It's always seemed that if this Gophers team could shoot just a little bit better, they'd be OK.
In the Gophers' three conference wins, shooting has been the edge. If their shots are falling, they can look like a pretty good team.
But on Wednesday, they didn't and they didn't.
"We were just either forcing up shots or not taking the wide-open shots," Rodney Williams said. "And that's something we're going to have to work on when we get back to Minnesota."
And they'll need to if they want to continue to compete in this league. Against Michigan State the Gophers shot 38.3 percent from the field. They're not going to win too many Big Ten games that way.
The thing is, the Gophers were shooting pretty good for several games. In the previous three they had shot 51.6 percent from the field – up from 41.6 for the first three conference games – and a combined 50 percent from three-point range.
So what happened?
"They had really good defense," Coleman said. "They were able to make the court a lot smaller than what it was."
But consistency is the difference between an OK team and a good one; between a good one and a great one. After three games when it looked like the Gophers had found it, they slipped right back where they were before.
