Everything Dusty May said after Michigan's 101-60 win over Rutgers

Opening Statement

I want to begin by giving our crowd a sign of gratitude. They were awesome. Our players feed off the energy, they feel appreciated, and hopefully a lot of them are walking over across the parking lot to Yost to watch us take care of Sparty tonight like we did last night over in hockey, Brandon and the guys, what a special season they’re having.

And so it’s a good day to be a Wolverine, but we’re excited about the trajectory of our group and the way we avoided complacency. We had a very unique schedule where we have nine days off between Vegas and now. And so with that, there’s a lot of concern with outside noise, with things that really don’t go into winning or losing, and I thought our guys handled it with maturity.

I think we had six practices, and I would say five of them were really, really good practices. We had one that wasn’t nearly up to our standards, but part of it was the practice format and some things were choppy because of the way that the staff scheduled it. But overall, I think we’re better than we were ten days ago, and that’s all we can ask this time of year.

On working on transition defense a long-term goal due to different teams pushing the tempo

Yeah, yes, and no. Obviously, if we can get our defense set, then we’re going to be tough to score on. We’re really big, we’re athletic. I don’t think we have a position where you could just line them up and go at the guy. And so I think we have really good rim protection. I thought Rutgers actually seemed like they shot the two today much better than most teams have against us.

I thought they had some floaters and some tough finishes, credit them. But no, we had been making some poor decisions in transition. Most of the time it wasn’t a lack of effort, it was a lack of execution, and we were all doing it. So anytime all of our guys are doing it, then it’s something we haven’t taught very well. So we just went back to re-teaching it through the film, through practice drills, and then through five-on-five execution. And when you have a really intelligent group that has basketball character and basketball IQ, they can fix these things in a day or two, and that’s what they did tonight. So I didn’t know that they had zero until Brian told me afterward, but that’s pretty good.

On the growth of Morez Johnson’s game

How much time do we have? I can go until the hockey, until the game starts, talking about Rez, if you want me to. Man, we really, and his teammates, we really appreciate that guy, man. When you look at our good possessions in Vegas, a lot of times we got layups and dunks because of his seals, because of his screens, because of his rim runs. He does a lot of extremely visible and invisible plays, and for him to knock down the threes, it’s a testament of his work. As you could see when he raised up into it, I don’t think there was anyone thinking, oh, don’t do it.

We’ve seen him shoot in practice, and as long as he’s shooting step-in threes, I think everyone’s confident. And both times, Elliot put pressure on the rim, on the paint, and drew the five, so it wasn’t as if he had to make a split-second decision, and I think that if teams have to be a little more skittish towards helping at the rim, then Elliot’s going to get more layups and Yax is going to get more layups, as you saw in the second half. So there’s a chain reaction.

We want all five guys on the court to be capable of knocking down threes, and even the guys that don’t shoot them now in games are shooting them in practice every day because we’re always thinking the end goal is to beat the absolute best teams and be able to win in any situation, and so to do that, we’ve got to have a whole Swiss Army knife of weapons, and we’re still developing that.

On Johnson’s ability to seal

He loves contact. I think that’s first and foremost. He wins every catch. Our guys have a lot of confidence to throw him the ball because if it’s a 50-50 ball, if it’s a 60-40 ball, 70-30 ball, and he’s at a disadvantage, he typically wins those catches and turns them into baskets. There’s trust that’s developed throughout the season amongst one or two guys or even teams, and Rez has certainly earned the trust of his teammates that he’s going to play the right way, play with efficiency, and even he has whatever, 9 of 11 at one point, he missed one shot, and he’s not hunting shots.

He’s trying to play good basketball, and that’s probably the thing that I, as a member of the team, am most pleased with is just how unselfish our guys are. I don’t think this is common, and I think part of it, too, is the mutual respect and the shared sacrifice amongst our group, so I’m very pleased with that aspect.

On his team not being complacent

It’s going to be different every week. There’s going to be new challenges, and the guys that were here last year were Roddy, and Nimari, and Will, and LJ. They’re preaching some lessons that we learned the hard way because we let down our guard a little bit last year, and then it’s not much more difficult than just follow the game and you see teams go on the road and look like different teams, undefeated teams go on the road to a team they’re supposed to beat by double digits, and they lose because it’s difficult to win on the road, especially in the Big Ten, and so we’re trying to learn from those examples, but also I think we have two of everything, and so if a guy doesn’t bring it, he’s at risk of being, I don’t want to say replaced, but relegated temporarily by a really good player, so hopefully internally that motivates us to stay on our stuff, but I think there’s a real accountability to the group that we’re all doing it, and we’re all putting in the work, and we do have big, big goals and big, big dreams, and so if we’re not better tomorrow than we are today, and we’re not better next weekend than we are this weekend, then we’re just, we’re fooling ourselves, because teams are going to continue to get better.

Some are going to get better quickly, and some are going to get worse. It’s college basketball for whatever reason, so we have to make sure that we continue to move in the right direction, and we anticipate what problems are going to pop up, because there’s going to be issues, and so if we can get out ahead of them and we can prepare for them in advance, then we’re going to have the upper hand when that time comes.

On sustaining the winning margins in the future

I mean, we talk about it internally that when we defend and rebound at the top of our game, then when we make shots, it’s going to simply determine the margin, and the size of the margin. And the nights they don’t go in when everything’s going wrong, and we’re not finishing around the rim, and we’re missing our free throws, and we’re missing our threes, that if we can hang our hat on all the other things, the intangibles, then we’ll still be able to find a way to win, because those nights are coming too.

I mean, we’re going to have some games when we just don’t make shots, and it’s a tricky game, and the ball squirts out, I mean, you see it every day, you see 90% free-throw shooters miss free throws, so it’s just, that’s on the horizon as well. We don’t know if it’s Tuesday, Saturday, a month from Saturday, but those days are coming as well. So we’re simply trying to prevent losing with all the other things, and not letting a bad bounce come into play. I like the mindset of our group right now, especially for early December, but we have a long way to go, especially with some of the teams we have on our schedule. We don’t get Purdue at home, and we don’t get Illinois at home, we don’t get some high, high-level teams at home this year. We’ve got to be even tougher to go on the road, and win against some of the best teams in the country.

On it being unexpected and beneficial to be able to give minutes to the deep bench

Yeah, we just talked about that as a staff, that we’re developing our bench in live play, and the one thing about our program, you know, when we win, when we lose, it’s still about the growth, and the development, and improving. We have a group in there lifting weights now because we have a quick turn, just squeezing a lift. There was zero resistance when we suggested, let’s get a post-game lift, that way tomorrow is not such a long day as we prepare for Villanova, we can practice a little bit, we can get our film work, and then these guys also have a big week academically as well, so I don’t know, I went on to a tangent outside of the question, did I answer what you wanted? But yeah, we have a group that enjoys work, and I think we’ve just, once again, got to keep the blinders, earmuffs, whatever you want to call it, and stay focused on the process of getting better, because every team’s going to look a lot different in three or four months than they do now.

On LJ Cason’s biggest area of growth

The last two or three weeks, there’s been a real steady growth in the things he needs to work on and improve on. LJ is a guy that, man, I’m really, really happy he’s with us, to see him change as a person, to see him become a real, reliable, and dependable man, and to see him bounce back in the second half.

I thought he played poorly in the first half for his standards, and I thought the second half, he was really, really good, and it was outside of just making shots. His nonverbal and verbal communication on the court as a point guard was really, really good in the second half, and those are the things we’ve been challenging him with, because that leadership is needed, especially a guy that’s been in some fires, man, we don’t have the success. I give Roddy a lot of credit last year for his emergence late after going through the funk, but LJ, staying the course whenever he was in the rotation, then he was out of the rotation, he was in, he was out, and for him to stay the course and be ready when the team really needed him is a tribute to the way he stayed with it, and so that’s a good quality to have as a person, somebody that can just get to the next thing and stay with it.

On whether there’s room to be proud of what the team has been able to do the last four games

There’s points of the game when we’re proud every game of maybe it’s a ball screen coverage that we execute, maybe it’s a press rotation that we execute, so there are these details of the game that we’re proud. As far as the end result, no, I wouldn’t say that yet. This is part of our innocent climb where we’re just lost in the fight of getting better, and when you guys say those things, we process for about a half a second and then move on to the next thing, because we have one of the historical programs of all college basketball coming in Tuesday, we need our fans here again, it’s a huge game for us.

I think they’re number one in the country in offensive rebounding, so we like these quicker turns, because we just get to the next thing and focus on getting better in our processes, this nine day break was tougher to manage than what we have going forward.

On whether he’s more comfortable in Big Ten games this season

I was talking to Sean, who did the game for Big Ten Network, and in the Big Ten you don’t ever get into a routine, so I don’t know if you’re ever comfortable with the routine of Big Ten play, because Friday, Sunday, week off, three games in a week, like, grateful that we’re representing a brand that the networks want to put on peacock on a Friday night or whatever the case, so I don’t know if we feel more comfortable because of that or if we just feel more comfortable because of our roster. I mean. we have a very, very good ball club, like I said, when you have two of everything, we have experience, we have size, there’s nothing that is going to keep us from being our best other than ourselves.

When you play against really good teams, they’re going to have to beat us, and so I think that gives us more confidence than simply being through it the last year, because every roster changes. We’re going to different cities, we were in LA last year, now we’re going to be in the Pacific Northwest, last year we played at Rutgers, this year we didn’t, so we have some tough environments we have to go into this year. Northwestern’s a bear place to play, obviously, Ohio State a couple times, Michigan State a couple times, so a little more comfortable, yes, but as far as being a real difference maker, no, we’re still figuring it out on the fly.