Michigan basketball coach John Beilein just finished up his press availability before the No. 19 Wolverines face No. 6 Ohio State on Saturday night at 9 p.m. on ESPN, part of the College GameDay coming to Ann Arbor, Mich. this weekend.
The highlights, as always, are in easy to read bullet form:
On injuries: Carlton Brundidge is scheduled to practice Friday. Might be available Saturday. Jon Horford still only working in halfcourt situations. When he plays defense, Max Bielfeldt then will take over, run the floor and play offense.
On this weekend: "It should give everybody a lot of energy and enthusiasm. I'm pretty certain it should not distract us in our focus."
How does Michigan treat tomorrow: "We go to GameDay. We'll treat it a little bit like a night game like we do on the road. It's going to be up and we all are at GameDay. Stu (Douglass) and Zack (Novak) made an appearance and I do but there's a time that the team walks through. We're going to nestle that between our first walkthrough and first video. The second one would be 5 p.m., 4:45, that would be cleanup of details."
Beilein said the biggest thing Michigan needs to correct is how the Wolverines dealt with transition offense and defense and transition rebounding.
On fixing weakside offensive rebounding: "Most of it was stuff that was very difficult to practice. You're running full court, trying to find people and the shot goes up and you're not in block out position or you assume you're not going to block out. Very, very difficult to simulate. Lenzelle Smith is very long, Deshaun Thomas is very long. You can do everything right when the ball is above the rim and you're not going to get it. That ball might need to bounce our way a little bit, a little bit to the left or to the right. There are some things you can't fix that happened in that game."
Beilein said "there is a lot of basketball" left before he'd call any game a must-win. But he acknowledged a win against another of the Big Ten's top teams would help.
On GameDay coming here: "For us to be one of the eight, that was pretty forward thinking in September or October they picked it for us to be GameDay, not knowing when we lose Darius Morris that Trey Burke would put us in this situation. Who knows how the season is going to go. It's an important weekend for both teams and to have it be a day-long commercial for the University of Michigan, what better timing with this new facility and Digger (Phelps) and Jay (Bilas) and Hubert (Davis) and Rece (Davis) are all here seeing what we have. It's pretty good."