Manny Harris and DeShawn Sims are dominant — leading the Michigan basketball team in scoring and rebounding — but Iowa coach Todd Lickliter sees the big picture as he looks at the Wolverines in preparation for Saturday’s match-up at Crisler Arena.

Here’s his take on Michigan:

“They’re a team that has a lot of firepower and they are very good in transition. They’ve hit a lot of 3s this season in transition. Sims is a terrific post player. He had a his way with us the last time we saw them and he is surrounded by four capable scorers.”

Sims scored 27 points and Harris had 18 in the Wolverines’ 73-45 win over the Hawkeyes in the 2009 Big Ten tourney, an Iowa loss that came about three weeks after the Hawkeyes won an overtime game between the teams at Carver-Hawkeye.

Lickliter expects Michigan’s blend of defenses to challenge Iowa. John Beilein-coached teams have been known for their 1-3-1 over the years and based on the way the Hawkeyes struggled with it at times when Ohio State deployed it on Wednesday, Lickliter expects to see more of it Saturday.

He does believe his team can take some confidence from its road win at Indiana on Sunday, a victory that ended a 15-game skid away from home.

“I think our guys now have an understanding of the focus it takes away from home,” Lickliter said. “We’ve been in some difficult environments recently and we learned at Indiana that when you do enough good things down the stretch that you can have success.”

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Hawkeyes Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.