Mike Boynton reveals how he learned of May exit
· Yahoo Sports
On the morning of June 21, just about everyone in Ann Arbor thought that Dusty May would continue on as the Michigan basketball coach, with business going on as usual. After all, there was no reason to believe otherwise. And while then-Wolverines assistant Mike Boynton Jr. (now the head coach of the program) had a little more insight and foreknowledge, he was caught about as off-guard as anyone when it came to May leaving for the Dallas Mavericks.
Boynton appeared in an exclusive interview with The Field of 68 this week, and he shared that while May did prepare him for some sort of contingency, he learned about May's departure just like everyone else -- from Shams Charania.
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"The challenge we had was, Dusty's name came up for pretty much every job, all spring, at every level, right?" Boynton said. "North Carolina, and jobs that he didn't ultimately even come open, but some of those jobs were in the NBA -- Chicago, Orlando, and subsequently, Dallas. And so it really wasn't until it started to get a little louder over the weekend that Dusty and I had a conversation Sunday, I think, after he returned from visiting with him, that he was really contemplating whether he would take it or not. And part of the conversation was, what would that mean for me, and whether I wanted to try to take this thing over and continue it, or maybe even perhaps join him in Dallas? And so it was a conversation that was brief. But because of the briefness of the conversation, I didn't have a whole lot of time to process if it happened, what would be next.
"And so Monday morning, when we wake up, and we're here, and he's hosting camp, and my son's in camp, and I'm helping run camp. And then literally, as I'm walking out of opening camp, I get a notification from Shams that Dusty's taking the Mavs job. And Dusty had asked if I would go to Warde's office and meet with him to figure out, at least for that day, what it needed to look like. Because all of our players were here already. And so we needed to at least coalesce those guys around a message about staying together and continuing this. And from there on, man, it's been like drinking out of a fire hydrant."
Such was the same for the players on the team, as May got scooped by the media.
Even so, Boynton didn't necessarily know that he would end up next in line as the interim, and then bona fide, head coach of the maize and blue. And in the moment, he didn't really care much about titles. His major focus was on keeping the band together. After all, the team had just reported, and Boynton knew he had to work to keep them together.
And so he did -- though he credits guards Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney, who did the legwork. Boynton managed to lose only one player who was already on the roster, a signee, or a transfer -- backup point guard LJ Cason. Other than that, he managed to keep everyone in Ann Arbor.
"I mean, I wasn't told a whole lot in that moment other than, 'Hey, we think you can be somebody that can help this team right now.' And that's where my focus was, to be perfectly honest," Boynton said. "And let's be honest. Like this is Michigan. This is Michigan coming off of a 37-3 national championship run, one of the most dominant basketball seasons that we may ever see. I mean, I've been going back and watching some of the stuff, just trying to get our new guys to understand how we play and the implementation of it all. (. . .)
"And so, I wasn't really worried about the things I couldn't control. I was worried about making sure that Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney and Moustapha Thiam and JP Estrella, and all the way down to a guy like Marcus Moller, who hasn't even arrived on campus yet. (. . .) But literally, all those guys knew that there was a plan for them. And the message that I wanted to have them kind of rally around was, when they went to bed on Sunday night, June 21st, they thought at that moment, they were a part of a really damn good team. They thought that they were part of a team that they decided to be a part of. They knew who their teammates were going to be. They had a very good idea of who their coaches were and what the style of play they committed to. And that, for the most part, that still existed, right? Even on Monday night, when they went to bed. And it felt like there was a lot of instability. And so that was my focus, was trying to get them to focus on that. And obviously, it took several weeks for them to all kind of come together. And Trey and Elliot, I think, led that charge. It's good when you got what's probably going to be your starting backcourt off a national championship that decide that they still want to do it together. And I think it gave good vibes throughout the program."
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Mike Boynton reveals how he learned of May exit