DENVER — The scouting report on No. 4 seed Texas A&M was fairly simple: The Aggies were going to crash the offensive glass — hard.
Texas A&M is the best offensive rebounding team in the nation, grabbing 16 per game, and the No. 5 seed Michigan men’s basketball team — which struggled on the defensive glass at times — looked like it might be in for a long afternoon.
In one of the Wolverines final games of the regular season, March 2 against Illinois, Michigan allowed 19 offensive rebounds and a whopping 30 second-chance points en route to a 93-73 loss. To avoid a similar fate, the Wolverines emphasized rebounding down, starting with the guards.
“I’m disappointed in myself and the staff that we haven’t emphasized our guards rebounding enough, ” Michigan coach Dusty May said Friday. “… It alleviates some pressure from your bigs of having to fight a guy that’s 250 and athletic and get the ball. So we put a really strong emphasis the last couple weeks, and that’s the reason we made incremental progress.”
Not only does having guards crash the defensive glass take some of the onus off of the bigs to get every single rebound, it also eliminates the need for an outlet pass. When a guard grabs the rebound, they can immediately lead the break, allowing the Wolverines to establish the high tempo that they thrive in.
While matching up against the best offensive rebounding team in the country could’ve been intimidating, Michigan took it as a challenge.
“That was the number one thing on our docket,” graduate guard Nimari Burnett said about the Aggies’ proficiency on the offensive boards. “And we took that personally, we took that with pride. And each and everybody boxed out, gang-rebounded the whole entire game, and that’s what led us to beat the number one team on defensive rebounds.”
As the final buzzer sounded, the Wolverines won the overall rebounding battle, 48-39, and the offensive board battle, 16-15. It truly was a team effort, too. While Michigan’s 7-footers led the way — as junior forward Danny Wolf and graduate center Vlad Goldin collected nine and 12 boards, respectively — the guards carried their weight as well.
Junior guard Tre Donaldson nabbed six boards, while graduate guard Rubin Jones grabbed seven, including several massive ones in the late minutes. A lot of rebounding in basketball comes down to effort. The fundamentals can only take you so far, at some point, it’s about getting the ball in your hands at all costs.
“It’s just how bad do you really want it?” Donaldson said. “I mean, everybody talks about how bad they want to win, how bad they want to win the national championship, but when it comes down to the details, like keeping the number one offensive rebounding team off glass, it shows how bad you want it if you can do it or not.”
Beyond simply keeping the Aggies’ second-chance opportunities to a minimum, the guards helping down ignited the offense as well. Off of misses when a guard collected the rebound, the Wolverines immediately pushed the other way, catching the Texas A&M defense flat-footed several times. In total, Michigan tallied 17 fastbreak points and several others as a result of forcing the defense to react and scramble in transition.
The Wolverines, despite their size, haven’t been a prolific rebounding team all season — and sometimes they’ve even been burned by it. But when the lights were brightest, Michigan showed it could go all-hands-on-deck and battle down low with the best, literally.
