Michigan has a new men's basketball head coach. Dusty May has been hired as the new sheriff in town and was formally introduced in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Big changes will be coming to Michigan's roster and coaching staff in the coming days and to be prepared for some of those changes, I thought it would be a good idea to comb back through his six seasons at Florida Atlantic. Today we'll be looking at how the roster construction and coaching staff changed year by year, how their results evolved, and see what lessons can be learned for Michigan's sake: 

 

Dusty May's Arrival at Florida Atlantic

As has been repeatedly mentioned in the days since May's hiring by Michigan, the FAU program that he inherited was really bad. They had struggled for over two decades with next to no success, drifting from the Atlantic Sun to the Sun Belt to the C-USA by the time May arrived. The Owls had one NCAA Tournament bid in program history pre-May, a 2001-02 season that saw them go 19-12 (13-7 in ASUN play), finishing 3rd in the conference before winning the conference tourney to gain the autobid. They lost to Alabama as a 15 seed in the opening round, finishing 191st in KenPom. 

That was more or less the program's high watermark before Dusty arrived. Mike Jarvis led the program into Conference USA, but most of their time in that league before May was under May's predecessor, one-time Detroit Piston player and coach Michael Curry. The Curry era was pretty terrible, as FAU went 39-84 overall and a woeful 19-53 in conference play. Dusty May remembered years later about arriving at FAU: "I walk in the room and I started crying and said, 'I just committed career suicide,'" in reference to the dire state of affairs in Boca Raton. May would be building a program from scratch, one that was lacking in facilities comparable to even peer schools. As stated in the article linked a couple sentences earlier: 

The locker room had these old, ugly wooden lockers. It was exceptionally tiny. There was more square footage for the six showers than the actual space for people in the locker room. The arena sat 2,500, had an outdated scoreboard and looked superannuated. High school teams in the area were playing in better facilities. 

May was handed a team that was disastrous. They were 12-19 the last season under Michael Curry, 6-12 in C-USA play. The team was 321st in KenPom offensive efficiency, compared with a 112th-ranked defensive rating. May got straight to work, hiring three assistants in Kyle Church, Akeem Miskdeen, and Erik Pastrana, and then re-assembled the roster. Curry's last team was on the older side and that contributed to May's first team having only three returners of consequence from Curry's final team. Those were Jaylin Ingram, a 6'7" wing who played just eight games, plus 6-1 guard Anthony Adger and 6-9 power forward Simeon Lepichev. The rest of the team was entirely new, which meant that FAU had only 15.3% of returning minutes from the year before, which ranked 345th in KenPom's continuity metric. It was starting fresh. 

[FAU Athletics]

That first Dusty May team (2018-19) added players from a variety of sources. 6-7 wing Xavian Stapleton was a down-transfer from Mississippi State and 6-11 big Karlis Silins was a down-transfer from Ole Miss. He added three players from the JUCO route and then brought four recruits on board, two of which became starters in Kevaughn Ellis and Michael Forrest. This team had a remarkably international complexion, featuring a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Senegalese, two Canadians, and a Latvian. Players were acquired from all different means and the team was stitched together by the coaching staff.

Interestingly, they were a much bigger group than what May would have in his later years, starting the 6-9 Lepichev at the four and the 6-11 Silins at center, which allowed them to be a decent rebounding team. The team improved some over Curry's last team offensively but were still very rough (263rd in efficiency). They took a lot of threes, establishing what would be a hallmark of May's program, but shot them extremely poorly. They shot poorly from 2 as well, with an eFG% that ranked 298th as a team, just narrowly better than the 303rd they finished in TO rate. Defensively they were much better, 91st in efficiency, and that was able to carry the Owls to a 17-16 record in spite of the woeful offense. They were 8-10 in C-USA play, 9th in the league, which was a marked improvement on Curry's entire tenure. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't easy, but the May era started out on okay footing in Boca. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: the rest of the tenure and some lessons]

 

[Palm Beach Post]

May builds a program 

The next three seasons for Dusty May were characterized by improving offenses and middling defenses, with decent roster turnover as he continued to search for the right combination of players and coaches. After his first season assistant Erik Pastrana left the staff and was replaced by Todd Abernethy, who had been the head coach at Trinity International University in Illinois, after a run as an assistant at Ole Miss. Both Adger and Lepichev, the two main stalwarts from Curry's final team that May had been handed, departed in the offseason, leaving the now-healthy Jaylin Ingram as the last remaining inherited piece. 

The players he'd added to that first team (both the recruits and the transfer adds) became the core of the second team, who ranked 134th in minutes continuity on KenPom. They added a new point guard in 6-0 Cornelius Taylor, who was a transfer from D2 Lincoln Memorial (then coached by current Indiana State head coach Josh Schertz). Taylor and Ingram were the highest usage players on that squad, which was a bit smaller than the year before with the 6-7 Ingram playing the four next to Silins at center. They ranked 151st in average height, albeit still taller than the teams that May would put together in the coming years.

The squad's record didn't change much in his second season (17-15) and their record in conference play was an identical 8-10. Their defense slipped some at the expense of an improving offense. They didn't get much better at shooting the 3, but they did at 2PT% and the TO rate improved significantly. On the other side of the ball, the defensive assist rate entered the top 100 for the first time, as we began to see more glimmers of the sort of team May would be building in the future emerge. In all, the offense moved up nearly 40 spots in efficiency, while the defense slid about 60 spots. The team dipped a bit overall, but remained inside the top 200 which for FAU, was a historical success. 

 

[USA Today Sports]

Year #3 was the interrupted COVID year. The team took a hit when one of the group's highest usage players and best shooter, Richardson Maitre, transferred to Samford in the offseason, but they were able to offset it by improved play from 6-6 wing Kenan Blackshear, now a sophomore. He, Ingram, and Silins were the nucleus of the shortened 2020-21 campaign, which saw FAU post a 13-10 record overall and their first winning record in conference play (7-5). Perhaps what was most notable about this season was the addition of May's most impactful recruiting class, picking up four hugely impactful freshmen that would one day take his program to new heights, Johnell "Nelly" Davis, Alijah Martin, Nick Boyd, and Giancarlo Rosado. Toss in down-transferring guard Bryan Greenlee from Minnesota, and the new faces for 2020-21 would be memorable ones years down the line. 

But in 2020-21, few of those newcomers were notable. The 6-0 Greenlee played PG next to the 6-0 Forrest, but Ingram, Silins, and Blackshear ran the show. The team's defense slipped for a third straight season, to 192nd, but their offense improved up to 174th, May's first top 200 finish in the metric. They were a dominant rebounding team and the biggest improvement to power their offensive improvement was drastically improved 3PT%. The Owls shot nearly 3.5% better than they had the year before from behind the long line, due in part to some of those new guards. Boyd, Greenlee, and Forrest all shot at least 37.7% from deep and the May team that had always been shooting a lot of threes were suddenly making a respectable amount of them. It is no surprise then, that their offense improved, even if the TO rate remained iffy.  

The 2021-22 season, year #4 of the May era, was the beginning of the breakthrough. He added a new assistant coach, with Drew Williamson (formerly of Virginia State) replacing Akeem Miskdeen and they turned over the roster again, ranking 140th in minutes continuity but losing their three highest usage players from the prior year. The solution was to begin playing more of the second-year players who had joined the program the prior year, with Davis and Martin beginning to poke their heads out for the first time. FAU added Vladislav Goldin from Texas Tech after being seldom used in Lubbock, while they scooped up Brandon Weatherspoon from the JUCO route. Both played roles on the team, as did Giancarlo Rosado, who started at C, with Forrest and Greenlee reprising their guard role. 

That 2021-22 team was the first small team that May fielded. Everett Winchester suited up as a 6-6 PF and with Rosado as a 6-7 C, this team was small. Their average height was now down to 280th in the country, but the good news is, their offense just kept getting better. The Owls had the 129th best offensive efficiency, maintaining their lofty 3PT clip from the year before as Martin, Forrest, Greenlee, and Davis bombed away from the perimeter and the team finished with the #42 eFG% clip in college basketball. Their defense sat much in the same range as it had over the prior few years, 154th in this one, and the defensive assist rate entered the top 30 for the first time. As a team, their overall efficiency edged up to 129th and they were on the precipice of stardom. 

 

 

[Awful Announcing]

The two tourney bids 

The easiest way to describe what happened or changed to cause FAU's miracle 2022-23 season was that they finally achieved roster continuity. Despite the age of the portal shaking college basketball to its core and upending mid-major programs that produce good players, May was able to roll over nearly his whole roster from the year before. A few players did transfer out, but they were mostly seldom-used deep bench players. All the core pieces returned, giving FAU the 26th-most minutes continuity in the country, a remarkable achievement at a program like FAU. Everyone (save for Everett Winchester, who graduated) came back, vaulting the Owls among the most cohesive rosters in college basketball for the first time in May's tenure. 

And then everyone got better. Greenlee and Forrest were still there to man the backcourt, but Nick Boyd's return from injury and the addition of Jalen Gaffney from UCONN as a down-transfer gave them a deeper guard situation. They also became more comfortable playing a true four-guard lineup with the 6-6 Winchester out of the picture, meaning that 6-2 Martin was playing the three and 6-4 Davis was playing the four. Vlad Goldin became the starting center for the first time, taking a significant leap in his play, while Davis and Martin both improved to become the go-to usage players on the floor. With Weatherspoon and Rosado still around as reserves, FAU was deep and ready for an eruption. 

That's what happened. They stomached an early loss to Ole Miss but did not lose again until February, eventually getting to 21-1 and ranked for the first time in program history. FAU dropped two games in conference play to UAB and Middle Tennessee but finished 18-2 in conference play to win the C-USA title in the regular season. The Owls followed it up with a victory in the C-USA Tournament and an autobid to the NCAA's, a dangerous 9 seed in the East regional. They drew Memphis in the first round, narrowly defeating the Tigers and being the beneficiaries of the massive 1/16 upset of Purdue in the first round. FAU then got to play Farleigh Dickinson and moved past them, into the program's first Sweet 16. Off to Madison Square Garden, FAU knocked off #4 seed Tennessee and #3 seed Kansas State, both KenPom top 25 teams, to clinch the program's first Final Four appearance. Despite leading #5 seed San Diego State basically wire-to-wire in the second half, FAU lost on a buzzer beater to the Aztecs, coming up one point short of an appearance in the national championship game and ending their miracle season. 

The Owls finished the season 35-4, smashing all previous benchmarks for the best season in program history. They finished an astonishing 17th in KenPom, 22nd on offense and 34th on defense. They remained a strong shooting team from the prior year, but for the first time in the May era, they cleaned up the turnover problem. FAU's turnover rate was finally top 100, perhaps something you could chalk up to all that minutes continuity and familiarity among the roster. Their defensive assist rate was also 2nd nationally, the logical endpoint of a stat that May's teams had always been strong at. They rebounded well, they defended 2s well, and forced opponents into tough shots despite the team being very short, all the way down to 328th in average height. Their optimal lineup had just one player over 6-4 on the floor, but it was a combination that worked for them and it powered FAU to an exceptional Cinderella season for the ages. 

 

[Getty Images]

The hype coming into 2023-24 was probably unrealistic, because while FAU was a good team in 2022-23, they still outperformed their baseline in the tournament. Of course, they had immense continuity again, 1st in that metric nationally(!) as essentially the entire team rolled over, but some things were changing. The team was moving up from C-USA to the American Athletic Conference, giving them harder competition, and they scheduled a much tougher non-conference, with national contenders like Illinois, Texas A&M, and Arizona on the schedule. There were going to be new challenges for Dusty May's squad and they did indeed rock the boat. 

The team lost early to Bryant and lost late in calendar 2023 to Florida Gulf Coast. A loss to Charlotte a week later helped mar a picture of optimism, one that saw them beat the Aggies and 'Zona. There were good wins on the resume, but also some frustrating losses. They dropped four games in conference, a four point road loss at USF costing them the AAC regular season title, and then were felled in the semifinals of the conference tournament by Temple. The team fell short of expectations in getting only an 8 seed, drawing Northwestern in a game that the Owls should have won, fumbling it late in regulation and then unraveling in OT to end the season. 

The 2023-24 team remained very strong on offense, 22nd in efficiency, but its defense slipped to 96th. Their 3PT clip dipped by a decent amount and they didn't take nearly as many threes as they had previously. Their rebounding sagged some as well, even as Johnell Davis and Alijah Martin had excellent seasons, with Goldin taking another step forward offensively. They were a very similar team to the year before, still playing four guards a lot and still one of the shortest teams in CBB, but the results for whatever reason, just weren't quite there. Still, their finish of 47th in KenPom was an example of how far May had taken the program, as a top 50 KenPom finish and a loss in the first round of the NCAAs was widely considered a disappointment. Just six years earlier, that would've been by far the greatest season in program history. 

 

[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

What can we learn? 

A few things stand out from scrolling through the years of May's time in Boca Raton. The first and most notable to me was the minutes continuity and how directly that was tied to his best teams. After his first team started from scratch, he spent three years with teams that had minutes continuity in the 100s, before cobbling together two teams that were among the most experienced and intact in college basketball. It is perhaps not unsurprising, then, that those were the two best teams that he had, the ones that saw the offense leap up as they cut down on turnovers. When Dusty had the opportunity to work with his players year-over-year, growing their game and teaching them basketball as a unit, the team's on-court results improved significantly. He didn't do it by hunting the portal for plug-and-play one-and-dones, he grew a team carefully and reaped the rewards of that maturation. 

The fact that he was able to keep the roster together in Boca Raton says a lot as well. He lost a few pieces early in his tenure, Jaylin Ingram, Kenan Blackshear, and Richardson Maitre being the biggest, but that's still relatively little attrition for a program like FAU. And that he didn't lose any of his key players after going to the Final Four speaks volumes about May. The players seemingly buy-in to the coach and believe in what he is building. You need to recruit the right kind of players to have a culture that can be top of the country in minutes continuity back to back years, but you also need to be the right kind of coach. May seems to be that guy. 

Secondly, his willingness to go many different routes to acquire players stands out. He said as much in his introductory press conference: 

Our goal has always been to find the best players we can find and help them be the best they can be. So I don’t have an answer. We’re going to find the best players for Michigan, whether it’s international, whether it’s high school, from school, junior college, or portal, we’ll be on the hunt for the best players that fit us and want to be a part of this storied program.

That quote is absolutely backed up by the evidence. May recruited quite a bit, with arguably his two best players in Davis and Martin being HS recruits, but he also used the transfer route for both players who had played some at bigger programs (like Gaffney) and transfers who had not played much at all at bigger programs (Greenlee and Goldin). May also used the portal to import JUCO players, something that will probably not be as accessible at Michigan, but goes to show you how many different routes May is comfortable going and how many different vats of players he's evaluating from. Most of the American players he recruited were in his backyard, Florida specifically but also the South (he recruited quite a bit from Mississippi), though Johnell Davis came from his home state of Indiana. May didn't do much recruiting in the west, which may be notable. 

 

[Campredon]

The international character of his teams also stand out. Many of these players he recruited from either American high schools or American universities (like Goldin), but he did recruit Bogdan Zimonjic directly out of Belgrade, Serbia. Over his time at FAU, Dusty coached players from Bulgaria, Serbia, Kosovo, Senegal, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Canada, Puerto Rico, Russia, and Latvia. It does not matter where you are currently playing or what nationality you are, if Dusty May thinks you can help his basketball team, he will find and recruit you. As much as many of us are thinking that May will be trying to import key players from FAU (which he very well might), this exercise goes to show that there are no stones May will leave unturned to find players and we shouldn't be surprised no matter which avenue he goes.  

Third, I found it interesting that his teams got shorter over the years. His tallest team by average height was his first team and as he had more control to prefer different players over others, the teams got shorter and the roster piled up with more guards, up to his four guard lineups on the most recent teams. Though the lack of height is likely, to some degree, a factor of him coaching at a mid-major program that greatly limited the talent available to him, there was clearly some degree of selection going on here in the kind of teams May wanted to build. What the team sacrificed in size the last two years it gained in having four different players on the floor who could pass, dribble, or shoot and that seems by design. Whether that translates to Michigan and he continues to prefer shorter teams with guard heavy lineups will be something worth following. My hunch is he will roll with three guard lineups in Ann Arbor, while preferring more of a stretch four option who can help his teams continue to shoot threes. 

Speaking of which, from a coaching philosophy standpoint, the linear progression of his teams' offensive improvement stand out. They always took a lot of threes and usually offensively rebounded well, but eventually he got the right players to hit those threes, and enough continuity and coaching was built up to cut down on turnovers in order to produce a top 25 offense two years in a row. By the time they were going to the Final Four in the spring of 2023, opposing coaches were giving quotes to The Athletic gushing about how well put together the offense of May's team was ($): "They’re the most connected team in college basketball. They make the extra pass better than anybody we played all year". His teams push play in transition and they have constant movement, passing, and cutting on offense. At its best, it is indeed, as May said in his introductory press conference, fun to watch: 

Likewise, on defense, his teams' penchant for forcing opponents into isolation shots was there from the beginning. They've been top 80 in defensive assist rate each of the past five seasons and were still above average even in his first season when he was cobbling together a roster. That metric on defense, combined with the high volume of threes on offense, are the clearest indicators of May's coaching style instilling a philosophy. Still, he remains pretty flexible over letting his teams play different ways, which he also acknowledged in the press conference. He won't round peg in square hole this, and you can see this through how his teams evolved from having a center who shot the three some (Silins was not a high volume three point shooter, but he did attempt some) to a true back-to-the-basket center with no three point game in Goldin/Rosario the last two seasons. 

All of this is to say that we should generally be ready for anything in following May's critical first offseason in Ann Arbor. There are some things I expect, like May importing familiar players from FAU (if possible) and I expect he will hire at least one assistant from FAU with the Owls hiring outside the program to replace May (FAU tabbed Baylor assistant John Jakus). Kyle Church was with Dusty from the beginning and Todd Abernethy was there for the past five years, so I'd watch those. I'd also expect May to target good three point shooters and will look to build up guard depth, particularly athletic, switchable guards with a perimeter game. But beyond that, we should be prepared for May to be flexible in his coaching style and go in different directions to acquire players, not just from the FAU well.