Hunter Dickinson leads Michigan’s escape, and establishes himself in the process

Austin Davis walked up to Hunter Dickinson and gave him a dap, then a hug. They filed to the handshake line. Davis may have lost his starting job, but it mattered little in that moment. Michigan had won. Dickinson had engineered the escape.

As tends to happen in a game like this, where a 31-point favorite gets taken to overtime at home, there’s no shortage of stats to express how poorly Michigan played. The Wolverines turned the ball over 24.1 percent of the time, they shot 29.6 percent from 3-point range. Isaiah Livers and Juwan Howard yelled at each other in a timeout huddle, after which Livers committed a foul, got pulled, then fired a Gatorade cooler into the folded-up bleachers. Oakland led for much of the second half, by as many as six, and looked to be pulling away.

Then came Dickinson.

He and Terrance Williams, AAU teammates with Team Takeover, checked in at the 11:23 mark in the game. From there, Michigan outscored Oakland by 16, though it needed overtime to finish the job.

“I think he’s built for it,” Williams said of Dickinson after the game. “He’s been playing in these big games. Me and him, we come from the WCAC conference (in high school), we’re used to games like this, big games, close games. We’ve been playing in close games since elementary school, middle school, high school so I think we were just built for the moment.”