For the Michigan men’s basketball team as a whole, Monday night’s contest against Penn State was something of a ‘prove-it’ game. After getting embarrassed Friday night against Purdue, the Wolverines needed to prevent digging deeper into a rut with a win at home. And junior guard Tre Donaldson, specifically, had a bad taste to rinse out of his mouth.
“Turnovers really aggravate me,” Donaldson said following the win over the Nittany Lions. “I don’t like turning the ball over. I try not to express it in the games, but it really bothers me. So the Purdue game really bothered me.”
For a player who hates turning the ball over, a game like Donaldson’s against the Boilermakers — in which he gave the ball away six times — is like an insatiable itch until it can be satiated by a cleaner performance.
Donaldson didn’t have to wait long, as he took the challenge head on. He finished Monday’s game with a final line of 21 points, seven assists, three rebounds, four steals and perhaps most importantly, zero turnovers — an all-around gem given when his team needed it most.
Throughout the game, Michigan leaned on its point guard to keep the offense under control. After a first half to forget, Donaldson scored five early points and dished out a couple of assists to keep the Wolverines afloat. But in the final two minutes, which started with a five point Penn State lead at 72-67, Michigan counted on him to put the team on his back.
In that stretch, the ball remained in Donaldson’s hands as he either scored or assisted the game’s final nine points, turning the Wolverines’ five-point deficit into a four-point Michigan win. From an assist to junior forward Roddy Gayle Jr. to pull within three, a tough pull-up midrange to pull within one, a stepback three to take the lead and two free throws to ice it, Donaldson’s DNA is strewn about the final minutes of the game.
“Very, very proud of his confidence, his belief, his ability to stay the course,” Wolverines coach Dusty May said. “He continues to get better. … We need his leadership, we need his ability to generate plays outside of our offense.”
This isn’t the first time the ball has been in Donaldson’s hands to finish a game, but it hasn’t always yielded this result. Against Oklahoma, he missed the game-winning three just long. And recently against Minnesota and Northwestern, he couldn’t get tough layups to fall at the end of regulation, sending the games into overtime.
But still, Michigan trusts Donaldson with the ball in his hands. And more importantly, Donaldson’s confidence hasn’t wavered.
“Tre’s had a couple end-game situations,” May said. “I think it was the last game, overtime game here, where he got to the rim and it just didn’t drop. … So for him to still have the confidence to want to take the big shots, I mean, his pull up off the sideline out of bounds was a high level shot.”
With the game on the ropes, the Wolverines once again called upon Donaldson to make the big plays. And in front of his home crowd, he delivered. As the final buzzer sounded, Donaldson reveled in the cascading cheers, because it was his final two minutes that won the game and rinsed out the taste of his Purdue performance.
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