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Michigan basketball: Dusty May and staff working hard to eliminate one major wart

Chris Balasby: Chris Balas07/15/25Balas_Wolverine
Michigan Wolverines basketball head coach Dusty May at NCAA Tournament practice in Atlanta. (Photo by Dale Zanine-Imagn Images)
Michigan Wolverines basketball head coach Dusty May at NCAA Tournament practice in Atlanta. (Photo by Dale Zanine-Imagn Images)

By any measure, Michigan basketball’s 2024-25 season was a success under head coach Dusty May in his first year, going from 8-24 to Big Ten Tournament champs and the Sweet 16. The Wolverines had some warts, though — all teams do — mostly involving turning the ball over. 

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There were times the looseness with the ball was maddening, not just for the fans but also for May and his staff. They tried many different drills and other ways to fix it, but it wasn’t in the cards, and while some of it was personnel-driven, May and Co. are already working to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

“It was an ongoing project, and even after the season, I asked a couple of guys on staff that aren’t as busy recruiting some other things — why don’t you take a look at these from a different perspective?” May said. “Categorize them in these four or five things, and let’s really figure out, ‘do we not put them in the right situations? Do we not practice the right things? Is it just simply poor decision-making? What did the defense have a lot to do with it?’

“I read a quote this summer I really, really like … that, ‘the enemy gets a vote, as well.’ When we go into battle, the enemy has a vote. We don’t just get to decide what we’re good at and what we’re not. We have to work to improve, but yeah, there were times when it was the most confusing project. I didn’t really find any definitive answers.”

There never seemed to be a common theme, he noted many times last year. Sometimes it was one player; other games it was another. They added drills to help, made it a priority, but they never really solved it. 

It was something he wanted to do after the fact, May said, and it became a mission in the offseason.  

“We did the same thing at FAU after one of the first couple of years, and we found a couple of definitive answers and said, ‘you know what?’ There’s a solution here, and here’s what it’s going to be,” May said.  “It’s going to take some time, but we’re going to fix it. 

“With issues last year, we’d be playing well, and a guy would just dribble off his foot in that possession or whatever the case. It was just a lot of random ones that obviously we don’t practice dribbling off our feet or punish them for months. I read the articles about our teams … like Coach [Bob] Knight would just make them run to Brighton and back and turnovers would be fixed. Well, we did that. And then we gave them incentives not to turn it over. We tried just about everything.”

With a new team comes different personnel, and the guess here is that alone will help. There were simply a few players last year too careless with the ball. There were some turnovers in Sunday’s scrimmages we saw, but most of them were the result of guys not knowing each other well enough yet — miscommunications, thinking a guy was going backdoor when he wasn’t, etc. 

But expect major improvement this year. May understood the frustration last season, and he had a message.

“For our fans … we’re all experts in every field now. We spent a lot of time really, really trying and didn’t do a good enough job,” May said. “So, yeah. We’re going to figure it out, and roster construction is one of the ways we try to figure out a solution to that.”

They appear to be off to a great start.

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