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SAN ANTONIO — Moritz Wagner emerged from the Michigan locker room early Saturday night, extended his long left arm and pointed toward an open seat on a golf cart that as waiting to transport him to a postgame news conference.
“I’m definitely going up there,” Wagner said. “I’m not walking.”
Forgive the NCAA tournament’s most likable star for declining to walk another 125 or so yards down the hallways of the Alamodome. After carrying his teammates for the previous 2½ hours, flying off the NCAA’s raised floor twice in pursuit of loose balls, accidentally breaking a television announcer’s glasses and then apologizing for it after the game, it was a small miracle he even had enough energy to lift his 6-11 body onto the cart.
But no matter how tired he might have been when it was over, Wagner’s performance in Michigan’s 69-57 victory against Loyola-Chicago will immediately go down as one of the all-time individual efforts in Final Four history. Playing himself to exhaustion, Wagner extracted the best game of his career when Michigan needed it most and joined Hakeem Olajuwon and Larry Bird as the only players to ever have at least 20 points and 15 rebounds in a national semifinal.
“Wow,” Wagner said. “If you put it like that, it’s probably cool.”
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With his parents having flown in from Berlin in hopes of watching him win an NCAA championship, Wagner made 10 of 16 shots and a trio of three-pointers. He grabbed 15 rebounds and found ways to dominate the game even when Loyola did some effective stuff to take him away. And when the outcome was hanging in the balance, Wagner went into supernova mode, scoring 11 points in a stretch of four minutes as Michigan completely flipped a game in which it was not the better team for 30 minutes
“He’s a dog. He’s a dog,” guard Jaaron Simmons said. “He played with a lot of energy. He played like a pro, and he did his thing. He was ready for the moment.”
Should Michigan go on to win its first national championship since 1989, many will remember Jordan Poole’s halfcourt heave to beat Houston as the shot that changed history. But Wagner’s moment of transcendence against Loyola belongs above it, because this wasn’t one answered prayer, it was 36 minutes of answers from one player who wasn’t getting enough help and couldn’t afford to leave the court.
Even after two years of brilliance at Michigan that raised the expectations for this tournament run, Wagner has never looked more like another tall, sweet-shooting German who’s scored about 31,000 points in the NBA.
“Spectacular, sensational,” guard Muhammad-Ali Abdur-Rahkman said. “There’s not many times players put up numbers like that especially in the Final Four. It’s crazy.”
And perhaps the craziest part is Loyola actually played good defense against him. They didn’t give him comfortable touches in the post, constantly switching and using smaller players to dig and prevent Michigan from throwing it to him over the top. He only one got one free look at a three-pointer, though it was an important one that tied the game with 6:56 left.
Given the personnel challenges in guarding a center who is so comfortable stepping out from distance, Loyola could hardly have done much better — and it still didn’t matter.
“I liked a lot of things we were doing defensively on him,” Loyola coach Porter Moser said. “What he is, he’s a competitor. He competes and he’s emotional and passionate. And I like guys like that.”
Wagner, as the nation has learned the last three weeks, is difficult to dislike. In one of the most touching scenes of the tournament, he stopped mid-celebration after Poole’s shot against Houston to console the player whose missed free throws had left the door open for Michigan’s win. And immediately after the game Saturday, his first stop was to check on Bill Raftery, the television commentator whose glasses were broken when Wagner went barreling into press row in the second half.
“He’s a special kid,” Michigan coach John Beilein said.
Given the conventional wisdom in American basketball circles, Wagner should have left Michigan after last season when he probably would have been a first-round draft pick. In his second year in the USA, he had broken out as a 12.1-point per game scorer but more importantly as the kind of stretch big man that the NBA craves.
Wagner wasn’t satisfied, however, and came back to work on his game, particularly on the defensive end. It has paid off this season, and scouts Saturday saw an active body who can be a disruptor on that end of the floor and a willing rebounder who took advantage of those mismatches against Loyola.
Wagner had 11 points and 11 rebounds in the first half, including five on the offensive glass. Outside of his contribution, Michigan shot just 4-for-23 from the field and would have been down significantly more than 29-22 without his work on the boards.
That set the stage for Wagner’s takeover down the stretch, capped off by a corner three-pointer with 2:59 remaining that gave Michigan a 59-51 lead.
“I honestly just tried to do my job,” he said. “The shots were falling in the second half. It’s a lot more fun when the ball goes into the net.”
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