Dusty's Transfer Portal Diamonds Lead Michigan To Title

The Michigan Wolverines officially joined the pantheon of college basketball’s all-time great teams, completing a historically great 37-3 season with a hard fought 69-63 win over UConn in the NCAA Tournament championship on Monday.

Despite the fact that UConn hung around and kept the game within 11 points throughout, Michigan still led for over 30 minutes of gametime and controlled the majority of the second half en route to its first national title since 1989. PG Elliot Cadeau earned Final Four Most Outstanding Player honors, leading the Wolverines with 19 points in the championship on 5-of-11 shooting.

Overcoming Injury

Cadeau’s performance on Monday was especially crucial, due to the fact that Big Ten Player of the Year Yaxel Lendeborg was clearly less than 100 percent with the reported MCL sprain he suffered in the first half of Saturday’s semifinal win over Arizona. Lendeborg still dropped 13 points, but it came on a labored 4-of-13 from the field. He promised the Michigan fanbase and his teammates that he would be on the court for the title game despite his injury, but the reality was he wasn’t healthy enough to perform to his usual standard.

“I knew I was going to go as soon as I got back on the court the first game,” Lendeborg said. “There was no way I was going to miss this game no matter what was going on. I was very tentative this game. It felt like I was pretty much holding our team down. We could have been up by way more early in the game, later on in the game.

“I kept having opportunities to make plays, and I couldn’t make the play. But these guys stuck with me no matter what. They all believed in me. I was trying to push through my mental and physical battle out there dealing with myself, but these guys really helped me out and helped me push through.”

It was undoubtedly a complicated night for the 23-year-old Lendeborg, who was Michigan’s best player the entire season. Still, the fact that Michigan was so seamlessly able to pick up the slack around him was a testament to the strength of the team that coach Dusty May has built. We knew the cast of characters that May brought in from the portal last offseason had great potential, but the level of dominance the Wolverines exhibited was at times overwhelming this season.

Michigan’s dominance reached an entirely new level against Arizona.https://t.co/c9JLel3odd (Apple)https://t.co/EsZxIkcHSA (Spotify)https://t.co/qhh1N0DbQN (YouTube) pic.twitter.com/eXftRqr1n8

— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) April 5, 2026

Apologies Owed

Perhaps the most complicated addition for Michigan this offseason was the player who ended up coming up biggest for them in the season’s crowning. Cadeau was essentially dragged through the mud by North Carolina based media for his performance during his time with the Tar Heels, but he became a bonafide star point guard with Michigan on his way to the sport’s pinnacle. After Dusty got a word of recommendation from his former player Sean May, he dialed in on Cadeau and offered him Michigan’s starting point guard role.

“We had seen him in prep ranks and we had seen him in high school ranks and we felt like we needed a quarterback, a pass-first quarterback on the floor at all times,” Dusty May said. “With Elliot, once we got him, we were able to sell him. I coached Sean May years ago in AAU basketball, so I called Sean, and he gave me all the intel and everything on the background.

“I just said, let me ask you one question. Would 17, 18-year-old Sean May, who was a McDonald’s All-American, NBA player, would he want to play with Elliot Cadeau, and he said an expletive, yeah, absolutely, let’s go, and I said, that’s all I need to know because Sean is one of the smartest, best players I’ve ever been around.”

In addition to Cadeau, Dusty May also brought in crucial additions Morez Johnson Jr. from Illinois and Aday Mara from UCLA via the portal. Johnson Jr. will likely hear his name called in the first round of June’s NBA Draft, while Mara is now considered a much more formidable professional prospect than he was a year ago before he arrived. Not to mention, both players were essential pieces in Michigan’s dominant regular season and NCAA Tournament run.

Answering The Questions

As dominant as Michigan was throughout the season, there was some worry early on that this transfer class would end up being a dud. A loss in a preseason game against Cincinnati resulted in some social media eyebrow raising, and two messy wins against St. John’s in exhibition play did little to quell the suspicions.

It wasn’t until the Player’s Era Tournament in Las Vegas in late November that Michigan truly arrived as a national title contender, and boy did the Wolverines arrive. 40-point wins over Gonzaga and San Diego State and a 30-point win over Auburn made it quickly apparent this group of Wolverines had turned the corner into being something legitimately special.

“We weren’t very good early in the year,” May said. “The first two exhibitions we beat St. John’s and we didn’t play well. At that point we considered pivoting and changing our lineup and maybe admitting failure for our vision. Our staff, I remember it yesterday, we did a deep dive on everything that you could come up with to try to predict whether it would work.

“Once we left that meeting, we were more committed than ever that this is going to work, and these are the reasons why. It was like bamboo. We didn’t feel like the bamboo was just going to shoot to the sky the next week in Vegas, but it did.”

Respecting The Path

Not only did Dusty turn Michigan from a broken program under Juwan Howard to a national champion again in just a pair of seasons, he also provided more proof that he’s a generational architect in college basketball. Although his FAU team made the Final Four as a No. 8 seed in 2023, that roster and philosophy was the spiritual predecessor to this all-time great Michigan team that actually did end up finishing the job.

“The (FAU) team and staff that really, really helped us grow together,” May said. “That was the first time I had been with a group that was truly sacrificial where we were about each other, and because of that we all improved so much, and this team has done the same thing.”