It was a fun back-and-forth first half for the National Championship. Michigan jumped out to an early 9-4 lead as Michigan’s Morez Johnson had two layups and Eliot Cadeau had a layup and 3 free throws. But UConn’s Solo Ball and Alex Karaban would hit three-pointers to close the gap. With about 10 minutes to play, Karaban would hit another three-pointer and give the Huskies a 16-13 lead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every time the Wolverines would bully their way into the lead as Aday Mara would hit a layup in the lane, UConn would hit a three-pointer to regain the lead like Braylon Mullins did with about 6 minutes to play. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the big play might have been on an offensive rebound where Alex Karaban held onto Morez Johnson’s arm and got called for a hook-and-hold flagrant foul. Johnson would hit the two free throws to tie the game at 25, and then Yaxel Lendeborg would hit a layup to give Michigan a 2 point lead. After a missed three-pointer by Karaban, Aday Mara would score again in the lane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Huskies’ Solo Ball hit a three-pointer to cut the lead back to one, but the half would end with Mara scoring again in the lane and Roddy Gayle tipping in a missed layup by Lendeborg to go into the locker room with a 33 to 29 lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
UConn fought valiantly on the boards, as they got 8 offensive rebounds and were only behind by 2 rebounds overall. The pace of the game is at the path of the Huskies – I think one of the announcers said the least amount of points Michigan scored in the first half of this tournament was 47 points – the Huskies held them to 33. And Michigan went 0-8 for three-point range. Lindeborg only had 4 points. All factors that would seem to point towards the Huskies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the Huskies did not have a stop for Morez Johnson Jr (who had 10 points) and Aday Mara got hot at the end of the half for 6 points. At the end of the day, both teams have to be happy. If you told Dan Hurley they would only be 2 rebounds behind Michigan and the Wolverines would miss all their three-pointers, he would probably be pretty happy with that result. And if you told Dusty May that would have happened and his Wolverines would have still played such great defense that they were up 4 points, May would be pretty happy as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its been a great game – hopefully we have another 20 minutes of exciting basketball. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a fun back-and-forth first half for the National Championship. Michigan jumped out to an early 9-4 lead as Michigan’s Morez Johnson had two layups and Eliot Cadeau had a layup and 3 free throws. But UConn’s Solo Ball and Alex Karaban would hit three-pointers to close the gap. With about 10 minutes to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2026-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3696,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions\/3696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}