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As he sat down to do his postgame press conference via Zoom, Ohio State head coach Chris Holtmann wasn’t going to waste time explaining why the Buckeyes lost on Sunday.
It had a ton to do with what Michigan did and less to do with what the Buckeyes didn’t do.
Holtmann wasn’t even asked a question before he went in on just how good the Wolverines appear to be.
“Give them credit, I think you’ve gotta give them credit,” Holtmann said. “I think they were able to get enough stops there where we were – we turned it over, they had a couple offensive rebounds in a key sequence. And I think ultimately that was the difference. But give them credit. I think they deserve the credit for winning the game. And we’ll give them that, and we’ll try to figure out how to improve and move forward.”
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While he didn’t do as Rutgers’ Steve Pikiell did, announcing that the maize and blue are the best team he had faced in his tenure, given the rivalry, that type of praise speaks for itself.
One of the areas where Ohio State really struggled was in defending freshman phenom center Hunter Dickinson, who went off in the second half, being close to unstoppable. While Holtmann gave Dickinson his praise, he also noted that it’s the collective of players around him that makes Michigan so dangerous.
“He’s a really good player, he’s a really good player,” Holtmann said. “I thought his length and size, at the end of the day, bothered us. We’ll have to figure out how to do a better job of that in certain situations. Give them credit.
“I think the shooting around him, the way they pass and shoot it around him, it got to an older team that you can tell has played together – and won. They’ve got some guys that have played together and won, obviously, at a really high level, given what that that program has done in the last five-to-eight years. And I think you see that with a guy like Livers, who’s really been just important for them. And, their older transfers really helped them.
“But, yeah – he’s a load inside and I thought we were able to attack him in certain ways. Make it difficult for him, but at the end of the day, I thought it just wasn’t quite enough.”
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But the game was a stalemate early, when OSU was hitting nearly everything, not because of Dickinson, not because of Livers or Wagner. It was because of players like Eli Brooks and Chaundee Brown, who got hot from deep at the outset of the game. Ohio State was scoring nearly 60%, but Michigan not only hung around but took a halftime lead, due to the role players’ effectiveness from beyond the arc in the early going.
“They’ve got a good shooting team,” Holtmann said. “Some guys’ numbers were better in the first half – they were making shots at a higher clip than maybe what their percentages have shown – but some of it was a by-product of us being in scramble situations, worrying about the big fella too much, and some of it was they made some tough shots. They made some tough shots. To make 10 3s and for it to only be a 2-point game, obviously we were scoring it, as well. I thought it was able to level out a little bit going 1-of-10 in the second half. I thought C.J.’s ball pressure point of attack helped. But again, give them credit.
“They made some hard ones, and then some of it was our poor coverage.”
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Watch the entire press conference, provided by BuckeyesWire, below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51pDCkQRSjc
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