Summer workouts are ramping up for the Michigan men’s basketball team, and like the last few seasons, there’s a handful of new faces. Four scholarship players return from last season’s championship-winning squad, along with three transfers and six incoming freshmen.
And although he’s no stranger to the Wolverines’ returners, head coach Mike Boynton Jr. is still getting his feet wet in his own new position. Following former coach Dusty May’s late departure, Boynton was quickly named interim coach June 22 and later given the official head coach title July 10. In that time, he’s notably kept Michigan’s entire roster intact, with only one exception.
But as he faced the media for the first time in his new role Tuesday morning, Boynton wasn’t looking to take any credit.
“I don’t think I kept the roster together,” Boynton said. “I think there are a lot of things that factor into these guys wanting to be together. I think they looked around the room at each other on June 23 when we got together for the first time and realized that that was a team they thought they were going to be a part of in the beginning. So a lot of it was their belief in each other, their confidence in this program.”
The two returning key contributors from last year — guards senior Elliot Cadeau and sophomore Trey McKenney — led that charge, publicly affirming their commitment to the Wolverines rather soon in the process of the coaching change.
Not every Michigan player has hit the court for summer workouts just yet, whether they haven’t arrived or are recovering from injury, but Cadeau and McKenney already seem to be part of a “top four” in Boynton’s eyes along with two transfers: redshirt junior forward J.P. Estrella from Tennessee and junior center Moustapha Thiam from Cincinnati.
“Those four guys give you a lot of confidence, at least that you’re gonna have a really competitive top end of your roster,” Boynton said. “The other guys just haven’t proven it yet, we believe in them.”
Boynton didn’t get into too many specifics about how exactly the Wolverines will play under him, or what might look different than under May. But in the same way he valued retaining the roster constructed under May, Boynton wants to maintain many of the coaching principles that found so much success a year ago.
“I’ve worked for some terrific coaches, I’ve played for some great people,” Boynton said. “He’s as good as anybody I’ve been around at the whole of the job, but I also was right there helping to make some of those decisions, as well as the rest of our staff. So it’ll be a lot of what we’ve done, particularly as it relates to our defensive schematics.”
It won’t hurt that much of May’s coaching staff is sticking around along with Boynton. He hired Mike Martin from Brown to fill one of two assistant openings, and said Tuesday he wants to hire “creative” offensive coaches as a defensive-focused coach himself. Between keeping his roster together and most of his coaching staff too, it’s no secret that retention was a priority for Boynton across the board.
“It was probably the most important thing that I did for the first three weeks, which is why I’m probably a little bit behind in some of the other areas,” Boynton said. “Putting together a staff, scheduling, even recruiting for next year. Those things had to take a backseat to make sure that we could keep as much of this group together.”
With a roster seemingly set and the whirlwind following May’s departure winding down, Boynton should get a chance to catch up wherever he fell behind between now and the start of the season — when he, Cadeau and McKenney will be the familiar faces ushering in a new era for Michigan.
