What did UCLA do to completely disrupt Michigan's offense?
One thing that annoys me about mgoblog is the writers don't ever seem to analyze the last game of the season when Michigan loses. I like to hear what it was that the opponent did to end Michigan's season. Instead, it's just "it was a great season, time to move on".
In the case of the ugly UCLA loss, I'm curious what you guys think it was that UCLA was doing defensively that caused Michigan's offense to be so ugly. I don't buy into the thought that Michigan completely blew it, because UCLA was able to do the same thing to Alabama. There's something that UCLA does defensively that makes their opponents offense look terrible.
49 points. We only scored less then 64 twice this season, 57 in loss to Minny and 53 in loss to Illinois.
I don't know if it was gameplan or what but it felt like in the 2nd half the entire offense just threw the ball into the post for a contested layup. I am not smart enough with basketball to know if UCLA forced us into being so one-dimensional or the coaches saw something they thought they could exploit. I believe we were about 10/20 on layups and went 6/11 from the free-throw line. We also had 14 turnovers.
I'm not really upset about losing in the Elite Eight but to watch the team perform so poorly (including missing the last 8 shots of a game in which the margin was 2!) was just maddening. For me it was the how, not the loss itself so much.
Play good defense.
Gave us layups, wide open threes and free throws. It was a genius strategy by them that will really payoff against Gonzaga!
Other than Franz’s shot with 15 seconds, I don’t remember too many wide-open threes. Most of those missed layups were contested as well. And we shot 11 free throws, not that many for a team with a mismatch in the post.
We certainly could have shot better, but give them credit - they had us well-scouted.
Well, most of the time in today's college basketball, it's about 3 point shooting that dictates whether or not an offense looks good or bad.
Michigan probably would've lost to LSU if they didn't have some tremendous 3 point shooting during that game.
Brooks and Brown were feeling it. They were shooting with confidence and in the zone.
Franz and Smith lost their long distance shooting confidence quite a few games ago. So they haven't been much help in that area for awhile.
Though for some reason Brooks' 3 point shooting dramatically fell off after that LSU game and that left Brown as the only confident 3 point shooter.
They were feeding the ball to Dickinson so much because many of them didn't feel confident about their shooting abilities.
They got away with poor 3 point shooting against FSU because the Seminoles played terrible in the paint defense.
Michigan struggled with FTs and Hunter missed some easy shots and UCLA did use good defensive tactics.
Though the root of the problem was Michigan no longer having decent 3 point shooting and that's the real reason why they only scored 49 points in that game.
I think a simple but somewhat intangible factor of this game was UCLA got hot at the right time. Beat teams they perhaps shouldn't have and carried the momentum. They took down Alabama and probably gave them the confidence they needed to feel like they could also take down a similiar team on paper they shouldn't beat like Michigan. Michigan, on the other hand, was pants-on-fire hot from the start of the season and it seems like for whatever reason started to cool off. Dickinson was playing out of his mind good for a freshman during the season and I think came back down to Earth a bit. Not a great explanation but getting hot at the right time as a team is super important in this tournament
One obvious answer: Cronin Ball slowed the game down and limited possessions. UCLA walked the ball up the court, waited until about 12 seconds on shot clock, and ran their set. Every minute that went by was about 2.5 possessions. Limited shots.
Oh, and Franz played bad.
Often when these ugly offensive games occur, you see that the game was called very loosely. That's what stood out to me, I found this the opposite of this blog's take on the...LSU? game, where Brian kept saying, there were a lot of fouls called because there were a lot of fouls committed. In this one, even though there were on 25 total fouls called in the game, I found myself thinking that it was called pretty tightly. A couple of ticky-tack moving screens, I am sure UCLA's center didn't think he committed 5 fouls, etc. But, yet, the offenses both bogged down. I, too, will look forward to someone smarter than me to tell me why.
I read that based on the quality of shots of each team UCLA had about a 4% chance to win. So it's far more about Michigan's random failure to make layups, free throws, and open threes than about anything UCLA did.
Honestly Michigan had the jitters, they were spooked. Its what Baylor did vs Rutgers and OSU and Illinois did as well. The shots OSU made vs us game 1 were nothing an Oral Roberts wouldve stopped. Just Wagner going 2 of 10 and we arent talking about this. How many times this season did we miss 4 free throws in a row, how many times this season did we miss 8 shots in a row (most unguarded). It was just shit night of strange events. UCLA played defense as well as any big ten did.
UCLA did nothing...