Roddy Gayle and Nimari Burnett at Big Ten Media Day

He's just ahead of the curve physically. High IQ, shoots the ball at an elite level. From all three levels. You can just see that he's, you know, above, especially, you know, in the high school field, that he was above in those areas. And he's going to help us tremendously this year.

Yeah, I would say, like, even looking back at my freshman years, uh, he's way ahead of the curve as far as, like, physically, mentally. Um, one thing you usually see, like, as, you know, your sophomore, junior, senior year, when new freshmen come in, is just how hard the summer hits them. And I think our freshmen, including Trey, I was has done a great job adjusting to that.

I feel like they adjusted pretty well, and they were— you couldn't even tell they were freshmen from when they actually came to practice. Like, I feel like physically and mentally, those guys are ahead of the curve on the next level.

Um, I think the key with, uh, what our team is now is just the versatility. Like, there's no telling, like, one day he may be our scorer and maybe he'd be a starter, and one day he may be a bench player. So what I think the uniqueness with Aday Mara is just his ability to be a facilitator as well as score. Everybody knows him as a great scorer, but I feel like this summer, through the summer, he's taken long strides of being a facilitator, being able to read the defenses and be able to kind of pinpoint passes, even playing some backup point guard, especially with some, some of the guys dealing with sicknesses and stuff like that.

Like, he's been able to step up and play some of the 1, which I know, like, he haven't done in his career. So now it just kind of adds another, another key point in his game, I felt, might help him in the future. Dusty May has a weird mind. What's the craziest idea or most off-the-wall idea he's had, whether you've used it or not?

It's a great question. I don't know, like, just often, like, he just comes up with unique ways to just generate offense. Like, I can't spoil any of our plays or anything like that, but like, just his ability to like, all right, we want you to like pass it opposite and just like sprint off from the screen and you're going to be open. And then you think about it and it's like, how would I open, and it just works pretty much every time.

Just like his uniqueness in like floor spacing. It's like something as simple as like if a person's driving left, like you move left. Something as simple as that. And like you don't really think about it until like you get reps, and then you kind of see like the— kind of see like where his head is coming from because he just kind of breaks it down to you from stuff like that.

One unique thing that I've seen is just like he don't want you deep in corners. Like he hates the corners a lot. So what he would rather you do is like leave it some space so you can drive corner. Like, usually, you know, like, you— somebody's driving at you, you space all the way to the corner.

He wants you to just space like a little bit, tiny bit, so it allows you to just rip drive baseline and then create offense like that. So that's just that type of thing.

No, for sure. Like Roddy Gayle said, especially when you're deep in those corners, Junior ain't having you way out. He's like, we drive the middle. So he wants you to lift up so you have either way— you drive baseline, drive middle.

And, um, I feel like just because he watches so much film, he understands the game at a different level, and that's what makes his mind so New York, and it's like, just very broad, you know. You can come up with ideas from anywhere.

Yeah, like, this is point in time, like, I'm setting screens for Aday. Yeah, like, who would have thought of that like 5, 10 years ago? Like, we're going to have one of our point guards shooting guards set screens on a 5-man so he can get down here.

And it's like, it makes us good screeners too.

Yeah, yeah. So are we going to see that? Guards are great screeners.

We'll see everything.

You're going to see— I don't be surprised if you see Aday playing a 1-on-1.

Most of the time he explains a lot, but sometimes he gives you like the element of surprise. Like, oh, it works. So I see why he's doing that.

Um, I hope to learn, like you just said, just to learn about us, um, as a group playing against different competition, um, just to see how, you know, we play off each other, you know, especially because we like had different lineups play with each other during practice, and we've tried almost every lineup in practice. So yeah, it's nothing that we won't expect, but just learning about how we play together during the games against other opponents.

Yeah, I agree. Just kind of learning about how we come together in a real game setting. I feel like at this point in practices, we're kind of cheating drills because we kind of know what's going on, you know, cheating certain personnel scouts because we know that Aday Mara likes to do this, Yaxel Lendeborg likes to do that. So I feel like it's just an elite opportunity for everybody to see how dominant we can be on both sides of the ball, like how dominant we can be on the glass and stuff like that.

So I think that's a key thing, like Mari said, just learning about us, because I feel like we've kind of hit the roof at this point, and then we'll be able to kind of see, you know, where our sky is.