Michigan's One Tour Win Came On A Night Mega Superbet Missed Twenty-Six Threes

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Both teams shot thirty-two three-pointers on Thursday night. Michigan made twelve of them. Mega Superbet made six.

That is the game. Michigan won 84-81 in Igalo, Montenegro, and the box score is unusually obliging about why, because the three ways to score in basketball each produced a clean number and the three numbers add up to the final margin without any rounding or any argument.

Michigan won the three-point column by eighteen points, twelve makes to six. It lost the two-point column by six, sixteen of twenty-six against Mega's nineteen of thirty-five. It lost the free-throw column by nine, sixteen of twenty-eight against twenty-five of thirty-three. Eighteen minus six minus nine is three, and Michigan won by three. There is no fourth thing.

(The whistle was close to level, incidentally. Michigan was charged with twenty-five fouls and Mega with twenty-six. The nine-point gap at the line is five extra attempts for Mega and about nineteen percentage points of accuracy, and Michigan's 57.1 percent is the worse half of it.)

Say the deflating part before the flattering part#

The tempting sentence here is that Michigan finally shot the ball the way Mike Boynton wants it shot. The tempting sentence is not supported.

Michigan made twelve three-pointers in Igalo. It also made twelve three-pointers in the tour opener against Lithuania's senior national team, and it lost that game by twelve. Twelve makes is not new. The Wolverines have shot 37.5 percent from the arc in one game and 40.0 percent in another and 25.6 percent in the third, which is a normal spread for a team playing its first competitive basketball together.

What is not normal is six of thirty-two. Mega Superbet is a professional club in the Adriatic League, it took exactly as many three-pointers as Michigan did, and it made half as many, at 18.8 percent. A team that shoots 18.8 percent on thirty-two attempts is having the kind of night that does not survive being repeated. Michigan should keep the win. It should not file the reason under anything it controls.

Two things Michigan does control showed up in the same box score, and both are worth more than the shooting. The Wolverines outrebounded a professional club 41 to 35. And after losing the first half 49-38, they won the second half 46-32.

The fourth quarter belonged to two men#

Trey McKenney scored twenty-five points on nine-of-sixteen shooting and took seven rebounds. Elliot Cadeau scored fifteen in just over seventeen minutes, seven of them from the foul line, where he went seven of nine. Between them they scored nineteen of Michigan's twenty-two fourth-quarter points.

The sequence is worth walking, because it is the only stretch of the tour where Michigan looked like a team that had decided something. Down 67-64 early in the final quarter, Cadeau made five consecutive free throws, Quinn Costello hit a three, McKenney drove for a layup and Cadeau buried a three of his own. Thirteen unanswered, a three-point deficit turned into 77-67, and then a Cadeau layup for the largest lead of the night at 80-69 with 3:40 left. (Five of those thirteen points came from the foul line, which is worth holding onto when the run gets retold later as shot-making.)

Mega came back, because professional clubs do. Andrej Musicki's three with two seconds on the clock cut it to 83-81. McKenney made one free throw on the other end and Lucas Maniema's tying attempt missed at the buzzer.

Cadeau's seventeen minutes are the number to hold onto there. He was on the floor for well under half of a forty-minute game, in foul trouble, and Michigan's decisive run happened with him out there making free throws. A point guard who cannot stay on the court is a problem the Big Ten will find faster than a Serbian club in August did.

What did not get better#

Michigan turned the ball over twenty-one times. That is the third straight tour game in double figures, after twenty-seven in Vilnius and sixteen in Utena, and it is the one line that has read the same way in three different arenas. Sixty-four giveaways in three games is twenty-one and a third a night. Michigan attempted 199 field goals across the tour and gave the ball away sixty-four times, which is one giveaway for every three shots it managed to take.

The Wolverines also blocked nothing. Zero blocks in forty minutes, and four across the entire tour. That is a frontcourt question rather than a bad night, and it is the one item on this list that November will answer rather than practice.

J.P. Estrella had the most efficient line of the trip and did not get to finish it. Sixteen points on seven-of-eleven shooting, four rebounds, and a fifth foul that ended his evening after sixteen minutes. Michigan's centre has now fouled out once and played thirty-five and a half minutes once, in consecutive games, which tells you something about how much load is sitting on him and nothing yet about how he handles it.

Twenty seconds#

Brandon McCoy Jr. started. He played one minute, attempted no shots, and finished with one turnover and one steal.

The one minute has an account, and it did not come from Michigan. About twenty seconds in, McCoy picked off a pass and drove it in transition, and his right leg rolled underneath him as he slipped. He was helped up after roughly a minute, took one step, and was carried to the locker room without putting weight on that leg. He did not return to the floor and he did not return to the bench. The Detroit News and 247Sports both watched it and both reported it that night.

Michigan Athletics published more than seven hundred words about this game on Thursday evening, and Brandon McCoy Jr. is not in any of them. He is not in the four summary bullets at the top, not in the running account of the four quarters, and not in the closing notes. He had started the first two games of the tour and played thirty minutes in one and thirty-one in the other. What the program has said about him, and it is the whole of what the program has said, is that he will continue to be evaluated.

There is no diagnosis and nobody official has offered one. A five-star freshman being carried off twenty seconds into the last game of a foreign tour is a fact. What it costs Michigan is next week's question, and the box score cannot answer it.

The ledger, closed#

Michigan comes home 1-2, having scored 245 points across three games and allowed 259. It took 105 of its 199 field-goal attempts from behind the three-point line, which is 52.8 percent of everything it shot, and made 33.3 percent of those. Its opponents took 74 of 187 from out there and made 25.7 percent.

That is the identity, then, at least the August version of it. Half of what this team shoots comes from behind the arc. It outrebounded professional opposition in two of its three games and finished the trip plus five on the glass. And it has not yet found a way to keep the ball.

A coach can live with the first two in November. The third one is the season.