Michigan’s weapon now not so secret
LOS ANGELES — John Beilein, an old-school basketball coach who has spent his 40-year career finding and recruiting players in person, remembers an email that ended up bringing Moe Wagner to Michigan from Germany. “I had a player at West Virginia named Johannes Herber that played for Team Alba in Berlin,’’ Beilein recalled Friday. “My email gets stacked up a little bit and finally I was just trying to clean it up and it was maybe two or three weeks later that I watched this video, and then I called him, and then I called Moe. And on the phone, the energy on the phone was incredible. “So I just said, ‘You know what? We can’t, like, sit on this. I think this kid is going to be pretty good, but nobody’s been over to see him. I’m going over to see him,’ ’’ Beilein went on. “Because there is no high school basketball in Europe, the NCAA doesn’t allow us go watch him play. You can only see people in scholastic. So I had to do it off film. “But I did go to visit him in his flat. I asked for a big German dinner and a beer. I got both of them. That was it. When I got in the elevator with the young man, a small elevator, and went up, by the time I got out of the elevator, we talked about elevator conversation, I said, ‘If this kid’s good at all, I’m going to give him a scholarship, because he was so engaging.’ What you see right there is who he is.’’
This is who Wagner is: He’s a 6-foot-11 junior forward who leads Michigan in scoring and rebounding with 14.2 points and 7.1 rebounds per game, and is one of the keys to the Wolverines’ chance to beat Florida State in Saturday night’s West Region final at Staples Center
As this run to the Elite Eight by the No. 3-seeded Wolverines (31-7) has progressed, so too has the NCAA Tournament craze in Germany, where people are gathering in sports bars hoisting German beers and watching sports. It’s like Octoberfest in March over there.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty cool thing,’’ Wagner said Friday. “It’s pretty special for me. My mom told me the other day that there are so many people that obviously know me from being little, but I don’t know them. They call all the time. They kind of want to be part of it. They ask where to watch the games, and that’s something that makes me very proud and happy.’’
Wagner represents one of Michigan’s biggest bodies as the Wolverines go up against No. 9 seed Florida State and its wave of big, athletic talent. How Wagner goes on Saturday night is likely how Michigan goes. If Wagner stays out of foul trouble against Florida State’s big lineup, the Seminoles likely will be in trouble.
When Michigan won four games in four days at Madison Square Garden en route to its second consecutive Big Ten Tournament championship earlier this month, Wagner was named tournament MVP after scoring a combined 63 points and grabbing 26 rebounds.
And it all started with that email to Beilein, who went to visit Wagner in the middle of a season.
“It was October, I think, and we had a day off, so I went over and back, in disguise, by the way,’’ he said. “I wore no Michigan gear because I didn’t want anybody seeing me because word travels fast. Then other people would come recruit him. And lo and behold, when I came back, there was a group — obvi- ously I was flying out of Detroit — a group saw me, and it got out there on Twitter somewhere that I was overseas. So you can run, but you can’t hide.’’
Wagner is the centerpiece to Michigan’s lineup, and it has been a learning process as he has become more comfortable with the country and the U.S. game. Now he’s a potential NBA prospect as a 6-11 player who averages 41.5-percent from 3-point range and is a matchup nightmare.
“The biggest thing we’ve seen is the things that he had to grow in — a [main] area was rebounding,’’ Beilein said. “I think people way underrate what.he’s getting done this year as far as his rebounding. His numbers are probably double what they were last year. That’s tough to do.
“The other thing is his passing right now. We all knew he could shoot, but his passing [has improved immeasurably]. He’s a stretch four [forward] in the NBA. But for us, that’s many times you have a center, you play that guy as a center. He’s throwing passes right now, he’s handling the ball and busting out of the break.
“I can see the similarities to what we saw this time of some of our other guys that became really elite players in college and went on to the pros.’’