Michigan basketball head coach Dusty May’s team was just 150 miles from his old confines of Boca Raton, Florida, but the trip to the Fort Myers Tip-Off hardly started as a friendly homecoming.
The Wolverines couldn’t buy a basket to open its game Monday night against Virginia Tech and continued a torrid stretch of turnovers. Yet, despite making just six of 23 (26.1%) 3-point tries, 13 of 35 (37.1%) overall and turning the ball over 11 times, U-M entered halftime at Suncoast Credit Union Arena with a one-point lead.
From there, it was a cleaner second half. The turnovers stopped and the defense tightened as Michigan (5-1) defeated Virginia Tech (3-3), 75-63, in the Beach Division semifinals of the Fort Myers Tip-Off. The Wolverines used a 23-9 run midway though the second half to set up a Wednesday night championship-game matchup (8:30 p.m., FS1) against the winner of Tuesday’s late game between Xavier and South Carolina.
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Roddy Gayle Jr. paced U-M with 20 points, setting a personal high as a Wolverine, while Will Tschetter added 10. Tre Donaldson and Nimari Burnett each scored nine, while Rubin Jones and Vlad Goldin each scored eight. Danny Wolf scored just four points and didn’t make a field goal until the final 65 seconds, but had a game-high 11 rebounds.
Perhaps the best note: Michigan’s two 7-footers tied for the team assist lead with four apiece.
Keeping it close despite cold start
Michigan got out to a 5-2 lead, with a pair of scores in transition, then went ice-cold from the floor.
U-M missed its next nine shots from the floor, including eight 3-point tries. Although Virginia Tech was nearly equally rusty, making only three of its first 12 field-goal attempts, Michigan’s near five-minute drought provided enough time for the Hokies to find their rhythm behind a 10-0 run, as each of their five starters scored for a early 12-5 lead.
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After Tschetter checked in with an open corner 3, Tech went on another 9-2 stretch and had Michigan more than doubled up, 21-10, before the midway point of the opening half.
On the heels of a Gayle layup, Burnett hit a 3, one of his three in the opening 20 minutes, and Tschetter added a basket as part of a quick 7-0 run. But Tech scored five points over the next 43 seconds to extend its lead back to 26-17 with 8:03 left before the break.
From there, Michigan finished the half on a 17-5 run. Gayle made a layup then a tough fadeaway, Tschetter hit a layup, then, after a U-M turnover led to a runout and dunk for Tech, Gayle and Burnett canned back-to-back 3s to give Michigan its first lead, 29-28, since the opening minutes.
Michigan went into the break up 34-33 after Tschetter hit U-M’s only two free throw attempts of the half.
Point guards propel strong finish
The second half didn’t start much cleaner.
The Hokies made their first three attempts while U-M opened the half 1-for-7 from the floor. Two of those misses were on point-blank looks from Goldin, though he did have the only make in the sequence after Wolf saved an airball to Gayle, who made a tip-pass to Goldin for the flush.
Tech missed its next four shots, but went up four when Tobi Lawal hit a 3-pointer from the top of the key, only for Michigan to respond with a Wolf skip pass to Donaldson for his first score of the day, a 3 to get back within one.
It sparked the point guard, who hit a 3 on his next possession, then after missing a heat-check 3, connected on a baseline layup to make it eight straight points. That seemed to spark the other point guard on the roster: L.J. Cason, whose layup gave U-M the lead, followd by a transition 3 to help U-M go from down three to up four, 53-49, in 70 seconds.
Michigan was on a roll.
Goldin swatted the ball, twice, on the next possession to force a shot-clock violation. Virginia Tech then went 1-for-12 from the floor in the middle portion of the second half and the Wolverines’ lead ballooned to nine after after Gayle hit four free throws and Donaldson found Goldin for a slam with 7:38 to go.
When Brandon Rechsteiner hit a jumper to get the Hokies back within eight, it ended a drought that lasted 9:20. Virginia Tech made just eight of 28 (28.6%) shots after the break and just two of 12 (16.7%) 3-pointers.
Michigan turned the ball over four times after the break which helped it pull away even though it made just 25 of 62 shots (40.3%) and 10 of 343-pointers (29.4%) on the evening.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan basketball tops Virginia Tech in Fort Myers Tip-Off, 75-63
