The NCAA tournament is a strange concentrated series of staccato blasts, short weekends of fevered action moving faster than Time itself. Hopes rise and they fall, expectations collapse and are born anew. It is sport on a subatomic level, each game meaningful on an elemental level. March Madness is like staring the supernatural in the face, not unlike the Sodees in Escanaba in Da Moonlight. You see what you see and sometimes you just can't believe it. Sometimes you even go crazy, waiting for that first buck. You're 43 and wondering: when?
To be quite honest, growing up watch Michigan basketball during the Ellerbe and Amaker eras, I never thought this day would come; but, here we are.
Michigan traveled to play in its second New York borough during this 2012-13 season, this time taking on the West Virginia Mountaineers in the new Barclays Center on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
The Mountaineers beat what seems to be an okay Virginia Tech team last Saturday only to drop a contest against Duquesne on the road, shooting 33.3% from the field and relinquishing a 15-point second half lead in the process.
In any case, WVU was a tournament team last season. Kevin Jones is no longer around, but the Mountaineers still have the ability to challenge you if you're not on.
For Michigan, this game mirrored the motion of a pendulum that somehow manages to knock you in the head on each end point of its travels. This team is young but plays like it is older. This team is young and plays like it is young.
Luckily, the sheer gravity of this team's overall talent almost always pulls the pendulum back from the latter. Michigan ambushed the Mountaineers early, jumping out to a huge lead; naturally, Michigan came out firing from beyond the arc, with THJ missing his first attempt and nailing a second to begin the scoring. At the 15:24 mark, Michigan was up 17-4.
Like many other times, Michigan shot the lights out early, starting 4/5 from three. Michigan followed this up by going 0/8 from beyond the arc between the 13:51 and 3:03 marks. Perhaps not coincidentally WVU was able to cut Michigan's lead from 15 down to 5 in that time. The Wolverines led just 34-29 with 3:24 left in the half.
This has not been uncommon this season. There are times when Michigan falls in love with the trey and their prior levels of success with that strategy. In a sense, Michigan sort of sets itself up to fail in a way after going on these ridiculous shooting runs. Indeed, guys like Hardaway Jr., Burke and Morgan are veterans, but this is still a team that is largely dependent on the whims of freshmen like Stauskas, who finally had a truly rough night. The Canuck went 3-for-9 from the field (2-for-7 from 3), good for an entirely mortal eFG% of 44.4%.
There's not much point in dissecting the struggles of a guy like Stauskas too much. He had good looks, he just happened to miss tonight. It happens. At least one of those missed threes was more than halfway down before rimming out. Such is the life of a shooter.
With that said, although he drew a technical for this antic, it was nice to see him getting a little FIRED UP WOO after hitting that three in front of the WVU bench. Obviously he needs to not that do that anymore, but it was one of those moments where you're going YEAH on the inside while tsk tsking on the outside.
Otherwise, forgetting about the threes: six turnovers for the Pride of Mississauga is not good. Matt Vogrich did not play at all once again, so it's not as if Stauskas is in any danger, but if you're going to have an off night from the night you simply cannot compound it by being careless with the ball, which needs to be valued like the richest poutine.
Michigan's 11-point halftime lead quickly became a 17-point lead in about five minutes of second half play. The Wolverines kept a double-digit lead for the next seven or eight, generally continuing to dominate play as Hardaway Jr. and Burke racked up monstrous stat lines.
Following the tv timeout just past the 8-minute mark (at this same point, Michigan was only up by four against Arkansas last week), eight points from WVU's Terry Henderson powered the 'Eers to an 11-4 run that cut the deficit to eight.
Yes, Michigan was only up eight, which in this brave new world is supposedly cause for concern.
Like the Pitt, Kansas State, N.C. State and Arkansas games, even when Michigan wasn't shooting the ball well and the opponent began to challenge, as a viewer it never felt as if the outcome was in doubt.
Michigan being up by four points with eight minutes to go this season is analogous to a Yankee team in the 8th inning with Mariano Rivera ready to enter the game in the ninth. In the past, it felt like what Cubs fan probably feel like when Carlos Marmol is on the mound; a sweaty, tense and often frustrating affair. Sometimes the shots would not fall, and Michigan would slowly cede ground until the game was lost in some brutally discordant fashion.
Michigan no longer has to "hope" for shots to go in, because they just do. Even when they don't, the Wolverines are no longer bound by the strictures of heroball.
Maybe Stauskas' off night is skewing my perception of this performance, but it once again seemed as if Michigan wasn't playing all that well. Yet, you look at the box score and Michigan has shot 56% from the field as a team while holding its opponent to just 38.5%. More importantly, they won by 15.
Thus far, this team has demonstrated a strange yet intriguing combination of showtime and inexperienced talent doing what inexperienced talent does. Michigan is 11-0 and I don't believe that anyone will claim that the Wolverines have played their best ball yet.
Think about that: the best is yet to come. I mean, what more can I say?
As a freshman in 2007, I went to every single home game during what was John Beilein's first season in Ann Arbor. Michigan went 10-22 that year, including a December loss against Central Michigan at home. That CMU team finished the 2007-08 season with a 14-17 record. It was one of many stultifying losses in a season marked by transition, not unlike the 3-9 2008 football season.
Fast forward through four entire seasons, and here we are. You might as well be Philip J. Fry, emerging from millennium of cryogenic sleep to find himself in the brave new world that is the 31st century.
This isn't the Michigan basketball of yesteryear, when turning it over 23 teams against a mediocre Michigan directional school was met with nothing more than resignation.
Even as Michigan struggled through most of the first half, they held an 8-point lead about 14 minutes into the game. Even when Michigan was sloppy with the ball or when the shots didn't fall, there was never a sense that this MAC team existed in the same plane of competence as Michigan, as was the case with CMU back in 2007.
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With THJ shooting just 2-for-7 from the field and Nik Stauskas failing to connect from beyond the arc through over 15 minutes of first half play, Michigan looked to its trusty point guard to navigate it through the mildly choppy waters of the early stages. Burke was on in the first half this time around, unlike the past couple games when Michigan only needed him to facilitate the offense; Burke was 4-for-5 with 10 points and two steals through 16 minutes of play, powering Michigan to a 27-15 lead late in the half.
After some sloppy play bogged Michigan down early on, the Wolverines settled down and continued to feast on Western's own carelessness throughout most of the half. The Broncos accrued 12 turnovers by the 3:56 mark, five of them Michigan steals (a pair from Burke and Morgan each and one from Stauskas).
Michigan bled the shot clock on its next possession. Burke meandered around on the right side, and with only three seconds left on the shot clock, tossed it to newly minted contributor Caris LeVert at the top of the key. He rose, fired, and sank a trey to put Michigan up 15.
On its next possession, Stauskas finally hit his first three of the game to put Michigan up 16. It probably says something that I'm using the word "finally" to describe a sequence during which a freshman hits a three in the first half of a game.
For Michigan's next trick, THJ penetrated in the lane and found an open Mitch McGary at the basket for an open layup.
I defy you to find a sequence of possessions such as the aforementioned trio in the entire body of work that was the 2007-08 season. I'm willing to guess that Michigan was not able to pull off an unbroken stretch of cold-blooded competence very many times way back then, against a Michigan directional school or not.
Despite a relatively forgettable first half, Trey Burke and defense carried Michigan to a 35-21 halftime lead.
Halftime Stats
--Michigan (1.04 PPP)
--WMU (0.66 PPP)
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By the 7-minute mark of the second half, Michigan had built up a 27-point lead, 61-34. The Broncos were shooting 31.6% from the field at this point, with Darius Paul the only double-digit scorer (and even he was just 3-for-11 from the field).
Unlike the Bradley game, there was no hanging around for Michigan's overmatched opponent. It was a masterful half in which Michigan completely suffocated a WMU offense that was already pretty bad in the first half, and the offensive end was a 20-minute Michigan bicep flex.
Up 70-36 late, Michigan was able to roll out a lineup of Vogrich-Albrecht-LeVert-McLimans-Horford for the home stretch (Corey Person and Eso Akunne came in at around the 2-minute mark).
Michigan blew up the 22-point spread in what ended up being a smashing 32-point victory. In case you just roused yourself from a 5-year nap, no, it is decidedly not 2007. In a vacuum, a win like this is as memorable as a random face on the subway. But, with the memory of 2007 in mind, wins like these are prominent points of divergence, counterpoints to a once fundamental incompetence.
Hello, Internet. I am Fouad Egbaria, a Michigan grad ('11) and recent graduate of the MSJ program at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. This is a blog that attempts to analyze the highs and lows of Michigan football and basketball; I'm just trying to capture the spirit of the thing. I will also write about general Big Ten news, as well as Chicago professional sports (from time to time).
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