Dusty May sees early progress on turnovers, three-point shooting

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Ten minutes after each practice, Dusty May is handed a stat sheet. Given last year, there are two stats that his eyes are immediately drawn to.

“The first thing I look at is assist-to-turnover ratio,” May said Tuesday. “And then I still have some PTSD with our shooting woes in February. And so I look at three-point percentage every single day. … We’ve managed the turnover battle really, really well this year. … We’ve just done a much better job of making better decisions, of simplifying our approach. And so up to this point, that’s been a real pleasant surprise.”

Those two stats — assist-to-turnover ratio and three-point shooting — were awfully relevant last season.

Michigan was consistently plagued by turnovers last season, with a whopping 19.6% of the Wolverines’ possessions ending in a turnover. Few power-conference teams had a higher rate. Michigan’s misplays weren’t without range, from consecutive travel violations to slips and drops to flat-out bad passes. It wasn’t something that May shied away from, either, citing it in press conferences as a point of improvement throughout the season.

And yet, the Wolverines’ offense chugged along, surviving partially on the fact that a good portion of their turnovers were on passes for dunks or layups, otherwise high-percentage shots that — when the pass was made — Michigan converted.

Just because the Wolverines progressed to the Sweet Sixteen in May’s debut year doesn’t mean Michigan quit analyzing the team’s turnovers troubles. Rather, with UNC transfer Elliot Cadeau as the new starting point guard, the Wolverines are taking a new approach.

“We give him reads,” assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen said. “So when he’s going to the lane, he knows exactly where everybody should be. So he, honestly, could close his eyes and know, ‘I have a left guy, I have a guy that’s facing away.’ So we give him reads when he goes in the lane, if he gets stuck, we have a big guy, what we call ‘pivot duck’. He’s pivoting and ducking in, and you can throw it to him, so those reads probably make the game simpler for him.”