Nebraska men’s basketball finished the regular season with an 85-70 win at Michigan on Sunday.
The win improves Nebraska to 22-9 on the season and 21-8 overall in the Big Ten and is the first time in program history Nebraska has won at Michigan (1-12).
22 wins ties for the most in program history and is just the fifth time in program history (1920, 1978, 1983, 2018) the Huskers have won that many games in 108 years of basketball.
“This was important, we didn’t want to have stress going into the weekend and this I think takes a little bit off,” Fred Hoiberg said on the Husker Radio Network after the game. “We still want to go out and play hungry and play free. Enjoy this ride, I’ve talked to our guys about that. These guys are doing a really great job of staying on task. That is an important thing at this time of year when it matters most.”
The Huskers 12-8 regular season conference record is the best in program history since 1992-93.
Tominaga Time
Keisei Tominaga entered the game needing 18 points to reach 1,000 in his three-year career at Nebraska. With his 3-pointer with 4:22 left in the first half, Tominaga reached that mark. He is just the 31st player to reach 1,000 career points at Nebraska and just the 11th player to reach 1,000 points in just three seasons.
“I’m so proud of these guys for what they’ve done, playing together and there is no egos on this team. Whoever has the hot hand, it was Keisei tonight, we have done a great job of finding them,” Hoiberg said. “We made a lot of really good team basketball plays offensively pretty much all night and certainly in the second half I thought we were really tied together.”
Tominaga missed a career-high (31) by just one point. He had 23 of his game-high 30 points in the first half shooting nine of 12 from the field and four of six from 3-point range.
Rest
Nebraska continues to win (4-0) with more than four days of rest between games.
“It’s an important time of year. When i looked at it early I didn’t love the way the schedule layed out but we took care of business as well as possible when we had all of those games in a short amount of time,” Hoiberg said. “Now we get the benefit of having some rest heading into this final stretch.
“I do think it (rest) helped us. Josiah and Rienk especially are a little bit banged up. Brice has a little bit of a hip issue that he was able to recover and get treatments on.”
Second Half Defense
After a back-and-forth first half with both teams shooting over 50% from the field, Nebraska 70 percent (21-30) and Michigan 55.2 (16-29) the Husker defense settled in the the second half.
The Huskers held Michigan to 24.1 percent from the field and just 1-7 from 3-point range in the second half.
“I didn’t love our defensive effort early,” Hoiberg said. “We finally got our edge, we really challenged our guys at halftime and they stepped up and had a great defensive half.”
More History
With the win, the Huskers clinch a double bye in the Big Ten Tournament. It is the first time since 2017-18 that Nebraska has clinched a double bye.
Nebraska will finish in a tie for third place in the Big Ten and be the No. 3 overall seed in the Big Ten Tournament next week in Minneapolis. It’s the best Big Ten finish for Nebraska since joining the conference in 2011-12 and the program’s best conference finish since tying for second in the Big Eight in 1992-93.
Nebraska’s 12 conference wins ties for second all-time in school history.
