Tempo Is The Key For Michigan In The National Championship

It’s not easy to find a common thread running throughout the Michigan men’s basketball team’s losses this year. There’s only been three of them, after all, so the sample size is too small to draw any real scientific conclusion.

But there is one thing: In Michigan’s two most recent losses, the pace of play has been comparatively slow.

The Wolverines have played just two games in which they had 63 or less possessions. First, in the Feb. 21 loss to Duke, and second in the loss to Purdue in the Big Ten Tournament Championship Game. This isn’t a hard-to-find metric, either — the Wolverines are well aware of what went down in the losses.

“I feel like the three games we lost is because we didn’t dictate tempo,” junior center Aday Mara said.

When it comes to tempo, UConn is quite comparable to both Duke and Purdue. The Huskies don’t get into track meets — they’ll run the break when they need to, but they’re otherwise content to simply run their offense and use most of the shot clock to find the best shot.

It wasn’t just Duke and Purdue that slowed the game down against Michigan, either. A short-handed Minnesota team gave the Wolverines a run for their money in Ann Arbor, and a week later, Iowa did the same thing. 

The idea is simple: Michigan wants to rack up possessions and put up points quickly, so the best way to mitigate the damage is to limit their opportunities.

But at this point in the season, the Wolverines have seen these same ploys several times, and they’ve accrued the knowledge of how to manage them.

“You talk about games like Iowa where it’s super low possession and it's kind of a grind it out sort of game,” graduate forward Will Tschetter said. “We’re going to take lessons from that game and apply them to this one and make sure we learn from mistakes that we made then.”

It’s easier said than done, but there are several sure-fire ways to speed the game up and earn extra possessions. Collecting live-ball turnovers, for example, provide the perfect opportunity to take a scoring chance away from the opponent while also creating a fast break. Offensive rebounds, too, provide extra opportunities even when possessions are sparse.

“It starts with our starters,” senior guard Roddy Gayle Jr. said. “From the first moment of the game, you gotta set the rules of the game. UConn really likes to slow down and run their sets, so I think we gotta find opportunities to fight for extra possessions.”

There’s no simple button to press that lets the Wolverines nab steals and offensive rebounds, but if they can get under the Huskies’ collective skin on defense and crash the glass hard, they have a legitimate chance to get UConn out of its comfort zone.

There’s a lot of things that go into it, but controlling the tempo really is the name of the game on Monday. Whichever team is able to dictate the pace early will likely be the one cutting down the nets as the night ends.