Pitino Talks Defensive Changes, How Gophers Were Able To Stifle Michigan
The Michigan Wolverines’ two basketball meetings with Minnesota this year have yielded polar opposite results. The Maize and Blue crushed Richard Pitino’s Golden Gophers, 82-57, in Ann Arbor Jan. 6, but basically had the favor returned to them yesterday at The Barn, getting pummeled 75-57 in what was their first loss of the season.
The offensive and defensive success Michigan experienced in the first matchup was absent yesterday (especially the latter, where the Wolverines shot just 39 percent), with Pitino and his staff clearly making significant changes to their game plan in the week and a half since the last matchup at Crisler Center.
“What changed was we turned up the heat on the ball,” Pitino revealed. “We changed a lot of our coverages defensively, and guys trusted us to do it on two days’ prep. The story of the game was turning a team who has been great offensively over 20 times, and to guard our butts off for 40 minutes.”
The 20 turnovers Pitino referenced was arguably U-M’s biggest downfall of the game, with the club unable to ever get into any kind of rhythm as a result of the constant ball insecurity.
Senior guard Eli Brooks’ absence with a strained right foot didn’t help matters, though his presence probably wouldn’t have been enough for the Wolverines to come out with a win.
U-M shot a dazzling 56.9 percent in the teams’ first meeting and basically had their way with the Gopher defense. Again, Pitino credited the changes his players made on the defensive side of the ball as the biggest reason for yesterday’s success.
“We did a much better job setting our rules on the defensive end of it,” he noted. “I kept telling our guys we looked like we were playing a prevent defense, trying not to foul.
“We needed to be more aggressive and our guys trusted that. It started with the ball pressure, and guys ratcheted that up. We scrambled and it wasn’t about one-on-one, so I thought that was by far the biggest change defensively.
“Collectively, we were more of a team defensively and trapping better. We rotated out of traps better on [freshman center] Hunter Dickinson, and provided more help on [sophomore guard Franz] Wagner.
“[Junior guard] Gabe [Kalscheur] is the best perimeter defender in the league and showed it on Wagner. Wagner is a guy who will play at the next level and has size on Gabe, but Gabe just stick with it.
“We defended collectively as a group much better.”
Both Wagner and Dickinson had quiet offensive outings yesterday (eight points for the former and nine for the latter), after the freshman in particular tore up the Gophers in a big way Jan. 6 at Crisler Center.
Dickinson posted a career-high 28 points on 12-of-15 shooting in U-M’s 82-57 win, destroying fellow 7-0 center junior Liam Robbins in the process. Dickinson’s offensive and defensive struggles were one of the biggest storylines of yesterday’s game, with the Alexandria, Va., native actually looking like a freshman for basically the first time in his collegiate career.
Robbins was the primary reason why, playing stifling defense and pouring in 22 points.
“Liam was excited about the game going in,” Pitino exclaimed. “Dickinson did a great job at Michigan’s place when he had 28 points and had his way with everybody. We challenged Liam and said ‘You’re a junior and he’s a freshman, though he’s a really good freshman.
“’You have act like the junior in this one,’ and Liam did that. He hit three threes and made great plays down low, and was really good defensively. We have a really good one in him, though he’s going through it on the fly a little bit.”
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