INDIANAPOLIS — Dusty May built Michigan’s second national championship team by doing something many programs avoid: assembling a starting five largely from the transfer portal and then trusting them to become more than the sum of their parts.
The climactic example was Yaxel Lendeborg, a 6-foot-9 forward who arrived at Michigan after junior college and two seasons at UAB. Facing a choice between testing the NBA draft and returning to school, Lendeborg chose Michigan after staff promised to refine his pro prospects and backed that work with a seven-figure NIL package. The result: Lendeborg became an All-American, Big Ten Player of the Year and a national champion in one season.
“He had to get good at some of these other things, and we were going to help him learn it,” assistant coach Mike Boynton Jr. said of recruiting Lendeborg. “And when you do it well, we're going to be damn unstoppable.”
They were. Michigan closed a dominant 37-3 season by beating UConn 69-63 in the title game — the Big Ten’s first men’s basketball championship since 2000. Lendeborg, playing through a knee issue that limited him in the Final Four, scored 13 points in the title game despite an early dry spell a
