Michigan hadn’t really broken much of a sweat on its way to the Sweet 16. Saint Louis had pushed the top seed in the Midwest Region some, but nothing like the pressure Alabama put on the Wolverines at the United Center in Chicago on Friday night. Even playing a man down without star guard Aden Holloway, Alabama set the pace early and spent the first half playing on the Tide’s terms, resulting in a 49-47 halftime deficit.
Dusty May has been to a Final Four before, but that was as a No. 9 seed at FAU. The 49-year-old has never been forced to bear the weight of a No. 1 seed through an NCAA Tournament, but in the second half, he proved that it isn’t something he can’t handle.
Coming out of the intermission, May wrestled control of the game away from his friend on the other bench, Nate Oats, and with just a few small tweaks, the Wolverines never gave it back. That’s what championship-caliber teams do, and so far in the NCAA Tournament, with an Elite Eight matchup against sixth-seeded Tennessee looming on Sunday, that’s what Michigan has proven to be.
Michigan’s 2nd-half dominance is what championship teams do
From the tip, Alabama, which both loves to play fast and shoot threes and knew it needed to play a high-variance game to hang around with Michigan’s ridiculous size and interior dominance, set a blistering pace. Michigan, 85th percentile in fast break points per game this season, was all too happy to run.
May let it play out, tinkering with his defensive plan, switching 1-5 early, then fighting through ball screens for the rest of the half, and testing if he was better off with his three-big lineup or going small with Aday Mara off the floor. Not many teams are good enough to experiment and tinker in the first half of a Sweet 16 game. Michigan is, so that’s what May did. In the second half, he found his answer.
First, he slowed the pace. That was a necessity, and after attempting 38 shots in the first half, Alabama got up just 31 after the break. Playing in transition negated Michigan’s size advantage. In a half-court game, it took over, including a quick 5-0 run to start the half that included three offensive rebounds on two possessions.
The second change was slightly more nuanced, but equally as important. Switching or not, Alabama is trying to get its opponents into rotation so it can get to the paint and spray out to an open shooter. So, because Michigan has multiple rim protectors, it stopped overhelping, getting into rotation, and leaving open shooters. They didn’t give up anything more in the paint, but contested more aggressively outside, and a 9-24 first half from three for Alabama became a 5-23 second half.
Inexperienced coaches would let those problems snowball into the second half. They would have left Yaxel Lendeborg on Labaron Philon Jr., even though the Alabama point guard was too quick for the Big Ten Player of the Year to stay in front of. They would have continued to play fast and get sucked into a track meet. Though he’s only in his second year at Michigan, May is not an inexperienced coach. He’s a coach ready to win it all with a team good enough to make it happen.