Michigan hits 'ultimate target,' wins NCAA title

INDIANAPOLIS — Before Michigan took the floor to face Gonzaga in the title game of the Players Era Championship back in November, Wolverines guard Elliot Cadeau made a comment to his teammates.

“We’re the best team ever assembled,” Cadeau said at the time.

Michigan proceeded to go out and beat Gonzaga by 40 points.

From that point on, the Wolverines were the most dominant team in the country, and they ended Monday the same way they looked all the way back on Thanksgiving Eve: as the best team in college basketball.

Michigan put an exclamation point on a historic season in Monday’s national championship game, defeating UConn 69-63. Cadeau was named Most Outstanding Player after finishing with 19 points.

The Wolverines won the program’s first national championship since 1989 — and became the first team to beat UConn in the Sweet 16 or later since Michigan State beat the Huskies in the 2009 Final Four.

“When you bring a group this talented together and they decide from the beginning that they’re going to do it this way and they never waver and they never change, that’s probably the most uncommon thing in athletics now,” coach Dusty May said. “For these guys to cut down the nets after all they’ve sacrificed is pretty special.”

Michigan wasn’t as dominant as it had been in the first five games of the NCAA tournament, when it became the first team in history to score 90 or more points in five straight games in a single tournament. But the Wolverines’ strengths all season — size, length and more size — were the difference-makers again on Monday night.

“They’re legit,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “They definitely deserved to win the National Championship. They’re clearly the best team in the country this year. They’re just so hard to score against at the rim. I could talk about the threes that we missed, and I thought we had a lot of good threes that we missed. But they just made it so tough on us around the rim.

“That was probably what even got us more than the missed threes was some of those rim shots, all those transition baskets. I think they cut it to four. Could have put some serious game pressure on them. They changed so many shots around the rim. They’re just so tall.”

UConn’s plan from the outset wasn’t much different from the first few rounds of the NCAA tournament: Get the ball to Tarris Reed Jr. He attempted three of the Huskies’ first four shots but struggled to finish against the length and size of Michigan’s Aday Mara. The Wolverines’ edge in that area was a factor at the other end, too, with three offensive rebounds and six points in the paint before the first media timeout.

The first 15 minutes of the game, however, mostly trended in UConn’s direction. The Huskies kept Michigan out of transition, with the Wolverines having zero fast-break points in the first half and only one real opportunity to get out and run. UConn was controlling the tempo, holding its own on the backboards and getting a boost from Michigan’s shooting struggles; the Wolverines missed their first 10 3-pointers.

Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg looked a shell of the player who earned All-American and Big Ten Player of the Year honors. He played all 20 first-half minutes but went 1-for-5 from the field and was ineffective at both ends of the floor.

“I feel awful, I feel super weak right now,” Lendeborg said on the broadcast at halftime. “I can’t make anything … I played really soft in that first half.”

But the second half belonged to Michigan — with the Wolverines wearing down UConn with their size and ability to withstanding the Huskies’ physicality. UConn’s season-long issues with foul trouble caused problems, as Solo Ball had four fouls early in the second half, while Silas Demary Jr. fouled out.

The Wolverines overcame their shooting issues by dominating two areas that are familiar to them: the paint and the free throw line. They had a combined 61 points in those areas, compared with UConn’s 34.

UConn ran out of answers midway through the second half. The Huskies missed 13 consecutive 3-pointers at one point in the game. Entering the final four minutes of the game, UConn was 5-for-21 on its first-shot offense in the second half, per ESPN Research, and the Huskies were 1-for-9 on shots contested by Mara. Michigan’s size and length around the rim — four blocks after halftime — were a major deterrent.

Lendeborg had nine points and three rebounds in the second half, looking much more like the two-way battering ram that overpowered opponents all season. Mara’s counting stats weren’t as impressive as they were in his 26-point semifinal performance, but he held Tarris Reed to his worst game of the postseason. Morez Johnson had a 12-point, 10-rebound double-double.

“If you’d told me we would shoot it this poorly and [be] dominated on the glass and still find a way to win, I don’t know if I would have believed you,” May said. “This team just found a way all season.”

Cadeau, after a maligned two seasons at North Carolina, changed the game in the second half. He constantly played in attack mode, probing around the UConn defense to find openings. He had a critical three-point play in the second half to give Michigan breathing room and buried a 3 to put the Wolverines up 11.

“I’m just so proud of myself, where I came from,” Cadeau said. “Last year I was really down on myself, a lot of people doubted me, and I’m just so proud of myself for me to be able to say I was the most outstanding player and win a National Championship at the same time.”

It’s fitting that the Wolverines were forced to trust their identity in the national championship game. At no point in the season did Michigan’s confidence in its ceiling waver. It came close — once. Just a few days before Michigan put the nation on notice with its performance in Vegas, a few days before the “best team ever assembled” remark went public, May and his staff thought about going back to the drawing board.

Something wasn’t working. An overtime win over Wake Forest, a close win at TCU. They weren’t looking like a Final Four team.

May and his assistant coaches spent time trying to figure out whether they should change their lineup, whether the jumbo frontcourt wasn’t going to work.

“I remember the day like it was yesterday, we were in the conference room and we did a deep dive in everything that you could come up with to try to predict whether we thought it would work,” May said after Monday’s win. “Once we left that meeting, we were more committed than ever that this is going to work.”

Staying the course has been a theme for Michigan all season.

The Wolverines’ loss to Purdue in the Big Ten championship game was the most vulnerable the Wolverines looked all season. The eight-point loss was the largest margin of their three defeats and the game was out of reach for most of the second half. It wasn’t an ideal way for what had been the nation’s most dominant team since November to enter the NCAA tournament.

In Dusty May’s eyes, however, it was just a wakeup call — nothing more, nothing less. It was not a reason to forget the first four months of the season and try something completely new.

“There weren’t any wholesale changes,” the Michigan coach said over the weekend. “There wasn’t any faith, family, and the Michigan Wolverines speech. It was just, let’s get back to doing what we know are the right things.”

Fast forward to Monday’s halftime buzzer, and Will Tschetter gathered his teammates around him in a huddle. It wasn’t a unique thing; May’s teams have done it since he was at Florida Atlantic. But this one had a little bit of an edge to it. Tschetter got into his teammates, reminding them what was at stake.

“I was just telling them what everyone needed to hear,” Tschetter told ESPN. “Everyone was thinking it. We needed to stick together, play our brand of basketball.”

“We didn’t play our best basketball and our best basketball was ahead of us,” Burnett recalled Tschetter saying. “And we’re up four for a national championship. So lay it all out there on the line and leave no regrets.”

That Thanksgiving Eve win over Gonzaga — and the subsequent proclamations of greatness from Lendeborg — put a target on Michigan’s back all season. But on Monday night, the Wolverines proved they were right.

“This,” Burnett told ESPN, “is the ultimate target.”