Trey McKenney & Elliot Cadeau Talk Michigan Basketball with Rich

Michigan won a national championship and then lost its head coach inside of a few weeks. The two players who kept the roster from scattering were sitting next to the trophy at the Champions Circle golf event, and neither one is treating last season as finished business.

Elliot Cadeau, the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, and Trey McKenney, the in-state kid whose three-pointer put UConn to bed, joined Rich, who admitted up front that he had been waiting on this since he was a junior on campus in 1989.

Cadeau does not look at the trophy and see a weekend. "It kind of gives memories throughout the whole season, like months just leading up to that," he said. "So it just reminds me of the great process that I went through with my teammates."

Neither of them saw Dusty May leaving. Cadeau said the plan in his head was simple and boring: come back, run it back, win another one. "The news kind of came out of the blue," he said. "Definitely didn't expect him to leave."

McKenney had the same picture in mind, and he was blunt about the first feeling when it broke. "I was definitely kind of upset," he said. "But there was just a level of uncertainty with everybody in the room. I didn't know what was going on. Elliot didn't know what was going on. Like the whole team didn't know what was going on."

What happened next is the part Michigan fans should probably send a fruit basket for. Two players with every incentive to look after themselves decided their job was to hold the thing together.

"The biggest thing for me and Elliot was just try to calm the team down," McKenney said.

Cadeau described the same conversation from his side. He and McKenney talked the day it happened, told each other they wanted to stay, and then went to work on everybody else. "It was our job to help coach keep the roster together," Cadeau said, "and we just try to do that day by day."

Mike Boynton Jr. getting the job made that easier for both. For Cadeau it was familiarity, a coach he already trusted rather than a stranger walking in. For McKenney it was personal history. "Coach Mike, he recruited me here," McKenney said. "He was the main recruiter of my recruitment. So it was obviously a no-brainer for me."

They also pushed back on the idea that Boynton is an unknown quantity. Cadeau pointed out that Boynton was the head assistant, handled the substitutions, and was central to how the season went. McKenney said the defense was largely his. "I feel like all the practices so far with Coach Mike have been the same feel," Cadeau said, "very, very similar to last year, if not the exact same."

Cadeau's tell that the group was going to be different came before anyone had played a game. He could not solve the starting lineup. "I had like three different ways you could go with the starting five and it would be an elite starting five," he said. "So that's when I knew we had a good team, cuz we had like eight starters."

Now everyone is coming for them, and neither seems bothered.

"They can target us as much as they want," McKenney said. "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."

Cadeau went further and called the target useful. "It's going to force us to be better in practice every day, to be on our ten toes every day and just work harder."

As for the piece of net each of them cut down, both gave the same answer, which is somehow the most college answer possible. It is tied to a hat. One of the hats lives on top of a fridge.