Shoot Like the Wind

After their disheartening loss at Wisconsin last Saturday, the Gophers’ veterans called a players-only meeting. There, they reportedly discussed playing with greater toughness, more poise and more confidence at the end of games. Well, the response was a 69-60 victory over Michigan on Thursday but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the rather ephemeral things discussed at the meeting. They actually played a bit listlessly for much of the game; the teams exchanged leads for much of the game and the Gophers seemed reluctant to finish the lesser team at home. They won because Lawrence McKenzie went completely bonkers, scoring 26 points on 9-14 shooting and breaking the Wolverines’ backs with three after ridiculous three. Throughout the year, McKenzie has shown flashes of such swag but never for an entire game and never quite this brazenly. He made an amazing 7 of 11 from behind the arc, many of them off the dribble with a hand in his face; the very best was a desperate, closely guarded, turnaround fade with the shot clock expiring that made the score 61-54 with six minutes left.

Wolverine Dream

Coach Tubby made this explosion possible partially by going with a three-guard lineup for much of the game (usually some combination of McKenzie, Al Nolen, Lawrence Westbrook and Blake Hoffarber). This move accomplished two things. First, it freed McKenzie and Westbrook from ballhandling duties (though somehow, McKenzie managed to turn it over four times). Both players score better off the ball; this three-man backcourt created mismatches and gave them some room to look for their own shots. Second, three-point defense has been one of the Gophers’ weaknesses and the smaller lineup allowed them to better contest Michigan’s long range shooting. Evidently, the move paid off: McKenzie scored his career high and, at least from the perspective of field-goal percentage, the Gophers had one of their better defensive games of the year. They did a much better job of rotating and closing out shooters and Michigan made only 31.4% of their shots and only five of their 26 threes (a grodily bad 19.2%).

With such awful offensive stats, one might wonder how the game was ever even close in the first place. Well, the big drawback to small lineups is rebounding. Michigan missed more shots (48) than the Gophers even took (47), and then rebounded 23 of those misses. That’s the equivalent of 23 extra possessions, which Michigan turned into 22 points and used to stay in the game almost until the end.

Lowlands

I mentioned that, apart from McKenzie, the team seemed a bit listless and lost (particularly on offense—they turned it over 18 times) for much of the game. From the warm-ups to the final horn, Dan Coleman wore a lonely, somewhat sickly expression, his eyes wandering far into the distance. The look suggested that he had lost either his desire to play or all confidence in his ability to do so. And who knows? Maybe he’s tortured by unrequited love, or grieving a death in the family, or undergoing a deep crisis of faith; or maybe, as befits a college senior, it is dawning on him that this particular moment in his young life is coming to an end, that it maybe meant a bit less than he thought and that the future seems like some uncharted, open-ended expanse of endless, crushing possibility? In any case, the 6’9” Coleman has not scored more than ten points in any game since January and has gathered more than four rebounds only once in that stretch. Recent weeks have been even harsher; he has taken only ten shots and gotten only five boards in the last three games combined. Against Michigan, he took only four shots (and no free throws) in 25 minutes and pulled down exactly one rebound. Passes slipped through his fingers; rebounds were ripped out of his hands; he passed up open shots; he showed no fire on defense (a meaningless block in the final seconds notwithstanding). For a senior co-captain who is arguably the Gophers’ most talented all-around player, it is a sign that something is re