Purdue vs Michigan Basketball Recap

Purdue 69, Michigan 59

It was going to be hard enough for Michigan to beat a fired-up and revived Purdue team on Saturday afternoon in West Lafayette, Ind. That task became far more difficult roughly five hours before tip time.

When the Wolverines began their battle with the homestanding Boilermakers, they soon realized how much trouble awaited them inside Mackey Arena.

If you were watching ESPN's College Gameday on Saturday morning, you might have seen the story break that Manny Harris - the leading Big Ten scorer with 19 points per game - was suspended by Michigan coach John Beilein for unsportsmanlike behavior in a team practice on Friday. One year after another Michigan visit to Purdue was marred by a wayward Harris elbow that bloodied Purdue star Robbie Hummel, the Wolverines' main playmaker once again made news for reasons other than his scoring prowess.

The timing couldn't have been worse for the Maize and Blue.

With their backcourt thin and newly vulnerable, the Wolverines were easy prey for Purdue's seasoned performers. Boilermaker guard E'Twaun Moore swiped three of Purdue's nine steals against Michigan guards who were clearly uncomfortable with an unusually heavy workload. Harris is the one who normally handles the ball at the top of the key and guides UM into its halfcourt offense, so without their main distributor, the Wolverines struggled. Purdue used a steady stream of transition baskets to build a 43-27 halftime bulge. While the two big men on the floor, Michigan's DeShawn Sims (21 points, 8 rebounds) and Purdue's JaJuan Johnson (21 points and 7 rebounds), canceled each other out, the home team won in the backcourt. Distinct dominance on the perimeter is what enabled coach Matt Painter's Boilermakers to win their second game of the week.

One final note on this game is merited: Considering the absence of Harris from the UM lineup, you might be tempted to think that the final score indicated a reasonably close contest in which Purdue merely managed to be a little bit better than the visitors from Ann Arbor.

Not true. Purdue owned a comfortable lead that hovered around 20 points for large portions of the second stanza, and with 3:13 left, the Boilers still enjoyed a 68-50 lead before shutting things down in the final minutes. Michigan couldn't have expected to win (Beilein is to be commended for disciplining a player in advance of a game his team badly needed), but this was not as competitive a clash as the final numbers might suggest.

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