INDIANAPOLIS – Dusty May loves to talk about beautiful basketball. Watch his Wolverines most games and it’s not hard to spot what he means.
Pause the tape of the game that led U-M here, to the Final Four, and you’ll almost certainly have freeze-framed a gorgeous, four-, five- or even six-pass sequence that led to a backdoor layup or an open 3-pointer.
Unfreeze the tape and you’ll see the Michigan basketball bench on its feet, celebrating along with the five on the court.
“Amazing,” is how Roddy Gayle Jr. put it Thursday, April 2, at Lucas Oil Stadium. “Everybody touches the ball. Everybody is engaged. That is what’s required for us to win … [when] the ball is really popping. It means so much more.”
Ask any of his teammates and you’ll almost certainly get a similar answer.
“It’s been contagious,” said Nimari Burnett, who happily sacrificed shots this season as May and the Wolverines welcomed in four key Division-I transfers. “Coach always talks about one more swing [pass]. I think that is the difference between us playing at an elite level and really maximizing our potential.”
All the swing-swings make the Wolverines even harder to defend. That is the point, of course. That it’s so much more pleasing to watch is another.
The Wolverines are here with their best chance to win a national title in at least a dozen years because they are long and athletic and skilled and versatile. They’ve got the best front line in college basketball. And they’ve got a 6-foot-9 playmaker in the body of a power forward who is just starting to realize how gifted – and how dominant – he can be.
They are here at a 1-seed for all those reasons, and for all those reasons are slightly favored to beat their fellow 1-seed Arizona, a team near their equal in size and bounce and absolutely equal in skill. Yet the Wildcats don’t quite play the beautiful game the way U-M does when it is humming … and free.
No one does. Not this season. Not in college. You’d have to find a squad in the NBA or even Europe. May, you won’t be surprised to know, scours leagues everywhere looking for ideas, and loves to cut up clips to show his guys what basketball should look like when everyone is involved.
And yet there are moments when a team’s most gifted scorer must go find a bucket on his own, when the game is in the balance, and he needs the confidence not just from within, but from the rest of the team to go do that.
Balancing the tension of when everybody needs to touch it against the moment a singular force needs to take it is critical in postseason basketball. These Wolverines can do both, and they’ll likely need to in order to beat Arizona.
Bullyball in the driveway
May learned how beautiful basketball could be an hour south of Indy, working as a student manager for Bobby Knight and the Hoosiers. But he honed his ability to teach the beautiful game in his driveway.
No, really, he did.
There, on the pavement in Ruston (home to Louisiana Tech), say, or Gainesville (home to the University of Florida) or Boca Raton (the home of Florida Atlantic), to name three stops on May’s 25-year journey from Bloomington (home to Indiana University, of course) to Ann Arbor.
“We’d play two-on-two with my brothers and dad,” Charlie May said, sitting in a corner locker inside Lucas Oil Stadium on Thursday. “We used to have some good battles in our driveway. … There are videos on my mom’s old phone. He’s been preaching good basketball his whole life.”
Charlie, who transferred from UCF when his dad took over the program in 2024, is 22. Older brother Jack, who played at Florida, is 24. Younger brother Eli, a student manager for U-M, is 19 – soon to be 20.
When Charlie was younger, the teams were Dusty and Eli versus Charlie and Jack. When they all got into their mid-teens, they’d mix them up. Everyone talked trash.
“We’re all hyper-competitive,” Charlie said.
None more than Dusty, who was known to show off when Anna was filming the action on her iPad. Those videos resurfaced last Christmas, Charlie said. Someone in the family found the old tablet, charged it up and rediscovered the videos.
There was Dusty, posting his kids up, blocking their shots, lowering his shoulder.
“Bullyball,” Charlie said.
“Absolutely,” Dusty said, “make them earn it.”
Between buckets, especially if Dusty’s team scored, he’d take the chance to highlight what his son had just done.
“Whichever son you’re playing with – and they make a backdoor [cut]? – you obviously over-celebrate that moment and make them feel great about that and hopefully they continue repeating that behavior,” May said.
As for the uber-competitive driveway games?
“I wanted them to value what we valued,” he said, “which was intensity, which was hustling, helping the team function and having the self-awareness of what you do well and what other people do better than you.”
Self-awareness, of course, is the key to all of this. Blending so many transfers. Passing up good shots for great ones. Standing out of the way when the best player needs the ball.
“There is a great sense of pride when you see your guys turning down good plays for great ones,” May said, “to see All-Americans turning down a good shot for a great shot, but also, more importantly, to see the joy that the other four guys had in that possession … that led to a a beautiful possession, to see how much the bench appreciated that unselfishness.”
That’s the ideal for May, and this season’s been pretty idyllic. He is winning and doing it with not just style, but a style that’s he’s pieced together from his basketball journey.
Winning and beauty?
Life doesn’t get much better … unless the defense is mucking up the beautiful plan and someone needs to make a play. May’s Wolverines have a plan for that.
“It comes from the self-awareness of (knowing) who can do (what) well in (those) moments,” he said. “And if we can’t create that together, sometimes you just need to rely on great individual play.”
This team has that, too.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dusty May’s quest for beautiful basketball began in driveway games
Reporting by Shawn Windsor, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
