When you’ve lived as long as I have and worked in the business for more than three decades, it’s getting harder to be shocked by anything.
Dusty to the Mavs, though? I was genuinely shocked.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. Certainly I can understand why the Mavs would want to hire May. He’s 49 years old — not young but not quite old —and has a sterling pedigree. Raised in the Hoosier Heartland. Cut his teeth as Bob Knight’s student manager at Indiana. He’s been a head coach at two places over six years, and he took both schools to the Final Four. And of course, he just won a national championship at Michigan.
May isn’t just smart, driven and successful. He’s humble, likeable and ethical, which is not an easy combination to find in any profession, much less coaching. He has great confidence and zero pretension. He is a voracious reader with an insatiable appetite for learning. Classic growth mindset.
It’s also no mystery why May would find the Mavericks’ job so alluring. The team has a generational talent in Cooper Flagg and a promising roster. Though May was generously compensated at Michigan ($5.1 million annually, per his latest revision), high-end NBA coaches make north of $15 million per year. If the Mavs didn’t put Dusty above that number, I’m sure they came awfully close.
Still, the move is shocking because of the timing, plus the fact that May just won a title and had another Final Four caliber team returning next season. (The Wolverines are No. 3 in my latest Never-Too-Early Top 25.) He had Michigan set up for long-term success. May is a midwestern guy rooted whose personality fits coaching at an elite academic institution. He just seems like a college coach. It’s like the old saw goes: Don’t mess with happy.
Sure, college sports has changed, but May has not been a head coach long enough to get stuck in the “way things used to be.” Whatever challenges that are posed by the transfer portal, pay-for-play era, he was obviously meeting them. May is also wise enough to know that coaching in the NBA comes with its own set of headaches. He understands better than most that the grass is greener where you water it.
May also understands that there a lot of great coaches in the NBA, and the vast majority get fired. Whether or not you’re a good coach doesn’t matter as much in the NBA because the coach is just one cog in a much bigger wheel. Above you, you’ve got team ownership and the front office, who call most of the shots regarding personnel. The players make way more money, which gives them a lot of leverage. It’s not uncommon for guys to go from being the Coach of the Year and competing for titles to getting fired, and back again. For a prime example, look no further than Mike Brown. The man has been fired four times in the NBA (twice by Cleveland), but he also took the Cavs to the NBA Finals in 2007 and just won a title with the Knicks. The entire time, he has been basically the same head coach. It’s his circumstances that changed.
That’s the world May is now entering. He’s a great coach, but in the NBA, that is often nowhere near enough.
Moreover, the track record of college coaches moving on to the NBA does not inspire much hope. The list of guys who succeeded is very small: Larry Brown, Billy Donovan, Brad Stevens. (Brown started his career as a pro coach, so even that’s an imperfect example.) The list of guys who didn’t survive long-term is much more numerous: Fred Hoiberg, P.J. Carlesimo, Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Mike Montgomery, Lon Kruger, Tim Floyd, Leonard Hamilton, Reggie Theus, Jerry Tarkanian. All of them were proven to be excellent coaches at one point. Three are in the Hall of Fame. But none stuck in the NBA.
Ironically, the last coach to make the college-to-NBA leap also came from Michigan. John Beilein bolted Ann Arbor to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2017, and he lasted just 54 games until he decided to call it quits. Beilein had the acumen to be a good NBA coach, but he did not have the personality. At 67, he was much older than May is, and having come from a family with strong military ties (his mother’s cousins were the real-life inspiration for the movie Saving Private Ryan), Beilein was far too regimented to connect with today’s NBA players. Beilein’s approach to the job was, “My way has proven to be successful, so we’re gonna do it my way.” May’s will be: “I need to learn what you guys need for us to win. Let’s figure this thing out together.”
The news is a tough blow for Michigan on many levels. First and foremost, this is a really tough time to hire a new coach. Unless athletic director Warde Manuel can convince someone who is both worthy and doesn’t currently have a job to climb aboard (Billy Donovan, anyone?), he’ll be in the market for the “next Dusty May,” which means capable candidates like Josh Schertz of Saint Louis or Iowa’s Ben McCollum. Yes, those guys just signed contract extensions, but that is not something that would stand in the way of either one coming to Michigan.
Barring that, it’s likely that May’s top assistant, Mike Boynton, who is going to serve as interim head coach, will pilot the Wolverines next season. Boynton did the best he could under tough circumstances at Oklahoma State, but he was let go after seven years. Boynton doesn’t have the type of resume one would expect from the next head coach of one of the top jobs in the country, but it’s likely he will have every opportunity to compete for it this winter.
Hiring Boyton on an interim basis will buy Manuel time to make a proper approach to Donovan. Many people have said in recent years that Donovan does not want to coach in college because of all the chaos, but my understanding from my own reporting is that Donovan is very much open to the possibility of coming back to college. The reason he didn’t consider it before is that the NBA season always ended too late. The latest instance was this past March, when North Carolina wanted to talk to Donovan about its opening. Donovan was coaching a Bulls team that was not going to make the playoffs and he knew he probably wasn’t coming back, yet he didn’t feel right about bailing on his players, even though no one would have begrudged him if he did. Donovan doesn’t have that conundrum now, and he won’t face it next March.
Besides losing one of the truly elite coaches, May’s departure is a double whammy for Michigan because under NCAA rules, the players now have a 15-day window to enter the transfer portal and consider other options. It’s fair to say many will have their share of suitors. How many of them will leave for bigger paychecks? We’re about to find out, but I would bet that the number is greater than zero. And that would make it even more difficult for whoever is the next coach to maintain the standard that May set in his two short years there.
When you just won a national championship, you have nowhere to go but down, both as a coach and a program. May knows that, but I don’t think that’s what drove him to this decision. Ditto for the transfer portal chaos. May is a basketball junkie – a basketball nerd, really — and like many people who enter the coaching profession, he has a real dash of wanderlust coursing through his veins. The Mavericks will be his eighth stop in the last 21 years, and if history is any indication, it will not be his last.
May is messing with happy, but however things end up in Dallas, he’ll be on to the next play. So yes, the news was shocking when it landed, but the story is as old as time. May has a new team to coach, and Michigan needs someone new to coach its team. You never know which way that ball is going to bounce, but it sure is fun following it during the doldrums of summer.
DUSTY MAY TO THE NBA
Dusty May, NCAA Championship Coach at Michigan, to Coach NBA’s Dallas Mavericks
May, 49, is finalizing a contract to become the Mavericks’ head coach, where he will lead a team headlined by Rookie of the Year Cooper Flagg
Dusty May, the Latter-Day Coach K
From their Bob Knight roots to modern day recruiting, May and Mike Krzyzewski have much in common
Dusty May Unpacks Michigan’s Dominant Season and Picks His All-Time Wolverines Starting Five
Following a huge win over Michigan State on Saturday, May joined Seth Davis and Andy Katz on The Hoops HQ Show
Meet your guide
