Michigan has a number of capable scorers on this year’s team, but head coach John Beilein doesn’t care who gets the points. He just wants to win.
He proved it Monday when he was asked how it felt to have the two Big Ten Players of the Week (Jordan Poole, player and Ignas Brazdeikis, freshman) and had to look to SID Tom Wywrot to see what the reporter was talking about.
“That’s what it means to me, right there,” Beilein said with a smile. “I won’t even tell the players.
“I’m happy for everybody that there’s a piece of paper that says that, but I was not aware of that. [Wywrot] knows I don’t care, and neither do they. But they had a good week, and it was a great week. We played two great basketball programs.”
And blew both of them out. Purdue has more Big Ten titles than anyone in the league, Beilein noted, and North Carolina is the only program in the last six years that has as many wins as Michigan.
“I’ll bet you didn’t know that,” Beilein said with a smile.
Each of those teams won because they played team basketball first, and this team epitomizes that. It’s a big reason the Wolverines are No. 5 nationally and 8-0 heading into Tuesday’s game at Northwestern.
“One day somebody will have 25 points, another guy six. The next day the other guy will have 25 and he’s going to get six,” Beilein said. “It doesn’t make a bit of difference. That’s case in point why we won’t be talking about who is player of the week. We will be talking about let’s go beat Northwestern.”
Beilein said during media day there would be ugly stretches for his team in November while they figured things out. Instead they haven’t had a win by less than 17 points.
He’s never surprised, and he doesn’t like to heap a ton of praise on his team early in the season, so he chose his words carefully when he was asked to describe it.
“I love the change I’m seeing in a positive way by a lot of people,” he said. “The biggest challenge right now against really good teams is make sure we’re not beating ourselves. Understand how we got to this point.
“The hardest thing everyone has to do [is be unselfish]. They arren’t sitting with their families afterwards, getting the tweets [if they’re not the top scorers]. It’s the hardest thing to do, but we’ll be on it all year long.”
Along the same lines, Beilein said he tells the freshmen to remain patient. They’ll get their chance.
“We played the Nick Saban clip about the Alabama situation at quarterback, Jalen Hurts,” he said. “What he did, how his name is forever a part of Alabama culture and how important it is that he’s got to be ready.
“Most young men are not going to walk on in their first year and be this immediate success. Even the stars, LeBron and Kobe that went to the pros their first years, those weren’t great years. It’s all relative to them, and we continually point out who was not on our scouting report two or three years ago that is a star now.”
He envisions the same for some of his underclassmen. History has proven his point over and over again.
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