Wolverine TV: Phil Martelli, Olivier Nkamhoua assess Michigan's vibe coming off third-straight loss, ahead of Iowa
Michigan Wolverines basketball interim head coach Phil Martelli and graduate forward Olivier Nkamhoua met with the media Friday morning ahead of the team’s trip to Iowa to play the Hawkeyes Sunday. Watch video of Martelli in the player at the top of the screen and Nkamhoua in the embed below.
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Michigan is 4-5 on the season, under .500 for the first time since 2009-10. Martelli discussed where the team is at given that it has dropped five of its last six contests.
“I’m not a cliche guy, but we’re 4-5 for a reason,” the Michigan coach said. “Even in these individual games, we’re up and down. We do some good things, but we haven’t done enough consistently. I point to turnovers, I point to pace of play. 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.
“It’s never too early, like it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s December, it’s only the second game of the Big Ten. 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.
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“You can’t hang your head and say, ‘Oh my… Oh, historically…’ One of our plethora of managers hit me with yesterday about under 50 percent assist to basket rate. I’m like, I just can’t process that right now. 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.”
Martelli said Michigan’s close losses — it’s 1-3 in games decided by two possessions or fewer — have stressed the importance of doing the little things right, like making free throws and boxing out.
“It’s enormous,” Martelli said. “We have good players, and we have a number of good players, but we don’t have talent that just says, well, you know what, we’ll make up for that. The small things matter, particularly against the competition that we’re playing. I hate to overuse a word, but the fight that we’re in — these are fights. Knocked down, but not knocked out, or they would be collecting our uniforms.”
