ANN ARBOR, Mich. — No. 5 Nebraska men’s basketball suffered its first loss of the season, 75-72 at No. 3 Michigan Tuesday night.
The tone and tenor of the press conference after the first loss for the Huskers in over 10 and a half months wasn’t one of “Ah, shucks, we lost.”
It was one of disappointment at a missed opportunity to keep the nation-leading 24-game winning streak alive.
The undermanned Huskers took what many people think is one of the best teams in the country to the wire and frankly dominated the game for about 36 minutes.
The tone was “We deserve to be talked about as one of the best teams in the country.” It was proving the naysayers wrong.
“That shows a lot of character of our team and it also shows we can compete with anybody in the country,” Coach Fred Hoiberg said.
The 10.5-point underdog Huskers believed they could win on the road at No. 3 Michigan, even without two of their top three scorers.
“For our guys, it should be a confidence builder, to know that we can do it,” Hoiberg said. “We’ve got to get past this one and move on and have three great days going into Illinois.”
The more physical team was the undersized Huskers for 38 of the 40 minutes, a team missing one of its frontcourt starters and its clear vocal leader in Rienk Mast, who missed the game due to illness.
“About 12 minutes before tip, I went in to talk to him,” Hoiberg said. “I said, ‘What do you think?’ He just said, ‘Coach I can’t do it, I’ve got no energy.’ He couldn’t even keep anything down, even sips of water he couldn’t keep down.”
Despite their coach praising the character they showed, the Huskers still took the loss pretty hard. They expected to win — despite the circumstances — and came up short.
“No, no moral victories,” Pryce Sandfort said.
“We can be proud of it, but there is no moral victory in this situation,” Sam Hoiberg added.
Playing Short-Handed
Tuesday was the first game Mast has missed this season. The illness was something that hit him after the team arrived in Ann Arbor on Monday evening. Mast exited the Crisler Center visitors’ locker room 82 minutes before tip to begin his normal stretching routine, well after his teammates had already taken the court.
After heading back to the locker room — which is a common practice for the Huskers — with nearly 25 minutes to go before tipoff, Mast never returned to the court. Freshman Braden Frager, the team’s sixth man and third-leading scorer, also missed his second straight game with a sprained ankle. Nebraska only went seven deep, with freshman Leo Curtis playing 13 minutes and Jared Garcia playing 10 (with only a foul and a turnover in his state line).
“We knew it was going to be a battle,” Sam Hoiberg said. “We knew it was going to be a fight and we knew we were going to have to fight and we were going to have to have guys step up — Leo, Cale (Jacobsen), who’s obviously been playing a lot, but he had a bigger role today; he was unbelievable. I thought everyone that stepped on the court made an impact, and we had to have it.”
That they did. In his first start of the season, Jacobsen set the tone early with the first basket of the game and finished with eight points in 28 minutes.
“You’ve got Cale Jacobsen out there battling Morez Johnson Jr. at 6-10 and built like a Greek god, and Cale battled him every step of the way,” Fred Hoiberg said.
Curtis played a career-high 13 minutes and scored six points with a steal and an offensive rebound.
“Leo was awesome, I’m really proud of him,” Hoiberg said. “I’ll say this about Leo: the kid puts in so much work, and this is why you do that. This is why you put in that extra time.”
Jamarques Lawrence put on a show early, scoring 16 of the team’s first 31 points in less than 10 minutes. Sandfort nearly matched him with 14 points in the first half. Nebraska led by as much as 11 points and shot 10-of-19 overall from 3 in the first half. However, they went just 1-for-13 in the final 20 minutes and missed their last 10 as the lead slipped away and free throws began to mount for the Wolverines. Michigan took the lead with just over a minute to play and the Huskers couldn’t find an answer.
The winning streak may be over, and the Huskers may not want to accept even the moral victory, but they certainly turned some heads on Tuesday night. In their first loss off the season, Nebraska may have earned more respect from across the country than in any of its 20 wins.
“That team is projected by a lot of people to win a national championship,” Hoiberg said. “You’ve got no Braden, you’ve got no Rienk, you’ve got no (Ugnius Jaruševičius), you’ve got no Connor (Essegian) and you fight them all the way to the finish and you lose by a basket.”
