Steve Pikiell: 'Juwan Howard does a great job - I give credit'
Coach Steve Pikiell has done a great job at Rutgers, but Michigan desperately needed a win over a good Rutgers team to keep its NCAA Tournament hopes alive … and played like it. Down 13-3, the Wolverines turned it up on defense and got great play from several in one of their gutsiest performances of the year to pull out a 58-45 road win.
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Point guard Dug McDaniel and shooting guard Kobe Bufkin were fantastic, scoring 16 and 14, respectively. Junior Terrance Williams II was plus-18 off the bench despite scoring only 4 points — they were better with him on the floor — and Tarris Reed Jr. was a beast defensively.
Jersey Mike Arena was rocking, but U-M withstood the emotion and pulled out an incredibly gutsy and impressive win.
“I want to really thank our fans for a spectacular place. It was rocking,” coach Steve Pikiell said. “We didn’t play well enough to win in this league, to beat a good Michigan team. [Juwan Howard] is a good coach .. they have got good players. You can’t shoot 5-for-16 from the foul line and turn the ball over or create timely turnovers [like we did].
“We didn’t play our best basketball [but] hey certainly deserved to win. Juwan Howard does a great job, and I want to congratulate them. Our crowd was fantastic.”
They’d been shooting ball “solid” heading in Pikiell noted, and certainly much better from the line. They left plenty of points on the board when they had a chance to extend leads in the first half.
That created the opening the Wolverines needed, and they never quit, especially defensively. McDaniel was brilliant on and off the ball, while Williams played one of his best defensive games. Reed, too, was outstanding on that end.
Several of McDaniel’s 5 steals led to transition points — Michigan would finish with 17.
“Every time I thought we started getting a little momentum, it was either a missed free throw or turnover, and that obviously didn’t help us,” Pikiell said. “In a game like this, you need those kinds of points. They’ve been very good defensively. I thought we defensively tonight were good too, except for our turnovers on offense. You can’t defend in transition like that. They got a lot of steals, and they got to the basket. Obviously, those things really hurt us.
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“We just never could get back into it. I give credit. That’s a pretty good team. They have a lot of really good players. They have lots of good size. [Junior center] Hunter Dickinson is a problem around the basket, not just for us, but everybody in the league. Their guards are good. A couple of them are on the draft board.”
One of them, freshman Jett Howard, didn’t play, but the Wolverines rallied in their absence. The Wolverines moved up to No. 52 in the NET rankings as a result and moved closer to the NCAA Tournament bubble.
It wasn’t always pretty, but we knew it wasn’t going to be. This was a game they had to win with a gritty performance, and that’s exactly how they got it.
“They go down, they get some easy baskets … I thought when they had to go up against our man-and-man defense, we were pretty good,” Pikiell said. “But, you can’t defend transition like that …
“We turned it over and we really struggled. Then when we did get good looks, we didn’t capitalize on them. That’s obviously what happened. We’ve got to continue to get better at those and you’re going to have days like that. You’re going to have minutes. I still say to our guys all the time that we usually put up plenty of points to win basketball games. If we held them, if we didn’t turn the ball over as many times as we did, and give them free points, we could have made this game a little more interesting.”
