May had 48 hours to put a team together.
The Michigan Wolverines men’s basketball team is going through extreme turnover right now.
The positives: Michigan has a new coach who is accustomed to winning.
The negatives: Dug McDaniel , Tarris Reed Jr. , George Washington III and Youssef Khayat all entered the transfer portal, Olivier Nkamhoua is out of eligibility, and decisions for next season have yet to be made by Nimari Burnett, Terrance Williams II and Will Tschetter.
This situation could be daunting for some head coaches, but this isn’t Dusty May’s first rodeo taking over a limited roster going into his first season with a new team.
May’s first few weeks in Boca Raton presented a difficult challenge that ultimately led to his successes. May had 10 open scholarships to give out his first year at FAU, but he was not allowed to leave campus for any official recruiting since the team exhausted the official number before he arrived.
Fortunately, the NCAA did him a favor in helping him get the players he needed.
“We borrowed two days from the the following year, the NCAA let us borrow two days from the next season so I could go watch some local players — Mike Force, who’s been with us for five years as one of those guys, and we end up piecing together a really good team in year one with the 10 signees and then three holdovers that we really liked and became close with,” May said in an interview with Rich Eisen last March.
The clever thinking helped FAU start the season 9-3 with wins against Illinois and UCF, two tournament teams that year.
The back half of the season was riddled with season-ending injuries, so May regrouped for year two by adding players from the transfer portal. May learned the transfer portal can be useful for short-term roster building, but not for his long-term vision.
“By preference, I enjoy the younger players and having continuity, building, growing together, and therefore, the lifelong relationships that I feel like I have with almost every player I’ve ever coached,” May said during his opening press conference on Tuesday.
Because of this preference, May found hidden gems all over the country in the 2020 recruiting cycle that became four-year starters for the Owls and led FAU to the Final Four in 2023.
“Nick Boyd, Elijah Martin, Johnell Davis and Giancarlo Rosado — they’re as close of a group as I’ve ever seen,” May said to Eisen. “These guys are truly family. If you said they’re cousins or brothers by blood, I would believe you, and they all work incredibly hard. They’re all extremely intelligent. So they brought all the winning intangibles to our group. And now those guys are the core, the foundation, the leaders of our team, so as they’ve gotten older and got better as players and improved because of their leadership — and they’re really good players — they’ve really taken over our locker room. And then all the other guys are just like them or they’re great people that could hold each other accountable. They’re self-aware, so we just have a really nice winning mix.”
Coming into his first season at Michigan, May is tasked with a similar challenge. The easy solution is to fill the roster with transfers until landing high school recruits for 2025. However, May is still looking to win in 2024 and does not want to push the mentality to the following year when he could lose recruits, the fan base and the current players on the roster. He is looking for a nice mix of high schoolers and transfers who can adopt his winning mentality.
“Recruiting now in the portal is more like speed dating than the traditional recruiting,” May said Tuesday. “And I think it’s very valuable to have a network of people that you trust and they trust you. And hopefully between former players and former coaches, our programs are gonna have thousands of agents working for us — when I say agents, people that are going to say great things about us and want players to play for us. So we’re going to cast a big net. We’ll narrow it down, we’ll be very, very patient because we’re not going to take the wrong guys. We have several spots, but we’re gonna be very thorough but understand that we need to be right. We need to do our research in advance and make sure we make very calculated decisions because there’s a lot of options, and they’re not all great options.”
May has some tough decisions to make, but he has more resources now than he did at FAU. He currently has two commits — guards Durral Brooks and Christian Anderson — and is also keeping an eye on his three FAU commits , guards Elijah Elliott, Lorenzo Cason and Ty Robinson. In addition, the Wolverines have not lost out on former commit, four-star forward Khani Rooths, who decommitted on March 18.
On top of those players, George Washington III — who entered the transfer portal after Juwan Howard was fired — was in attendance at May’s introductory press conference. Speaking to reporters, he made it seem like a return to Michigan isn’t out of the question.
“Schools have reached out but I am still in the middle period,” he said. “The whole reason why I left the option to come back is because I didn’t want to be stuck somewhere, but I am really interested in building a relationship with (coach May).”
May’s path to Ann Arbor is a precarious one, but he has every intention of reigniting the program and appears to have a plan for what the roster will look like for 2024 and beyond.