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ROSEMONT, Ill. — For both Danny Wolf and Dusty May, a lot changed in a year.
Sure, in the modern landscape of college basketball players swap jerseys like frat boys do and the coaching carousel goes around and around and back around again. But the change for the junior forward and the first-year coach of the Michigan men’s basketball team goes beyond their respective relocations.
Wolf, for starters, is expected to start at power forward for the Wolverines, playing alongside a fellow seven-footer in graduate center Vlad Goldin. Over the past two seasons, Wolf almost exclusively ran the five at Yale thanks to his size advantage in the Ivy League.
“It was obviously a concern when I was getting recruited by Michigan, having to guard fours, whether it’s 6-4 to 6-10, however tall they might be,” Wolf said at Big Ten Media Days Thursday. “And it was a priority I made in the weight room this summer, slimming down and really putting on muscle and trying to improve my lateral quickness.”
On both sides of the ball, Wolf is expected to play further from the rim. As Wolf himself noted was an initial concern, the biggest curve will be learning to defend quickness rather than height.
That adjustment started by spending time with strength and conditioning coach Matt Aldred, getting Wolf in shape for the position change. Now, and as he deemed more importantly, it’s been a matter of accumulating reps in practice.
But as Wolf’s work-in-progress perimeter defense comes along, his game on the offensive end is expected to make a more immediate impact — especially in May’s system.
“Danny Wolf is as much of a guard as any of those guys we had at (Florida Atlantic),” May said. “Now, he’s still learning the nuance, as far as if you have a smaller, quicker, athletic guy underneath you, you can’t play the same way as if you have a bigger guy guarding you on the perimeter. So he’s still adjusting and learning those tricks now. But it’s going to be the same thing, we’re going to be hunting the same shots.”
May’s system with the Owls relied on loading the perimeter with shooters, at times running four guards. And as he has emphasized since being hired, he intends to continue running that high-tempo offense at Michigan — just with some slight alterations.
Slotting two seven-footers in the lineup may seem antithetical to that philosophy. Even if May calls Wolf a guard, it’s near impossible for a player of his stature to play like a traditional guard.
But Wolf isn’t a misfit in May’s approach. Rather he is the bridge between May’s old system and the physicality of the Big Ten.
FAU went 0-2 against Big Ten opponents last season, including a season-ending loss to Northwestern in the NCAA Tournament. The sheer size and physicality in the conference was overpowering. Now that he’s in it, May knows he has to play a bigger lineup than he did with the Owls.
Wolf gives May the ability to do that while staying true to his offensive scheme. Wolf’s the unique piece to adapting a space-centric style of play to a tall lineup. While that requires a great deal of adjustment to Wolf’s game and to May’s system, it’s the reality of how Wolf wants to play and May wants to coach.
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