Five takeaways from Michigan’s 101-60 win over Rutgers

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The No. 3 Michigan basketball team kept on dominating in its first game of Big Ten play against a struggling Rutgers squad.

From somehow managing to improve an already-elite defense to LJ Cason starting to break through, here are five takeaways from the Wolverines’ blowout win.

Defense is elite in all phases

Saturday afternoon, Michigan added another game to its case of having the best defense in the country.

The Wolverines, admittedly against Rutgers’ middling offense, had an answer for pretty much everything. When junior center Aday Mara or sophomore forward Morez Johnson Jr. plant themselves in the paint, opposing teams’ offensive possessions turn into a puzzle, and often end with a forced, bad shot as the clock is ticking down. There were so many instances of Mara and Johnson altering shots, passes, and drives, whether or not they showed up in the box score.

A great indicator of Michigan’s rim defense is Rutgers’ midrange shots. The Scarlet Knights were 7-for-25 on twos that weren’t dunks or layups, and only made a single basket 8-to-16 feet from the rim on 12 attempts.

“If we can get our defense set, then we’re going to be tough to score on,” Michigan coach Dusty May said postgame. “We’re really big, we’re athletic. I don’t think we have a position where you could just line them up and go at the guy, and then we have a really good rim protection.”

Senior guard Roddy Gayle Jr. said after the game that the most significant focus in practice over these last nine days was transition defense, echoing May’s sentiment earlier in the week. The Wolverines held Rutgers to just four points in transition, per Synergy.

“We had been making some poor decisions in transition,” May said. “Most of the time, it wasn’t a lack of effort, it was a lack of execution, and we were all doing it. So anytime all of our guys are doing it, then it’s something we haven’t taught very well. So we just went back to re-teaching it, through the film, through practice drills, and then through five-on-five execution. And when you have a really intelligent group that has basketball character and basketball IQ, they can fix these things in a day or two, and that’s what they did tonight.”