Michigan’s exhibition with Northwood gave coach John Beilein something to look at, but he still has plenty to learn about his team.
Norfolk State provides the first opportunity Tuesday night. NSU beat Virginia State 77-70 and forced 21 turnovers in the process.
"We’re trying to guesstimate what they’re going to be doing,” Beilein said. “We have a lot of new people out there in different roles, so we’ve got to find out somewhere where we are and build from it … I’m excited to get this going and know my team is, as well.”
They had good moments and bad offensively against Northwood, he added, seeing the floor well at times, not so well at others when the ball stuck. They got the jitters and nerves out of the way to pull away last Friday.
They also turned it over 15 times, and Norfolk State will apply even more pressure.
“It will be big for us all year,” Beilein said. “We tried to do a little more yesterday, threw the ball around a little bit. It’s sort of a staple of our offense. We don’t go into games saying, ‘we’ve really got to take care of the ball today.' We said that the number one day of practice.
“… They have good quickness, a variety of defenses. We’ve got to be ready to play with both pace and space. If we’re rushing and things like that, we’ll dribble or pass ourselves into problems.”
The offense is a little ahead of schedule because of the Spain trip. Once he sees what’s happening in games and figures out who his gamers are, Beilein said, he’ll be able to put an offense together.
At the same time, he expects teams to do a lot of what they did against his Wolverines last year … switching up defenses and surprising them.
“Every time we do that another team with another plan comes up against us, a different type of defense they use,” he said. “That’s the beauty of it; we try to have this big flexible plan, at game time it’s not easy on the players or us for a while, then it flows together as the year goes on.
“Hopefully by Big Ten season we know what we have. I don’t think we’ll know much until we play games like this and some of the other really heavyweight teams. Then we’ll know where we are, if this is good enough or we have to do something different.”
NOTES
• Beilein said he hasn’t given much thought to the two new banners being raised tomorrow night, a Big Ten Tournament Championship and Final Four banner.
“I never live in the past very much unless it haunts me; unless I’m remembering a guarantee game against New Jersey Tech or something,” he said. “I don’t remember all the success very well, and I probably should.
“I’m sort of focused on this year. When the banner is going up I’m sure I’ll be very proud, but I’ll probably be thinking about am I calling the right first play to start and did we prepare them well enough.”
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