Why UC San Diego was already on Michigan coach Dusty May's list of teams to study this offseason
A student of the game, Michigan Wolverines basketball head coach Dusty May has a list of college teams to study this coming offseason. On it is the UC San Diego Tritons, coached by Eric Olen.
No. 5 seed Michigan will take on No. 12 seed UCSD in the first round of the NCAA Tournament Thursday in Denver, so May has gotten a head start on that deep dive.
UCSD won the Big West Tournament title, earning an automatic NCAA Tournament bid in its first season being eligible for the Big Dance after transitioning from Division-II in 2020.
The Tritons are 30-4 and on the nation’s longest active winning streak (15). They play a unique brand of basketball, featuring a switch-heavy, no-middle defense when they’re not playing a matchup zone. They play small, with no rotational players taller than 6-foot-8, shoot a lot of threes and rank second nationally in defensive turnover rate (23.3 percent).
May explained on the ‘Inside Michigan Basketball’ radio show why UCSB is a team that enamored him enough to want to study them.
“To do what they’ve done just doesn’t happen in the first year of being eligible,” May said. “And obviously Coach Olen has been there for a long time, and he’s built the program, so they’re on a very sound foundation.
“But they’re one of the best teams in the country at turning you over. They never turn it over. They have a bunch of proficient D-II transfers, mostly from the West Coast and New Zealand. I think the New Zealander might be 25 years old. And so these guys play basketball at a high level, they’re very unorthodox, they keep you off balance.”
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Michigan wanted to be different than the rest of the Big Ten heading into its first season under May.
“In a way, that’s how we wanted to build our team and program, where we wanted to switch and we wanted to go with the two bigs,” May continued. “We want to be different than most of the other teams, and that’s what they’ve done to an extreme.”
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Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones — a New Zealand native and former rugby player — is averaging 19.5 points per game as a downhill driver. He poses problems, as does the UCSB defense.
“Their best player is a wing that’s gotten to the free throw line 100 more times than [Michigan graduate center] Vlad[islav] Goldin, who at times has lived at the free throw line. They’re scrappy. They’re handsy.
“And obviously, when your biggest concern every night is your inability to take care of the ball on certain nights and then you’re playing a team that’s as good as any team in America at turning people over, that usually calls for a lot of the upset picks.”
National pundits and Michigan fans were surprised to learn that the Wolverines were only a No. 5 seed, but Michigan may use the selection as fuel heading into the tournament.
“For whatever reason, we’re a fifth seed with 12 Quad 1 wins … and we get dropped to a five,” May noted. “But I think they’re underseeded, so it’s one of those things where both happened.
“But we can’t control it, so we’re excited to go play a really good basketball team and go in with an edge, since I think we’ll go in as an underdog as the Big Ten Tournament champion, second-place team, going against the Big West champion.”
