Villanova made a Final Four-record 18 3s in a record-matching 40 attempts. After last season, coach John Beilein hired Luke Yaklich, a longtime high school coach in Illinois who was working as an assistant at Illinois State, to be Michigan’s defensive co-ordinator. Villanova was unconscious from 3-point land, as the Wildcats won in a laugher over the Jayhawks.
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Junior point guard Jalen Brunson was named AP Player of the Year on Thursday and entered the Final Four averaging 19.2 points per game. The fact of the matter is that tonight, he may very well be dealing with an animal, Villanova’s offense, that can’t be schemed into a bad game. After a dominating shooting performance against Kansas in the Final Four and a ideal 5-0 record against the spread, Villanova opened as a 6.5-point favorite over No. 3 seed MI in Monday’s national championship game in San Antonio (9:20 p.m. ET). “They’re No. 1 for a reason”. Caris LaVert, Nik Stauskas, and Spike Albrecht were in the same company as over-looked players.
According to OddsShark, the Wolverines will be getting 6.5 points from the Wildcats on a neutral floor at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
The German big man carried MI through its struggles in the first half by using his size advantage against the smaller Ramblers, snagging five offensive rebounds to notch a double-double by halftime.
It started in the film room the next day. “It doesn’t mean we can stop it”, Beilein said. “We had a letdown”. It’s Monday night. It’s on TBS (and the internet – we’ll get to that in a second). If you want to get out and run, MI will do that.
Police tell 7 Action News that at least four people were arrested in Ann Arbor for disorderly conduct following Michigan’s 69-57 win over Loyola on Saturday – it has police prepping for a busy evening on Monday. Only one went in. They have not lost since February 6 at Northwestern, and their defense has given up 70 or more points just three times since then. While I do think Villanova is the best team in the country, something about this MI run makes me believe that the spread here is just too high.
In the second round of this Tournament, Michigan had fewer points than Houston when the clock expired, but Jordan Poole’s shot nestled inside the rim.
The Wildcats going off as such big favorites is less a slight on MI and more a result of how dominant Villanova has been throughout this postseason.
That’s 29 attempts per game.
On Saturday, the typical Villanova possession involved working the ball down low on the wing, then a skip pass across the bottom of the paint, followed by one, two or three passes around the arc until somebody got open. Although the Wolverines have a zealous big man in Moritz Wagner that can defend the rim and work the low the post with relative ease, MI has looked fairly inconsistent when it comes to shooting the basketball from mid to long range. “They’re really, really efficient at multiple positions”.
The last two teams have counted on freshman to help them reach the title game. You know what? It’s not supposed to be easy.
Winning a national championship game is hard enough. And they showed why that was the case in the game against Kansas.
So, here we are – the modern day college basketball juggernaut versus the hottest team in the country. No player other than his teammate, Mikal Bridges, had a better offensive rating while playing a schedule as strong as Nova’s. But the Wildcats are much deeper than that.
Villanova (35-4) advanced to its second title game in three years by blitzing Kansas 95-79 in Saturday night’s second semifinal. The Wolverines’ 6-foot-11 German center has been anticipating this opportunity since he was a teenager in Berlin watching Michigan’s 2013 NCAA title game appearance and dreaming of participating in college basketball. Paschall shone in the win over Kansas, making four three-pointers.
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“You don’t want to just run them off the line and then give them a layup”, Michigan’s Charles Matthews said. “But really when you have whether it’s a (Kevin) Pittsnogle and Tyrone Sally at our West Virginia teams, we had similar things in there”. We understand that and we’ve faced some pretty good teams all season long. NBADraft.net has him going 28th overall to the Golden State Warriors, with the Sixers grabbing Duke’s Trevon Duval at 23.
