While winning with a supersized team is perhaps not a trend that Michigan owns, it’s certainly one the Wolverines have perpetuated. They earned a Sweet 16 appearance by screening two 7-footers with each other, then doubled down and won a national championship by starting the trio of Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr. and Aday Mara together.
This upcoming season, though, the Wolverines might look to their backcourt to carry them back to the mountaintop.
“At all levels of basketball, guard play is really important,” Mike Boynton Jr. said when asked if he had a national championship-caliber roster. “I’d argue we have one of the top 3-to-5 backcourts in the country. And again, we got the reigning Final Four Most Outstanding Player (Elliot Cadeau) and a guy who probably had as efficient of a year — Trey (McKenney) — as you could imagine them having and that’s a good place to start.”
Moustapha Thiam and JP Estrella are expected to be starters alongside Cadeau and McKenney, and both players have All-Big Ten upside, but after those four, the depth chart gets murkier, especially for the frontcourt. Injuries have sidelined Jalen Reed for the past two years, and freshman 7-footer Marcus Moller is coming off a bout with cancer. This pushes up freshmen like McDonald’s All-American Quinn Costello or under-the-radar defensive maestro Malachi Brown. The inexperience of these potential reserves, alongside the fact that they’ll play in the most physically demanding conference, puts far more pressure on the backcourt to be the primary offensive targets.
This increased onus will first be placed on the returning guards.
“(Cadeau and McKenney) are probably going to be asked to score a little bit more than they did last year, but again, the other team has a say in how we play also, and I never not take that into account,” Boynton said. “If the team’s going to double-team Elliot, which they didn’t do a ton of last year because we had so many weapons that maybe he doesn’t have as many opportunities to score, and maybe his assists go way up.”
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