Mike Boynton Jr. previews Oakland

This— I'll do this in two ways. One, um, I've been really fortunate to recruit and coach some really talented people. Um, I've not recruited or coached very many better people. Um, you take basketball away from Trey McKenney tomorrow, and he's going to be an incredibly successful person.

He's got a maturity that I've only seen in K at his age. Only in 22 years now coaching college basketball. He's a professional in how he approaches his life. He may be, of all the young guys, he's the most responsible.

None of them are irresponsible, but he plans every night what he's doing the next day. He plans when he's going to bed. He plans when he's eating. He stretches.

I mean, he does all the things that young guys usually have no clue about. You talk to them about it and they're like, why would I do that? Like, because you're gonna play against a 23-year-old who's been doing this for 4 years, and you're going to need as many advantages. Um, so that, that's him as a person.

And then as a player, he's really talented. Um, he'll have to figure out how he fits in with this group. It'll probably be the most challenging basketball experience for him that he's gone through. Not that he won't be capable of helping us win and being a big part of our success this year, um, but he's never been asked not to be a primary playmaking scorer consistently, right?

Maybe as a secondary or Batman and Robin with Acuff on the AU team. But even then, right, it was still the two of them. He wasn't— it was gonna be sometimes he's our fifth option on the court in terms of what we're looking to do and the way we play. He'll figure it out.

But I'm curious to watch how he embraces that challenge. And I have no doubt by the way he's worked since he's been here in June, that he'll do well. He'll certainly hit some bumps in the road like all freshmen do, but I'm really, really bullish on what he's going to become and what he's going to represent for this program for a long time.

I mean, I think any coach you're talking to on the Friday before the Monday the season starts are going to feel me. If they're not, then good luck to those guys this year. But everybody's, you know, there's a level of optimism of what they've either done in the offseason or what they've seen in the preseason. What the ceiling is.

I think the thing that excites me the most is the quality of people that we have. I use Trey as an example. Will Tschetter, I didn't know at all before I got here. I knew Nimari a little bit.

I coached against him at Texas Tech, or he was at Texas Tech his freshman year before he transferred to Maryland. I was familiar with him. He was in the same class as Kade, so I got to see him quite a bit. But I didn't know Will Tschetter at all.

I've not met 10 better people in my life. Than Will Tschetter. And he is the— he is, you know, whatever Michigan man is, like, he is it. And he kind of leads what it means to be in a locker room every day.

The things that he values, he makes sure that the guys understand the things that are important in life. And it's kind of helped the young guys, Ricky Liburd, Winters Grady, like, adapt to Michigan. But it's also helped guys like who come from different college cultures. Aday, Mara, and Will, Morez Johnson Jr., Elliot Cadeau, who've all come from really good teams coached by really good people, just seeing what it could be like here.

So that's what I'm most excited about, is that gives you a chance. And undoubtedly there's going to be a point where we hit a little bit of a challenge. It's sickness, injury, we lose it, whatever. Something's going to happen that's going to create some adversity in our locker room.

And that is what gives you a chance to still become what you are capable of, is the quality of people who don't start pointing fingers and start taking in all the outside noise and start buying into individual, individualism over our team. So that's what I'm most excited about is we got a group of people in our locker room who really care about each other and care about winning.

And then obviously the talent level speaks for itself. It's the most talented group collection of people that I've been around. Um, you know, nobody else team is necessarily the alpha that Cade is from a playing individual standpoint, but he also didn't play with another guy like him. We have guys that are very, very complementary of each other.

Uh, I think we have several guys who will make a lot of money playing basketball.

I think that's probably the biggest advantage that we have as a team is that our staff is all been together now. We know staff turnovers, probably more important than maybe people think, um, because last year we were all figuring out our own individual philosophies and how they work together well with the team. And now we're just trying to figure out, we know what it looks like for us to play well and how we want to coach.

And I was getting, um, the combinations that'll be on the court to understand how things change depending on who's on the court with you. When Aday Mara's in with Morez Johnson, his role's going to be different than when he's the 5 and Yaxel Lendeborg is the 4. When Will's the 4 and Yaxel Lendeborg is the 5, it may look even a little bit different, and we feel really comfortable with that.

And so it's going to take some time for those guys to make those adjustments in-game, which was why it was really important for us to get Aday Aday and Morez Johnson back for at least some real live action before we started. But I'm really confident that we're going to be a really, really good defensive team. We have the size, the versatility, the physicality, which I think was lacking some last year.

The physicality to rebound the ball against really physical rebounding teams. And then obviously not giving up second chance points gives you a chance to play as fast as we want to. I said it all last year, and this is certainly not pointing fingers, but our turnovers and our lack of rebounding was as much a cause for our defensive numbers to slip over the course of the season as anything.

But I do think that we'll continue to get better. And as those guys play together defensively and learn where the spots are, how to cover for each other, because our switching can be a problem with our size and versatility.