May is perfect fit for Michigan hoops
Over the weekend, Michigan basketball got the hottest name in the sport to run its program ... and beat Louisville to do it. This says plenty about how the U-M program – and facilities – are viewed within the sport.
“This is a dream come true,” Dusty May said in a statement Sunday afternoon.
No new hire is a surefire bet, but hiring May is a safe one and a smart one. How smart will depend on May, who arrives from Florida Atlantic fresh off consecutive NCAA tournament appearances and a year removed from a Final Four run.
The 47-year-old May, who has roots in Indiana and had a stopover at Eastern Michigan, knows how to build a program. That was critical for Warde Manuel, U-M’S athletic director, who swung big when he hired Juwan Howard five years ago.
Howard had built a reputation in the NBA as a promising up-and-comer. He’d learned under the best coaching staff in the league, led by the Miami Heat’s Erik Spoelstra.
But he’d never been a head coach anywhere, coached in college, or was anywhere near the day-to-day workings of a college program, outside of his playing days nearly a quarter-century earlier. Talent matters, obviously, and Howard had his moments in attracting some to Ann Arbor.
Roster-building and talent acquisition aren’t the same, however, and May has shown he can fashion a roster despite bronze-level resources – FAU’S facilities brought out tears, and not the good kind, after he took the job sight unseen, he told reporters last year.
From his remote outpost in Boca Raton, Florida, May scoured the country – and Europe – looking for players. Mostly, he wanted guys that could shoot, read defenses, move the ball and absorb scouting reports in practice.
His 2023 Final Four run came on a tsunami of 3-pointers and spacing. His arrival there a year ago must have made all the nights he nerded out, devouring sets from various Euro leagues, worth it.
Like so many coaches, May is a basketball junkie. When he worked as a student-manager under Bob Knight at Indiana, he filled stacks of notecards during practice (according to The Athletic) – sometimes incurring the wrath of the old man himself, who couldn’t stomach a manager who wasn’t paying attention to loose balls.
May doesn’t handle his players like Knight did, thankfully. Nor should he. Times have changed. May adapted. Never more so than after he’d read Doug Lemov’s “The Coach’s Guide to Teaching,” according to The Athletic.
A central theme of the book centered on guiding players through mistakes. May took it to heart. A player once tried to double-team at the wrong time or from the wrong angle. In the past, May might have raised his voice, vented, done the rage-y “might makes men” thing.
Thanks to Lemov, U-M’S new coach bit his lip, kept calm, and told his player he was glad he made the mistake, because it meant he wouldn’t make it in the game. He didn’t, for the record. Teaching moment? Absolutely.
But then what is any sport for a coach if not a classroom?
Sound familiar? It should. Howard’s predecessor, John Beilein, considered himself a teacher first, too. For that matter, so did Howard, which is to say that some teach better than others.
What’s clearer by the season in college basketball – heck, at any level of basketball or just about any team sport –is that young folks don’t respond to the old-school ways anymore, to the Knight philosophy of dictatorial love. This doesn’t mean coaches can’t hold their players accountable or pass out consequences.
But the endgame is to ensure players understand what they are being taught so that they can rely on those teachings in the high leverage moments.
Watch May on the sideline and you see relative calm, sometimes a smile. You’ll also see a coach who did the grind; who made stops at five programs as an assistant – including Eastern Michigan – always searching for more responsibility and the opportunity to learn.
All but one of May’s stops were midmajors. Although mid-majors don’t have the resources – and alumni obligation – that come with high-majors, much of the machinery is the same. Oh, and that other stop? Florida, for three seasons, where May was an assistant at a football school with basketball aspirations.
In other words, he has a pretty good facsimile of what the hoops climate in Ann Arbor is and what its fanbase, its administration and its donors will expect.
May takes over the Wolverines near the program’s rock bottom. Not since before Beilein arrived, in 2008, has the roster been so bereft and unsettled.
The two best players from this season – Dug Mcdaniel and Tarris Reed Jr. – recently announced plans to transfer. Then a couple of Howard’s recruits backed off when he lost his job.
May is starting virtually from scratch, with perhaps just four scholarship players returning from the Wolverines’ 8-24 campaign. But then college basketball moves at terabit speed these days. The transfer portal has given the game free agency without a salary cap – helpful for a coach trying to win quickly, daunting for one trying to sustain what he is building.
The Block M brand should kick open doors FAU could not for May, and he’ll be able to draw players into the maize and blue who wouldn’t have considered joining him in Boca Raton.
Don’t expect him to abandon his scope, though, or to stop looking for skilled players wherever they are grown.
Do expect him to keep exploring his pace-and-space tendencies. He fell in love with the Steve Nash era of the Phoenix Suns, a symphony of shooting and movement and speed, orchestrated by Mike D’antoni and his “7-secondsor-less” dogma.
That sounds interesting, right? Scoring is helpful.
Even with the portal and NIL money, it may take a while for May to settle in and remake the program in his own image. He’ll have fits and starts. Just as most new coaches do. Just as Beilein did.
He’ll also have a résumé of winning in a place where no one had won in decades. That’s what it takes to get a shot at a place like Michigan.
Let’s see what May does with his.