2021-22 Season

Game 17: Northwestern at Michigan Recap

When you spend your winters writing about what happens in college basketball games it is pretty easy to identify patterns. By mid-January, it’s clear what a typical win or loss looks like for a team and results tend to fit neatly into a certain basket. Teams that lose because they can’t shoot in November usually lose for the same reason in February. Teams that win at Thanksgiving because they dominate on the block, end up winning the same way in March.

But every so often there’s a game that breaks the pattern. Sometimes it’s a Murphy’s Law game where everything is off, or maybe a case of extreme shooting luck, but other times it’s just a game that doesn’t make any damn sense.

And then there’s whatever happened between Michigan and Northwestern on Wednesday night. A game where both teams combined to commit as many personal fouls (46) as they made field goals. A game where Hunter Dickinson and Moussa Diabate fouled out and Jaron Faulds flung the decisive pass to put Michigan ahead in the closing minutes. A game where Michigan shot 52% inside the arc and 67% from 3-point range but only won by two points at home.

It was Northwestern’s season in a nutshell and a reminder of the demons of inconsistency that the Wolverines haven’t completely eradicated. It was also the first time that Juwan Howard’s team figured out how to win one of those games this season, and that’s an important step.

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