Over the first few months of the men’s basketball season, Michigan looked to be one of the best teams in the country. The Wolverines were 13-3 through the first 16 games, but have since gone 9-6. There is one issue standing out from each of their losses: turnovers.
Dusty May discusses turnovers on Pardon My Take
On Wednesday’s edition of Pardon My Take, Michigan head coach Dusty May shared details of how he sees the turnover problem and how he has tried to fix it. May said it seemed like the speed of the game was the issue, but he later debunked that notion.
“Early in the year we attributed it to we were playing a little bit faster than these guys have ever played,” May said. “We were really trying to sell something for the future (and) the recruits: a system, a style of play.
“Then we realized that we weren’t really turning it over when we were playing fast. It was mostly just the decision making (and) ball movement.”
After May figured out the root of the problem, it was time to dig deeper. He said there haven’t been many similarities from game-to-game.
“It’s a myriad of things,” May said. “I think we had three or four turnovers on illegal screens (Sunday against MSU), and we’ve been imploring our guys to screen more to get their teammates open, so it’s been a different problem every night.
“There haven’t been real consistent themes, and it’s something where hopefully (Sunday) in the second half a light bulb went on and hopefully we can figure this out before it’s too late.”
Turnovers are a simple problem, but the solution is usually more complex. May said he was part of a group-chat with other college coaches struggling with giving the ball away.
“We’ve tried every drill. I’ve consulted probably 25 different coaches,” May said. “There’s actually a group of us that were really struggling early in the year with turnovers that we were communicating with each other about what we were trying to do.
“The other two guys that were down at the bottom with us, those guys made a nice jump late, so they were able to fix it with using the same ideas.”
The Wolverines haven’t improved a bit in terms of giving the ball away, as they rank 337th (out of 355) in the country in turnovers per game (14.4). One of the coaches in the group-chat was able to get his team to protect the ball, but May said he couldn’t replicate it.
“I’ll just say my good friend coach (Mike) White at Georgia, who I worked with for a number of years at Louisiana Tech and Florida,” May said of who is in the group-chat. “I was actually talking to one of his assistants this morning, I said ‘hey I haven’t checked your turnover numbers lately’. They’ve found their stride in the last five games, and I asked if their turnover numbers were down because I didn’t have time to research it, and he said drastically.
“I asked him what they were doing, and he told me the two drills that they had done consistently, and I said ‘yeah we did those as well, they didn’t work for us’.”
Georgia is averaging 12.9 turnovers per game and ended the regular season on a four-game win streak. Michigan is headed in the opposite direction after losing its final three games before the postseason. The Wolverines have a chance to put everything behind them as their journey in the Big Ten tournament begins Friday (March 14) against USC, Rutgers or Purdue.
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