INDIANAPOLIS— When L.J. Cason tore the ACL in his right knee in late February, Michigan didn’t have a Plan B. Cason was Elliot Cadeau’s sole backup at point guard, playing more than 18 minutes a game, a reliable sophomore and change of pace. He was done for the year.
It was the kind of thing that can derail a team even as powerful as the Wolverines, disrupting a finely crafted rotation honed over the course of a successful season, throwing off defensive schemes and offensive rhythms. Dusty May and his staff had to get creative. They took freshman guard Trey McKenney and, in May’s words, “threw him into the fire.”
McKenney’s quick adaptation to the position has smoothed over the rough edges left by Cason’s absence, becoming the primary ball-handling alternative on a team full of bigs and wings. It’s not the biggest reason why the Wolverines have stormed through the NCAA Tournament, easily dispatching Arizona on Saturday night to earn a meeting with former Michigan center Tarris Reed and UConn, looking to win Michigan’s first title since 1989, the Big Ten’s first since 2000 and deny the Huskies a third title in four years. But the Wolverines also probably wouldn’t be here if McKenney — averaging 9.9 points and 0.9 assists in 21.9 minutes per game — hadn’t figured out his new role so quickly.
“This hasn’t been gradual,” May said Sunday. “It began the day L.J. went out. We handed him the ball in practice and instantly started challenging him with the terminology, with the game management, with the actions that we could help him with, with the pressure releases when he did feel some heat from smaller guards and what to call when Aday (Mara) had it going or when we needed to manage the clock. And so it became a crash course, and he made several mistakes, and then the next day he didn’t make very many mistakes and then fewer and fewer and fewer.”
In the postseason, that has taken different forms, with different demands. When the Wolverines, facing an understandable motivational deficit, struggled to find their flow during the Big Ten Tournament, May turned to McKenney as an on-the-ball defender to slow down guards like Bruce Thornton and Nick Boyd.
When Cadeau was in foul trouble Saturday against Arizona and Yaxel Lendeborg was nursing an injured left leg, McKenney was given full command of the offense — although Lendeborg said he chose to re-enter the game after Cadeau picked up his fourth, despite his lack of mobility, just to offer a second option against Arizona’s pressure.
“It’s totally different,” McKenney said. “I’ve been playing a lot of point guard ever since L.J. got hurt and he went down, but I think it’s really good to show a different aspect of my game and be able to get some more opportunities offensively and show what I can do besides being an off-ball creator for myself. I think I’ve gotten better offensively and reading the game and getting people in the right spots.”
The star power on Michigan’s roster starts with Lendeborg and doesn’t stop there. Mara was a dominant force against the Wildcats. Cadeau has taken his game to a level he didn’t have his first two years at North Carolina, although UConn will probably let him shoot from distance, as most teams still do. (He’s 11 of 27 in the NCAA Tournament, one of many reasons the Wolverines have scored at least 90 points in every game.) Morez Johnson Jr., Roddy Gayle Jr., Will Tschetter and Nimari Burnett are all veterans who have contributed in different ways; Tschetter and Burnett stuck around from the end of Juwan Howard’s tenure to savor these moments now under May.
Amid all that, McKenney can get lost at times, even as a homegrown freshman who grew up a Michigan fan, the centerpiece of May’s first real recruiting class and the first big-time recruit from Flint to choose the Wolverines over Michigan State since Glen Rice. Yet against UConn on Monday, against the ball pressure Silas Demary Jr. and Malachi Smith can generate, his ability to relieve Cadeau and offer an additional offensive threat is the kind of thing that can make the difference against a battle-hardened team like the Huskies.
That’s something his teammates can now trust him to do, and they know better than anyone exactly how difficult his last-minute “crash course” was.
“It’s definitely tough. I feel like he accepted that,” Tschetter said. “There was definitely a little bit of a learning curve the first few games but he came out on top and I feel like he’s playing some of his best basketball of the season right now.”
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