Dusty May going from Michigan to the Dallas Mavericks at this point in time makes sense for both parties, ESPN’s Mike Wilbon says. While debating TV partner Tony Kornheiser on Pardon The Interruption, the two tried to figure out why a national championship coach would jump from the college to the pros after just two years in Ann Arbor.
The biggest attraction is soon-to-be second year player Cooper Flagg, last year’s No. 1 overall pick out of Duke. But the Mavericks are in a rebuild since trading Luka Doncic and eventually Anthony Davis, whom they acquired from the Lakers last year.
But May will be given grace, despite his instant success in college at Michigan and Florida Atlantic prior to that. Plus if he nails this week’s NBA Draft, perhaps Dallas’ timeline can be accelerated under a good coach like May.
“I mean, you got Cooper Flagg, who’s maybe 19 years old by now, who you know, for 100 years of basketball in America after Naismith would have been playing for a college coach like Dusty,” Wilbon said. “You can bring a haul in, you can still get something for Kyrie, a younger player who you think can grow with Cooper Flagg, and you think Dusty May is a developer and will have the patience to do that, and there’s no timeline for Dallas now. What are they, three, four years away from being a couple years away? So, I think, yes, I think it makes sense.”
Kornheiser couldn’t quite get a grasp on the move. Since May was so good in college, why would he want to go to a franchise that has been in the news for all of the wrong reasons in terms of basketball over the last two years since making the NBA Finals?
“So, I have to be honest here, I have no physical sense of Dusty May,” Jornheiser said. “I know that he is a great college coach, and his career is a whirlwind. Listen to this. The last four years, the 124-26 he went to the final four with Florida Atlantic, a school in Boca Raton, nobody knows where it is … Then he goes to Michigan. He follows Juwan Howard in a terrible year, 8-24 and he goes in two years 64-13, he wins the national championship.
“This guy is to college basketball what the guy at Indiana, Curt Cignetti, is to college football. So I am surprised. This comes out of nowhere to me, and I take a different view of Dallas than you do. Dallas, in recent years, trades away Luka Doncic, then trades away the guy they get for Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis. They fire their GM, they fire their coach …. What they have now is Copper Flagg and I don’t know anything else … Why does he take this job? Does he just take the job for money?”
Wilbon argued this is a move that a lot of college coaches in basketball and football are thinking about. The current college game is shaping up to see an exodus due to the lack of guidelines and rules these days, as On3’s Andy Staples pointed out.
“I talk to a lot of college basketball coaches, they’re confronting something that people have not confronted before,” Wilbon said. “They got to sit at living room tables and not just talk about a kid … what kind of money? Haggling with parents over how much you’re going to pay their child to come to your school. This is real
May is up against it when it comes to being successful. More college coaches don’t have the same success in the pros than those who can be good at both.
“Who’s been great,” Kornheiser said. “Very few people coming from college to the pros (are good). Most end up like John Calipari or John Beilein, and not Larry Brown, and Brad Stevens and Billy Donovan.”
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