Mike Boynton Jr. on the Key Moments That Shaped Michigan Hoop’s Title Season

There is a national championship trophy sitting on the desk, and Mike Boynton Jr. would like to correct the record about how it got there.

"The revisionist history tells us that this team was perfect," Boynton said. "And that everything went exactly the way you'd hoped it would go."

Michigan did dominate plenty of games. Boynton is not interested in pretending otherwise. He is interested in the parts that got sanded off the story, starting with a home game the Wolverines had no business losing.

"Stubbing our toe against Wisconsin as a 20-point favorite in the Big Ten game at home," he said, listing it alongside the early-season stretch of figuring out who this team even was, and the fact that one stated goal never happened at all. Michigan did not win the Big Ten tournament.

Boynton's framing of that is the most useful thing a coach said all segment. Failure makes you stronger, sure, every coach says it. He added the part most of them leave out.

"It also helps that you can count the toe stubs and it's less than the actual toes on your foot."

The nets came down twice before the ultimate one, for the Big Ten regular season championship and again to reach the Final Four in Chicago. Asked whether he could identify his own scissor cut on the net in front of him, Boynton laughed off the premise. He remembered the feeling, not the strand.

He also has a favorite way of describing how much talent was on the roster. People bring up the three lottery picks. Boynton points out the draft started earlier than that.

"The first draft pick was made the night before by the Dallas Mavericks. They drafted our coach."

That coach is Dusty May, and the story of how the two of them found each other is better than any coaching-tree diagram. They came up in the business around the same time on similar paths, May as an assistant at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, Boynton as an assistant for Brad Underwood at Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, both running programs that punched above their weight and struggled to get anyone to schedule them.

At one point they were recruiting the same player, and geography did not cooperate.

"There was no way to fly from Ruston to Nacogdoches," Boynton said. "So I think we met at like a casino to exchange the kid."

Two coaches, one recruit, one casino, and a decade later they are cutting down nets in Chicago.

Boynton ran the defense in Ann Arbor, and the numbers move in a direction that is hard to argue with. Michigan had been somewhere in the hundreds nationally before the staff arrived. Year one, the Wolverines finished 12th. This past season they were the best defense in the country.

Rich pointed out what that unlocked. This team could play any style it wanted, fast or slow, transition or half court, and most nights it was Michigan doing the dictating rather than reacting.

The part Boynton keeps coming back to is why a roster assembled through the portal played like it had been together for years. Elliot Cadeau came from North Carolina. Trey McKinney, Yaxel, Morez and Adimora all arrived to a locker room that already had three seniors in it.

Those three, including Demetrius Burnett and Roddy Gayle, could have wanted more for themselves. More minutes, more money, more shots, a better runway to the NBA.

"They were all committed to sacrificing a little bit of those things so that we could win," Boynton said. "They really wanted to win for Michigan."