Back in November, it quickly became clear that Michigan was the best team in college basketball. The only problem is that the season is long and our memories are short.
Michigan didn’t maintain that dominant level all year, but they never forgot it. Despite losing three games all season, Big Ten play wore the Wolverines down to the point where it seemed they might be leaking oil heading into the NCAA Tournament. They weren’t.
Dusty May’s Michigan Machine mashed its way through the NCAA Tournament with five-straight 90+ point outings before scraping out a 69-63 win against Dan Hurley’s zombie Huskies for the Big Ten’s first national championship since Michigan State in 2000. The most impressive part: they did it with just 14 minutes of Yaxel Lendeborg on Saturday night, and a severely hampered version of the Big Ten Player of the Year on Monday.
That was possible because May built about as well in the Transfer Portal as you can, leveraging a healthy but not exorbinate, $10 million budget to assemble the first-ever title-winning team with five transfers in its starting lineup. Including the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player, Elliot Cadeau.
Elliot Cadeau, Michigan
On Saturday night, Elliot Cadeau may have played the best 5-17, 4 turnover game in basketball history. He was in complete control of the game offensively, attacking aggressively in the pick-and-roll, brilliantly manipulating Arizona’s Motiejus Krivas in drop coverage, and, according to Dusty May, intentionally missing shots at times to create putback opportunities for Aday Mara.
In a game that Lendeborg played just 14 minutes, Cadeau took over and picked up the playmaking seamlessly. On Monday night, in a game that a severely hobbled Lendeborg played 36 minutes, Cadeau again took charge, this time as a scorer.
The former five-star UNC cast-off continually got downhill and put pressure on the rim, and late in the game, he closed it out at the line, going 8-9 to add to his 19 points. Maybe most impressively, in a game that UConn slowed to a crawl, putting a premium on possessions, Cadeau, who averaged over three turnovers a game last season for the Tar Heels, only turned it over once and had two steals.
Aday Mara, Michigan
You’d imagine that if there were any player in the country who could handle Aday Mara, it would have been 7-foot-2 Motiejus Krivas, but Mara gave Arizona’s monstrous rim protector an easy 26 and 9 on 16 shots with a few assists for good measure. Defensively, Mara was the centerpiece of Dusty May’s diabolical plan to pack the paint and dare Arizona to bash its head into a brick wall for 40 minutes, to which the Wildcats happily obliged.
With Mara anchoring the defense, Michigan held Arizona, a team that scored nearly 50 percent of its points in the paint this season, to just 10-23 at the rim and 8-21 in the paint. Meanwhile, in Mara’s 30 minutes, a staggering 44.2 percent of Michigan’s field goal attempts came at the rim, and the Wolverines posted a 98th percentile offensive rating of 125.4.
Against UConn, Mara didn’t have nearly the same offensive impact, but as always, he alters the geometry of the opposing offense, snaring them in his drop coverage trap of low-efficiency mid-range jumpers and floaters. Plus, he often erased the threat of Reed in the post and destroyed any notion of the Huskies dumping it into his possession after possession in crunch time.
Trey McKenney, Michigan
As a Dan Hurley team tends to do, UConn would not die on Monday night. The Huskies just kept hanging around, and whether they’re the better team or not, it always feels like their championship pedigree is going to tilt the game in their favor late. However, the dagger didn’t come from a two-time national champion in Alex Karaban, or a 23-year-old All-American in Yaxel Lendeborg; it came off the hands of a 19-year-old freshman, a step-back three with 1:50 left to extend the Michigan lead to 65-56.
A physical score-first guard whose soft touch on his jumper is a stark contrast to the way he bullies defenders to get to his spots, McKenney gobbled up the minutes vacated by LJ Cason’s late-season knee injury and looks poised to break out as one of the best players in the Big Ten next season.
Tarris Reed Jr., UConn
It’s hard to recognize a single player from UConn’s two Final Four games. Reed almost gets the nod by default with back-to-back double-doubles, especially pulling down seven of UConn’s 22 offensive rebounds against Michigan on Monday night, but in Indianapolis, he was far from the efficient post-scoring monster who terrorized the first few rounds of the tournament.
Reed shoulders such a massive load in the front court against two of the tallest teams in the country in Illinois because, unlike the back-to-back title teams, UConn doesn’t have Donovan Clingan or Samson Johnson coming off the bench behind him. Still, UConn is stout defensively, rebounds at a remarkable clip, and legitimately functioned as an inside-out offense for much of the tournament, playing through Reed in the biggest moments.
That became considerably more difficult against Aday Mara on Monday night, but Reed’s gravity and utility as a screen are still so integral to the functionality of Hurley’s offense that it almost seems as though it would all fall out of alignment without the former Wolverine.
Keaton Wagler, Illinois
Illinois looked to be obsessed with hunting switches in ball-screens and attacking mismatches as much as they could. Ultimately, it took them out of their offense for a third-straight abysmal offensive performance in a third-straight loss to UConn. That and some seriously brutal shot luck. Still, as he always does, Wagler found a way to get his.
UConn turned it into an isolation game for Illinois, and while he’s not an explosive athlete, it’s impossible to keep Wagler from getting where he wants, either creating space with a step back jumper or driving to the paint with impressive strength to finish through contact at the rim. Even in the final minute, when Braylon Mullins hit what seemed like a dagger three, Wagler immediately responded to trim the lead back to four and keep Illinois’s slim hopes alive.
His effort wasn’t enough to carry Illinois to a national title, but the most overlooked one-and-done freshman in years did not disappoint on the biggest stage in Indianapolis.