ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The first chair was his, but Phil Martelli wasn’t about to sit in it.
He never took a seat in 24 years as a head coach at Saint Joseph’s, and he’s only now getting used to the idea in his third season as an assistant on Juwan Howard’s staff at Michigan.
But Wednesday night, with Howard serving the first game of a five-game suspension for his role in an ugly altercation Sunday at Wisconsin, Martelli was back on his feet, trying to help the Wolverines find their own footing in a pivotal late-season Big Ten game.
“There'll be a chair there, but it'll be for him — it will not be for me,” the 67-year-old associate head coach had explained a day earlier. “And I told the players that: I'm not replacing Juwan Howard. What we have in place is the way that we're going to play.”
And if the way they played Wednesday night is any indication, they just might play their way into the NCAA Tournament without their head coach, who will miss the rest of the regular season. Because although this 71-62 win over Rutgers at the Crisler Center was hardly a masterpiece, it was a necessary first step for the Wolverines, who improved to 15-11 overall and 9-7 in the Big Ten with the victory.
“There'll be a chair there, but it'll be for him — it will not be for me,” the 67-year-old associate head coach had explained a day earlier. “And I told the players that: I'm not replacing Juwan Howard. What we have in place is the way that we're going to play.”
And if the way they played Wednesday night is any indication, they just might play their way into the NCAA Tournament without their head coach, who will miss the rest of the regular season. Because although this 71-62 win over Rutgers at the Crisler Center was hardly a masterpiece, it was a necessary first step for the Wolverines, who improved to 15-11 overall and 9-7 in the Big Ten with the victory.
Three of their final four games would qualify as Quad 1 wins in the NET ratings used by the NCAA selection committee. But beating Rutgers (16-10, 10-6) certainly qualifies as a confidence builder, particularly with Michigan playing shorthanded as it was.
The Wolverines were without two regulars in the rotation Wednesday, including freshman forward Moussa Diabate, a starter who scored a career-high 28 points last week in a win at Iowa.
This week, though, he and sophomore Terrance Williams worked with the scout team in practice while serving one-game suspensions for throwing punches in Sunday's mayhem in Madison. And replacing Diabate in the starting lineup was senior Brandon Johns Jr., who’d lost that role in early December and seen his role dwindle in recent weeks.
Steady play
Johns didn’t fill the stat sheet Wednesday, but he did play more than half the game. And Martelli also got some solid minutes from freshman Kobe Bufkin. And with steady play from guards DeVante’ Jones and Eli Brooks, along with a double-double from Hunter Dickinson, Michigan had more than enough to pull away from a surging Rutgers team that recently rattled off four straight wins over Michigan State, Ohio State, Wisconsin and Illinois.
Outside of a pair of outings against Purdue, Michigan entered Wednesday’s game shooting under 20% (19 for 98) from 3-point range the month. And Martelli is as baffled by the erratic results as anyone, noting Monday this group of players gets up more shots during practice and after-hours than any he has been around since coming to Michigan.
“But I just want our guys to shoot it, and concentrate on the next shot,” he said. “Not worry about the last shot, not worry about the statistics — and just think that the ball’s going in.”
It didn’t in the first half Wednesday, either, other than a pair of Caleb Houstan 3s on consecutive possessions just prior to the second media timeout. Otherwise, the Wolverines missed their other eight attempts from behind the line in the first 20 minutes.
But Houstan repeated that sequence early in the second half after Rutgers had tied the game at 38 on a vicious dunk by Clifford Omoruyi. He knocked down a 3 from the left wing after an offensive rebound by Johns, then hit a double-clutch 3 from in front of the Michigan bench with 15:08 left to give Michigan its largest lead to that point.
He'd go on to hit one more in the second half — Houstan finished 5 for 9 from behind the line and poured in a game-high 21 points in all — as the Wolverines gradually pulled away, shooting 50% from the field after halftime and going 10 for 10 from the free-throw line for the night.
"What we wanted to do was play hard, play smart, and play together," Martelli said. "And what we asked each guy to do was to be able to look in the mirror and say, 'I gave my very best.' And if we were short, then we were short."
But they weren't short, and for the Wolverines that's a statement that should help them move forward.
