Trey McKenney doesn’t look like a player easing into Year 2. He looks like someone ready to grab the wheel.
Michigan has only given fans three scrimmages to judge the 2026-27 team, but McKenney has already made the loudest statement. In the two games he played during the Europe trip, he averaged 25 points while shooting 54.2 percent from the field and 42.9 percent from three. In Michigan’s comeback win over Mega SUPERBET, he and Elliot Cadeau combined for 19 of the Wolverines’ 22 fourth-quarter points.
That late surge said plenty about how Michigan can lean on him. McKenney wasn’t forcing the issue.
He was reading the defense, taking the deep looks that were there and playing like a lead guard should. The confidence showed up in the shot selection, and the shot-making followed.
He flashed the full scoring package too. McKenney knocked down catch-and-shoot threes, dribbled into clean looks in a hand-down, man-down situation, and even turned a dead possession into points with a mid-range bucket.
The best sequence came when Cadeau hit him with the ball at full speed. Instead of barreling straight to the rim, McKenney stopped, went behind his back, faked the crossover and still finished through a bigger defender.
Then came the closer. With 90 seconds left, McKenney caught it at the top of the key, used a stutter step, spun his body to create space and finished through contact to all but put the game away. It was the kind of basket that fit the tone of the night: Michigan had been out-physicaled early, but McKenney delivered when the game got tight.
“It was definitely a physical game. We didn’t have the momentum we thought we would have going into the game in the first half, but we came out in the second half,” McKenney said through a team spokesperson after the game.
“I think we really showed tonight what we could be throughout the season. I’m excited to get back to Ann Arbor, get the group under one arena, practice for a couple months and get ready for the season.”
That stretch with Cadeau swung the game and gave Michigan’s opponent no real path back. Over those eight minutes, McKenney looked like the kind of offensive engine Michigan can build around.
That’s why the conversation around his ceiling keeps growing. On a recent UM Hoops Podcast, Dylan Burkhardt talked with CBS Sports’ Isaac Trotter about McKenney, and Trotter called him “probably a first-team All-Big Ten caliber player.”
That feels like a reasonable bar. McKenney has the scoring touch, the three-point consistency and the defensive energy to become one of the league’s most impactful guards this season.
Michigan should also expect a bigger workload. McKenney was already one of the team’s most useful bench scorers last year, averaging 9.9 points in about 22.1 minutes per game while shooting 46.2/39.1/89.5. Like a lot of young guards, he got better as the season went along, finishing with double-digit scoring in 15 of Michigan’s final 23 games.
The challenge now is keeping that efficiency when the usage rises. That’s not simple, but McKenney’s work ethic gives him a chance to do it.
If Michigan fans are looking for a blueprint, the obvious one is Nik Stauskas. The sophomore leap Stauskas made in 2013-14 remains one of the defining jumps of the Beilein era, going from a key piece on a national runner-up to one of the nation’s best scorers, a second-team All-American and a top-10 NBA Draft pick. His numbers jumped from 11 points in 30.5 minutes per game to 17.5 points in 35.6.
McKenney doesn’t need to copy that path exactly, and nobody is pretending he has to match Stauskas from three. But if he can keep last season’s perimeter efficiency while taking just one more shot per game, an All-Big Ten season is well within reach.
There’s even a case for some early All-American buzz if the scoring burst carries over once the season starts. McKenney’s three-level game already has NBA attention attached to it.
Michigan has seen this story before with guards like Stauskas, Caris LeVert and Kobe Bufkin making major sophomore jumps. If McKenney joins that group, the Wolverines will have a real shot at another deep postseason run.
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