Michigan coach John Beilein talked about his team’s basketball intelligence during the Big Ten preseason basketball meetings. He said the players adapted quickly to his lessons and figured that would bode well for the season.
He probably could not have predicted that his young team would use early struggles as a springboard for a run at the postseason.
Michigan lost to then-top-10 Syracuse by three points, to then-No. 3 Kansas in overtime and to then-No. 2 Ohio State by four points. Despite those near misses, they're projected to be in the NCAA tournament by several national bracketologists.
“I think the fact that we got knocked down so many times -- eventually, you’re going to learn how to make the smart plays, the winning plays at the end and limit your mistakes throughout the game,” co-captain Zack Novak said Tuesday. “We tried to focus on controlling the things we can control: defensive effort, being in the right position, rebounding, things like that.”
Novak, like many of his teammates, pointed back to a team meeting after the first Minnesota game -- with U-M sitting at 1-6 in the Big Ten -- as the moment the players embraced the change that allowed them to finish the regular season on an 8-3 run.
There were still some close losses in the final five weeks, including heartbreakers to Illinois and Wisconsin, but the Wolverines saw those as signs of progress.
“Brutal honesty, I think,” Novak said of the five-to-10-minute meeting between the Minnesota loss at Crisler Arena on Jan. 22 and the season-turning Jan. 27 win at Michigan State. “I think it was something that we needed, and I think it worked out. ... It was the fact that we had seen glimpses of what we could do, and we had been really close against some of the best teams in the country. ... You look at that and think, 'We’ve got a shot to do some things this year, and it would be a shame if, for the wrong reasons, we didn’t give ourselves a chance.' So we made a vow to each other to fix the things we could control.”
Point guard Darius Morris said he was the first one to speak in the meeting, but eventually, everyone got a chance.
“It started with me calling out myself,” Morris said. “Then the young guys … everybody started to come forward.”
That players-only discussion followed a film session in which Beilein and his assistants showed all of the team's mistakes.
“It was very apparent, after we watched the Minnesota film, some of the things we had to fix,” Beilein said. “Just staying in the play, moving on to the next play. It was very simple, subtle changes that we had to do -- complete buy-in and team-ownership thing. ... They’re young kids. They have fallen off the wagon a few times, but they just jumped right back on.
“Those are the best teams, (the ones) that are personally accountable.”
Join Free Press special writer Nick Meyer for a live blog of Michigan’s Big Ten tournament game against Illinois on Friday afternoon at freep.com/sports
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