Michigan’s roster shuffle took another turn this week, and Mike Boynton Jr. isn’t pretending the Wolverines are done looking for answers.
L.J. Cason is gone, leaving for Miami (FL) on Tuesday after being the lone Michigan player to enter the transfer portal. That opened another spot for a team that already had to adjust quickly after Dusty May’s abrupt departure and Boynton Jr.’s arrival as head coach.
Boynton Jr. moved fast to stabilize the roster, and by his own account he came close to keeping everyone in place. Cason was the exception, though the guard’s torn ACL last season meant he was unlikely to play a major role this year. Still, with the new 5-for-5 rule, there had been a path for him to work his way back and provide Michigan with another ball handler off the bench.
Now the Wolverines are weighing what comes next, and Boynton Jr. made it clear on Defend the Block that the search could extend beyond the usual boundaries of the transfer market.
“Yeah, 10 years ago, it probably wasn't an option," Boynton Jr. said of finding a replacement. "It's mid-July.
There are a lot of different factors that go into adding somebody to your roster and people being available also. But we're in a different climate.
And so there actually are several people potentially available with either a court ruling going well on the other or just somebody transferring from another school because something happened there.
"So we're very much in tune to who's available. We would like to, in a perfect world, add another veteran piece if we could.
Maybe another ball handler, decision maker, a playmaker, somebody who could help, you know, just add some element of playmaking to our team. But we do like the team as it presently is constructed.
"And so we'll do both. We'll continue to work with this group and develop the guys we have, but we'll always keep our ears to the ground as to maybe how some of this stuff is playing out there in the market.”
There’s also another wrinkle tied to Boynton Jr.’s staff. His first hire was longtime Brown head coach Mike Martin, who now joins a loaded coaching group in Ann Arbor. Martin’s departure from Brown means the transfer portal will open for those players, too.
That could matter for Michigan, which has shown before that it’s willing to mine Ivy League programs for help on the ball. Mike Smith and Jaelin Llewellyn both came from Ivy League schools and gave the Wolverines playmaking at guard.
One name that fits the profile is Jeremiah Jenkins. The rising junior led the Ivy League with 5.2 assists per game last season, and while he averaged only 8.2 points, he also topped the conference with 1.9 steals per game. His passing and defensive work would make him an interesting bench option for Michigan, even if he’d need time to adjust to the Big Ten.
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