Phil Martelli: 'It's time' for urgency to fix defensive issues, increase offensive pace

Michigan Wolverines basketball currently ranks 132nd nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency, according to Kenpom. The program hasn’t finished worse than that since checking in 150th in 2001-02.

The Maize and Blue, who have allowed over 1 point per possession in all but one game this season, understand that even while it’s December and there are nearly two dozen games left on the schedule, there needs to be a sense of urgency to fixing the problems that plague them.

“It’s never too early, like it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s December, it’s only the second game of the Big Ten,'” interim head coach Phil Martelli said Friday morning. “No, it’s time. It’s time that we answer what is a foundational piece of this [Michigan] program, which is, let’s get better every day, each player get better every day. And just address one area. And if they address one area, then we collectively are addressing a lot of areas where we need to improve.

“We have to play better, and and ‘we’ is each of us. We have to coach better, and it is a collective ‘we.’ There is nobody exempt to it to say, ‘Well, he’s doing well, but other guys aren’t…’ No, it’s a collective ‘we.’ We have to play better.”

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If it’s not one thing, it’s the other with this Michigan team, Martelli said. The Wolverines had rebounding issues early in the season and have corrected them. They’ve had games with turnovers and improved that, but fallen back into bad habits in other areas (and started turning the ball over again).

“We didn’t turn the ball over at Oregon. OK, we covered that,” Martelli said. “But then we didn’t make our free throws, so now we’re covering that — and you run out of hands. We have to address every issue and we have to improve in all of these aspects. The ones that are glaring to me are one-on-one defense and our transition offense.”

Michigan’s defensive woes have been well-documented, and it affects the Wolverines’ ability to get out and run in transition. It’s much harder to do it after makes than it is misses. The first four games of the season were played at a furious pace, with 72 or more possessions in each, but four of the last five have been under 70 plays.

“We need to get back to scoring fast break points, putting pressure on the defense and then turning around and saying, at some point, everybody on our team is going to be challenged to guard the man in front of him — not just the scouting report, but we have to guard the man in front of us,” Martelli said.

Michigan’s ball and player movement has also suffered, Martelli explained. In its first four contests, U-M registered an assist on 51.5 percent of its buckets. But in its last five, that number is down to 37.1 percent.

“We’re making a pass, and we’re freezing,” the Michigan coach stated. “We watched, at great length, offensive tape yesterday with them about quicker movement — not faster movement. I mean, we are what we are in terms of foot speed, but you can be quicker, and we need to be quicker.

“I’m thinking of the last several games, like throwing the ball almost in an iso to [graduate forward] Olivier [Nkamhoua], to [sophomore forward] Tarris Reed [Jr.]. And if you look at the whole picture, the other four guys are stationary. That can’t work; that’s not what we’re about. We’re about ball and player movement. Our player movement has grounded almost to a halt, and that has to change.

“That’s one. And two, we’re not running the ball, we’re not pushing the ball. Is that minutes? It makes me wonder, since I’m handling the substitutions. Is it too many minutes? Do we have to go shorter spurts? Do we have to get another guard to kind of set that pace and set that tempo?

“Even the other night, getting to whatever we got to against Indiana point-wise, it was the stretch with Olivier in the second half, the stretch with [Michigan redshirt sophomore forward] Will Tschetter, but it didn’t feel like us. 

“Second half against Memphis, we had it. But first half, we didn’t. Texas Tech we didn’t have it for 40 minutes. Stanford, it took us breaking the ball loose defensively to really kind of get that energy. 

“There’s not a magic number — we don’t have to get to 80 — but we have to be more fluid offensively.”

Michigan has to do a lot of things more, and better, to start winning games, and as Martelli said off the top, it’s not too early to understand that it has to start soon so that the season doesn’t slip away from them.