Juwan Howard discusses the postseason feel to Michigan's final regular season games

Michigan hoops is battling on the NCAA Tournament bubble once again. Last year, the Wolverines controversially snuck in with a 19-15 record and even avoided playing in the First Four in Dayton. They ultimately made the Selection Committee’s leap of faith look good by winning their first two games and making the second weekend of the tournament.

A year later, and UM is in a similar situation at 17-14 ahead of the Big Ten Tournament with work do as currently one of ESPN’s Next Four Out in the latest bracketology predictions. They definitely didn’t help their cause in their final weekend of regular season games ahead of the conference championship. Granted, Michigan was on the road, but they fell in a pair of heartbreakers — one in double overtime at Illinois and then in single overtime at Indiana, where they had the ball down two but turned it over before putting up a shot.

Tough results to swallow for Juwan Howard’s club, especially since Michigan would 100% be sitting on the other side of the bubble had they found a way to win both (or maybe just one) of those contests. Ahead of this week’s win-or-die conference tourney games, Coach Howard reflected on the two games they let slip away last week.

“When you go on the road, and you have two teams — understanding that the Big Ten is a very tough, competitive conference that a lot of teams are jumbled up with similar records that, getting down to the wire, you know that every game matters,” said Howard. “When you get the games on the road, you’re going to always be in high intensity, very energetic crowd, because the home fans know exactly what’s at stake as well.

“For us, our last two road games were Illinois and Indiana — both really tough teams that in the beginning of the year, teams were picking to win our conference. So we knew that going into both environments, it was going to be hostile, but we welcomed the challenge. I just want to put our guys in the best position to win.”

The one positive takeaway for Howard is that his team is certainly capable of competing in and winning these sort of games. Michigan is frustratingly inconsistent and have especially struggled late in games, but they’ve still hung around and won some quality games away from home. Those last two easily could have fallen into that category but the home teams were able to prevail.

This week offers the Wolverines an opportunity to prove one last time whether they can or can not close a game over a good opponent with everything on the line. They’ll need to to have a shot at participating in the Big Dance.