Michigan Basketball Players Expect No Dropoff after Dusty May’s NBA Exit

Rich asked the question Michigan fans have been chewing on since Dusty May left for the NBA. A new voice is running the program, one nobody in the fan base has watched coach before. How is this supposed to keep working?

Elliot Cadeau's answer was that the fan base may be worried about the wrong thing.

"I think coach Mike was a really big part of us winning that national championship," Cadeau said of Mike Boynton.

Pressed on what that actually meant in practice, Cadeau got specific in a way that reframes the whole handoff. Boynton was the head assistant. He made all the substitutions. He handled a long list of things that were, in Cadeau's word, impactful.

"All the practices so far with coach Mike have been the same feel, same as last year, very very similar to last year, if not the exact same."

Trey McKinney landed in the same place from a different angle.

"I feel like it's just a different voice," McKinney said. "We're going to run a lot of the same stuff we did last year."

The offense was free flowing, and it is staying that way. As for the other end of the floor, McKinney confirmed what Cadeau had already implied, that Boynton constructed the substitutions and ran most of the defense. That voice was in the gym all last season. It simply has a different title now.

Rich moved backward, to the moment each of them realized what they had. Cadeau knew almost immediately, and his evidence is a problem most coaches would take.

"It was hard for me to find out who the starting five was going to be," he said. "I had like three different ways you could go with the starting five and it would be an elite starting five. That's when I knew we had a good team, because we had like eight starters."

That depth showed up all season. Cadeau did not always start, but he frequently finished, and the rotation reordered itself again when LJ went down.

McKinney's version arrived later and with less certainty attached.

"I never had the dream of winning a national championship. I never thought that would happen that quick," he said. What changed his mind was the summer, the genuinely hard practices, watching how much individual talent was in the gym and doing the math on what it would become if everybody surrendered a little of it.

Which is the part that usually breaks. Rich asked how difficult it was to get a roster assembled through the portal to care about the collective more than the individual. McKinney said it was easy, and credited the people doing the choosing.

"The coaches knew what they were doing in the recruiting. They went in the transfer portal and they grabbed kids with the same mindset," he said. "Not one person on the team really had an ego."

Now Michigan wears the target, and the assumption around the sport is that all this turnover makes the Wolverines ripe for the plucking. Neither player sounded especially bothered.

"They can target us as much as they want. I feel like we have a really talented team, and I don't think there'll be that big of a gap between last year and this year. The goal is a national championship and it's nothing less than that."

The other answer was shorter, and closer to a warning.

"People targeting us is a good thing for us. It's going to force us to be better in practice every day, to be on our ten toes every day."