Five takeaways from Michigan's loss at Michigan State

I can’t hit F5 every 3 minutes until Friday. Does Juwan understand this?

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Earlier today (late morning/early pm?) Orion Sang asked Juwan about Eli’s ankle and he said he hadn’t gotten an update yet from the training staff. I highly doubt he hadn’t gotten some sort of update this morning. He just doesn’t want to say, IMO.

I think the one sustained issue we’ve seen is that Hunter has come back to earth. Remarks in this thread about focusing on the post to the detriment of the rest of the offense seem accurate… but I think some of this may be perceptive; before, we would focus on the post and Hunter would score baskets and the offense would look great.

But he’s not doing well lately. In fact, until his late explosion against OSU, I was ready to come in hot with a comment that Hunter had cooled down in a sustained way two weeks ago. Then we had a couple of wins where Hunter played reasonably well, albeit with the help of late scoring surges.

But overall he hasn’t been sharp. He misses stuff he made early in the year, perhaps because scouting has made it harder, perhaps not. He doesn’t seem all that confident right now. Defenses are singling him up and he hasn’t made them pay, and that makes the rest of the offense a lot harder to run, particularly since he’s passable but hardly a spectacular roll man on ball screens.

Perhaps some of this comes from a concerted focus on defense, because he had certainly shown improvement in that category, improvement that has been obscured by cheap foul trouble in the last week.

Hunter’s emergence as a big-time player was the reason this team went from good to great; his descent to earth is the reason we don’t feel that good this week, and it is the one area I can look at easily and say “this is an area that is contributing significantly to the problems of the last week.”

Good thing we have a solid big man coach on the staff, I guess. 10 days to get him right for the tournament.

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I also think some of the shots he was putting up early in the season that went in were “lucky”. Balls that kind of rolled off his hand weird and rattled around and found the bottom. Go back to the Maryland game for example. Just reverting back to the mean a bit.

I think he was probably shooting from a lot closer in earlier in the year as well, but he’s also just seemingly not as sharp. Dumb fouls. Whole team, really. Not as sharp. Maybe needed to get smacked around.

It honestly seemed like UM threw the game. Dickinson’s turnaround hooks that only hit backboard were bizarre. Wagner was rough. Were they doing the Big Ten and MSU a solid? Is it blasphemy to even consider?

Yes, blasphemy.

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You couldn’t give enough money to the Seniors on our team to take that deal. They were bitterly disappointed last year.

What I always say about Michigan fans:

“Michigan fans seem incapable of understanding that other teams have players and coaches too.”

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State played about as well as they can. It was not surprising to me. They were embarrassed in Ann Arbor and came out playing tough. They were also playing for a spot in the big dance. They had everything to gain and nothing to lose. There are fans who always think it’s our fault when we lose, but I don’t think that is a common theme here in the UMHoops community. Many of us almost expected a letdown.

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