The Blueprint: How Elliot Cadeau Became The Centerpiece Of Michigan’s Offseason

For Michigan head coach Dusty May and his coaching staff — which had already lost one key figure during the early stages of this year’s carousel — the irony of presiding over the finest campaign in school history was preparing for an offseason that might be among the program’s worst. Figuratively speaking, of course. There’s nothing desultory about the afterglow of winning a national championship. May knew he was losing assistant Justin Joyner to the head-coaching job at Oregon State, a move that was finalized nearly a month before Michigan cut down the nets in Indianapolis. He knew it was becoming increasingly likely that Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr. and Aday Mara would all turn pro following revelatory seasons out of the transfer portal. It’s now widely expected that the Wolverines will produce three first-round picks in a single year for just the second time in school history. “We tried to anticipate the worst-case scenario,” Michigan assistant coach Drew Williamson told me earlier this month, “which would be all those guys leaving. And so we kind of put a game plan together for trying to find the best fits that were similar to how we wanted to play. And the guys that we knew were returning, using their strengths to put guys around them [from the portal].” That approach quickly rendered point guard Elliot Cadeau the central figure to Michigan’s rebuilding efforts — even as Cadeau joined some of his teammates in declaring for the NBA Draft, launching into the pre-draft process while maintaining his collegiate eligibility. The understanding among the Wolverines’ coaches was that Cadeau, who had just completed his junior season, was more interested in gathering feedback from scouts and executives than actually turning pro. Sure enough, Cadeau withdrew his name from the draft’s list of early entrants over the weekend, reaffirming his commitment to Michigan. That was precisely the outcome May and his staff envisioned when they observed just how integral Cadeau was to landing the program’s latest batch of frontcourt reinforcements: former Cincinnati center Moustapha Thiam, former Tennessee forward J.P. Estrella and former LSU forward Jalen Reed. As eager as Cadeau was to work with Michigan’s coaches in identifying portal targets — constantly peppering them with names he’d seen and heard — the Wolverines soon discovered that just as many high-level transfers were eager to be his teammate. “A pass-first point guard,” May told me earlier this month, “that’s the biggest sell in today’s climate. To not have a high-volume scoring point guard helps the chemistry. When we took this job, we said, ‘We’re gonna get a good big [man] and a pass-first point guard.’ And we were going to try to make sure we have that every year. Everything else, in between, we felt like we could figure out a way to be successful.” That Michigan’s coaching staff coaxed such refinement from Cadeau emphatically squashed any external concerns surrounding both his ceiling as an elite guard and his long-range consistency following two uneven seasons at North Carolina. He completed his first season with the Wolverines averaging a career-high 10.5 points per game while also ranking 11th nationally in assists (5.9 per game) among players from the power conferences. When the stakes were highest — as the Wolverines steamrolled one opponent after another during the NCAA Tournament — Cadeau’s assist rate of 35.3% ranked fourth among guards who reached the second weekend or beyond, culminating in his selection as the Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four. Isolating and extracting the things Cadeau and his NBA-bound teammates had excelled at soon became the coaching staff’s primary goal once the transfer portal officially opened in early April. May understood that the chances of signing three more future first-round picks were exceedingly slim, especially once the prices for post players began to soar on the open market, but the Wolverines had two seasons’ worth of data that emphasized the benefits of high-level, fear-inducing positional size. Replicating that formula seemed like an obvious choice, with Cadeau and fellow returning guard Trey McKenney offering plenty of backcourt continuity from the title-winning group. [THE BLUEPRINT: Michigan Built A Formula Teams Are Racing To Copy] “Our phones are ringing more than they were before,” assistant coach Mike Boynton told me earlier this month, “with guys reaching out saying, ‘Hey, we’re watching what you guys have been able to do with this particular type of player and we have a guy who we think has a similar game, similar skill set, and we’d like to talk to see if there’s mutual interest.’” So which of those skills did the coaches believe would mesh most seamlessly with Cadeau moving forward? May told me his early studies of the Big Ten underscored the importance of having quality screeners, a category into which he grouped ex-Wolverine center Tarris Reed Jr. and Purdue standout Trey Kaufman-Renn. That realization led Michigan toward Estrella, who averaged 10 points and 5.4 rebounds per game at Tennessee, another program known for its physicality and toughness under head coach Rick Barnes. When the Wolverines studied Estrella’s high school tape, they saw shooting mechanics solid enough to believe he could eventually expand his repertoire to include pick-and-pop opportunities with Cadeau next season. Then there were the alley-oops, a trademark of Michigan’s offense whenever Mara was on the floor. Williamson told me the staff identified a handful of transfer centers with the requisite size and mobility to “fit that mold a little bit,” even if nobody could quite match Mara’s monstrous 7-foot-3, 255-pound frame — though the Wolverines certainly came close to finding a plug-and-play replacement in Thiam. A former top-60 recruit in the 2024 cycle, Thiam now stands 7-foot-2 and weighs 255 pounds after adding a considerable amount of muscle during stints at UCF and Cincinnati. He averaged 12.8 points, 7.1 rebounds and 1.6 blocks per game for the Bearcats last season before head coach Wes Miller got fired. He preempted those numbers with an eye-catching 15-point effort against Michigan in an exhibition game at Crisler Center on Oct. 17. The chance for Thiam to be on the receiving end of passes from Cadeau was exactly what he’d hoped to find after back-to-back seasons in which his team’s point guards averaged 4.3 assists or fewer per game. “He saw enough, and I think we were able to give him enough evidence that Elliot could be maybe the best facilitator in the country,” Boynton told me. “And we [explained to him how] that will make the game easier on you. You will have more baskets where you literally just have to catch it close enough to the basket to lay it in, instead of having to fight against a post defender, making a move and trying to create things yourself through double teams. You’re going to get, probably, two to three lobs per game. You’re going to be able to play in space a little bit more. You’re going to be able to get some throw-aheads because that’s the way that Elliot sees the game. “I think that was probably the thing that put us over the top versus some of the other schools that he was considering, is that he watched how we all believe Elliot helped Morez [Johnson] and Aday [Mara] make the game easier and put themselves in the position that they’re in now.” For all of those portal additions to unfold while Cadeau was still technically entered in the NBA Draft speaks to the trust that runs from May to his point guard and back again, an understanding that neither side would burn the other. Michigan’s coaches even went as far as consulting with Cadeau on potential targets, drawing on film the guard himself had studied or opponents he had faced earlier in his career. Eventually, Cadeau began sending names directly to assistant coach Akeem Miskdeen, according to Williamson, because he “wanted to have a little skin in the game.” That dynamic made Cadeau the most important figure in Michigan’s offseason and its bid for a second consecutive national championship. Some of his teammates might be departing, but Cadeau was always intent on running it back. “His clips and his highlights were involved in a lot of our recruiting pitches this offseason,” Williamson told me. “I think that was an easy sell.”