INDIANAPOLIS – So often, basketball comes down to its most basic element: shooting. A coach can champion defense, passing or rebounding, but when it comes to wins and losses, to the best shooter go the spoils.
LaVell Blanchard earned his team the prize in Thursday’s game at Conseco Fieldhouse. Michigan’s small forward knocked down four treys in the first half alone, including a couple from NBA range.
While Blanchard’s team didn’t put the game out of reach until the waning minutes, the contest may as well have been decided by a short stretch at the beginning of the second period.
After Michigan’s Dommanic Ingerson made a jumper with 18:00 left, NU began a possession that lasted more than one-and-a-half minutes and included five missed shots and four offensive rebounds. Blanchard pulled down a defensive board at the 16:26 mark, quickly advanced the ball down court and made a jumper after just six seconds had ticked off the shot clock.
One hundred seconds had gone by, and NU’s deficit had increased from 12 to 14 points.
“We’re not a very good shooting team,” NU head coach Bill Carmody said recently.
That’s not how the Cats were viewed earlier this year. But things have changed in Evanston.
Many opponents saw junior Winston Blake as NU’s biggest offensive threat, largely because of his three-point shooting ability.
Power forward Tavaras Hardy is the long-range threat, now – he took a whopping 10 treys Thursday and made a respectable four.
The team’s momentum has also changed. Carmody’s crew has lost four straight, dashing its NCAA dreams and forcing us to take a more critical look at NU’s unusual strategies.
The Cats’ languid style of play has only hurt them in the past couple of weeks. It doesn’t work if NU falls too far behind, and slow starts have been one of the the squad’s biggest weaknesses.
All season, the Cats have counted on five things: slowing down the pace, keeping the game close, frustrating opponents with a switching-zone defense, and making backdoor cuts and outside shots.
Thursday, NU slipped a few passes through the lane for easy layups. And the pace was slow, while the Cats were on offense, at least.
But the bottom line is Michigan put the ball through the hoop – though not so often that the game was a blowout from tipoff to final buzzer. On the contrary, Michigan failed to put the game away. The Cats had a chance for a comeback down the stretch, but they missed five straight three-pointers in the closing minutes. The shots just weren’t falling.
It’s a simple concept and a simple statistic: The Wolverines made 24 shots, the Cats 17. NU may be patient, smart and well-coached. But the Cats won’t win until they start making buckets.
