Danny Wolf addresses Michigan's lack of confidence, road ahead
ANN ARBOR – The Michigan Wolverines lost their third game in five tries on Wednesday night with a 71-65 setback to the Maryland Terrapins. It has been an extremely inopportune time to string together the bad performances that U-M has, which is something the team is working through.
Junior big man Danny Wolf spoke to the media after the loss and reflected on what seems like a team that has lost its mojo.
“It’s just a confidence thing,” Wolf said. “I have all the confidence in myself. I have all the confidence in my teammates and my coaches. When the ball’s not going in, and you have a few games back-to-back-to-back, that rim seems smaller and smaller, and you’ve just got to see a few go in. Confidence just comes from yourself and I have nothing but trust and confidence in my teammates.”
Michigan’s recent stretch of games came juxtaposed with a surging Michigan State team that has won five-straight games and on the cusp of clinching an outright Big Ten title. U-M needs an Iowa win over the Spartans on Thursday to play for a share of the Big Ten title on Sunday in East Lansing.
“Obviously, you could say it’s the wrong time of the year [to be playing poorly],” Wolf said. “We were in the hunt for a Big Ten championship, and at this point, we need a few things to happen for that to happen. Eventually, we’re due for a good shooting game, and I’m happy that it’s going to come at some point in March. … I know at some point the lid’s going to fall off the rim for some of the guys. So, just excited for when that happens.”
Still, the result of Thursday night’s game in Iowa City is not something they can control or focus on, Wolf says. The team is focused on pulling itself out of the rut it is in and setting itself up for what would be its biggest win of the season yet if it can pull it off in East Lansing on Sunday.
“If Michigan State wins, we’re still going to go into that game knowing that it has very big implications for seeding and whatnot,” Wolf said. “But I don’t think we want to look too far in the future. I think we just want to go — no matter what happens [Thursday] night — just go to that Michigan State game knowing that, whether or not it has Big Ten regular season implications, it doesn’t matter. We just have to go into it as if it’s the biggest game of the year — because it is.”
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Wolf has been in this spot before at Yale as part of a team that found itself late last year and wound up beating Auburn in the NCAA Tournament as a 13-seed. It’s a message that he shared with his Michigan teammates after Wednesday night’s loss.
”Last year at Yale, we lost on a buzzer beater to Brown to lose the regular season,” Wolf said. “We had a decision to make as a team. We saw a fork in the road and we were going to go one way or the other. We kind of came together as a team. We were like, ‘everything we still want is ahead of us.’
A regular season title would have been great. But in the Ivy League, you need an Ivy championship to get to March Madness. We beat Cornell, and then in the championship game, we played Brown again. And we were down six with 26 seconds left. It seemed like the game was over, but we had a buzzer beater to go to March Madness and we won a game as a mid major team.
“I told that to my teammates after the game and I’m like, ‘guys, the best part of college basketball is ahead of us.’ And we have all the talent. We have the coaching. We have everything we need. So it’s just about guys coming together and just staying confident in what we’re doing.
“I’m excited to see what we can do these next few weeks.”
