Thursday, January 7, 2016

The Victors | Project OSPREY

@ Mackey Arena
(№ 20) Purdue 87-70 Michigan
12-4, B1G 2-1

Well, that was discouraging. For the first three quarters of the game, I was astonished, if not quite impressed, that the valiant Wolverines were staying in touch with the ill-starred Boilermakers despite (A) the absence of leading scorer Caris LeVert (senior, guard), (B) the ineffectiveness of Derrick Walton Jr. (junior, guard) & Zak Irvin (junior, forward), & (C) the sheer size disparity 'twixt the Lilliputian Wolverines & the Brobdingnagian Boilermakers. Our best player was out & two of our key offensive weapons had been neutralized, & yet we managed to stay roughly five to eight points behind; hey, I thought, drop a few timely threes & we'll be right back in this! Famous last words. As the game wore on, Purdue could do no wrong, raining three-point shots & crashing the boards for two-pointers. Meanwhile, we fell into the most tenacious bad habit of the Beilein era: ceding the inside & throwing up a barrage of ill-conceived & poorly-executed three-point attempts, nearly all of which were retrieved by the towering Purdue big men. It got worse, & it got worse, & in the end we lost by danged near twenty points.

True, we had to play without LeVert, but with the lower leg injury he sustained against Illinois who knows how long he'll be out, much less how effective he'll be once he comes back; to be successful in B1G play, the valiant Wolverines need to figure out how to win with LeVert in the lineup. It is true, as well, that we lost to a ranked team on their home court, a team that should have been able to defeat us, but that also means we've lost to every ranked team we've played; if we're to have any chance of making the Big Dance, we'll need to win against the toughest opposition, on nights when three-pointers don't fall from the sky like manna from heaven.

Next: Maryland (№ 3) in the friendly confines of the Crisler Center. After that, the Maize & Blue visit the giant-slayers of Iowa (№ 19). I believe in Team 100, in their potential & the soundness of their approach, but there's no denying that this stretch will be tough sledding for my valiant Wolverines. Let us hope they will rise to the occasion, that they will make the most of their opportunities.

Go Blue!

The Queue | Hollywoodland
I've not read Gulliver's Travels, but I have read that the size difference 'twixt the denizens of Lilliput & Lemuel Gulliver was 1:12, & similarly the difference 'twixt Gulliver & the denizens of Brobdingnag was a further 1:12, meaning that the disparity twixt a chap from Lilliput & a chap from Brobdingnag is an unfathomable 1:144. The Purdue bigs aren't quite that big, but they've got three players seven feet or taller. Sophomore Isaac Haas—7'2" tall & build like a house—is the real-life version of Ivan Drago, the giant Soviet boxer from Rocky IV.

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