Michigan basketball fans are, as the kids say, living the dream these days. But they’re a nervous lot, so they’re always listening for the alarm.
Those former (and soon-to-be) denizens of Crisler Center are primed and pumped for years and years of greatness by Juwan Howard’s teams. They’re not without ample evidence for optimism, either.
Howard’s first NCAA Tournament team clawed one make away from a Final Four. He’s recruiting like a Homecoming queen collecting prom offers, and coaching so well Mike Krzyzewski just threw up his hands and got out.
So U-M fans should be gleefully rubbing their hands, anticipating the dominant decade to come, right? No. Rejected — like Dikembe Mutombo’s Geico commercial rampage.
Jeff Goodman tweets out that the Boston Celtics ought to take a look at Juwan Howard as head coach, and some fret the U-M boss might secretly harbor Bill Russell loyalties. Freshman center Hunter Dickinson announces he’s checking out the NBA — with the option to return — and some wonder aloud whether Moussa Diabate, at 6-9, 190, can hold up as a freshman center.
The take has been consistent in this venue, all along. Dickinson stays put. That’s not the final word, of course. Things happen. Minds change. But in this case, there are two reasons not to fret.
One, Dickinson feels like he’s got unfinished business in college, given Michigan’s near miss for the 2021 Final Four. Two, Michigan basketball won’t permanently suspend the program once he does move on (more than likely next spring).
Brian Boesch keeps a close eye on all things Michigan basketball, as the play-by-play man for Howard’s Wolverines on the radio. He thinks it makes perfect sense for Dickinson to hear what the NBA has to say.
“I don’t think Hunter is going anywhere,” Boesch said this week on TheWolverine.com podcast. “I think if he had a true design on really, actively looking at this, he would have declared earlier.
“He told me, this is something he went back and forth on. He went back and forth on deciding to declare while keeping an agent that allows him to come back. He has reiterated over and over and over and over, this is something where he’s got flexibility, and has the ability to come back.
“I think this is informational.”
Checking out what the NBA has to say costs him nothing. It benefits him in many ways, with potential future employers having input on what they’d pay big money to see a year or two down the road
“This is a young man who is going to play in the NBA,” Boesch observed. “I don’t think there is any doubt about that. But with how he’s talked about it — with me, with Andy Katz — with how he’s framed it on his social media, this feels exploratory. This feels informational.
“Now, could there be a team or teams that come to him and say, ‘Hey, we love your upside. We think that you can be a real star right now.’ Then yeah, maybe it gets serious. I’m not dismissing that possibility.
“But I think the reason he’s going about this process is to get information. A lot of us know some of the things, and Hunter knows some of the things he needs to work on. But it’s one thing for him to know it. It’s another thing to hear it from people in the NBA.”
That’s the motivation, Boesch stressed. His expectations of their observations are straightforward.
“He told me the two things he’s really working on here in the offseason,” Boesch noted. “His body — just from a stamina perspective, and toning perspective. He talked about this time last year. He was a completely different person, in terms of physicality and stamina.
“It’s something we discussed at the beginning of the season. He said, ‘There were times when I needed to play out there more.’ On the floor, he talked about varying his game and getting more consistent with his jump shot.
“Something he didn’t say, but something that’s very obvious: the left hand is always going to be the dominant hand, but it has to be a closer gap. There can’t be as big of a dropoff from his left to his right.
“And I just think NBA teams want to see him make some jumpers in games, in college. We saw it in high school, but it wasn’t really part of his game [last year]. It couldn’t be last year. How could it be? When you have Isaiah [Livers], Franz [Wagner], Chaundee [Brown], Eli [Brooks] … Hunter Dickinson shouldn’t be taking jump shots.”
He should take a few next year, maybe in the early going against the Huckabuck States of the world. If successful, maybe later, in the Final Four.
He’s certainly dreaming of the latter, if he comes back. When he does, Michigan fans might be able to shut off the alarm … for a little while.
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