Michigan Won A Title With Its Big Men And Flies To Lithuania Without Them
Morez Johnson Jr., Yaxel Lendeborg and Aday Mara played all 120 games available to them last season and were drafted ninth, eleventh and twelfth on the same night in June. The three transfers replacing them have missed most of the last two seasons between them, and the first live evidence about any of it arrives on August 23.
Michigan boards a plane for Lithuania in six days and plays a real game in eight. The three men who played in front of the rim on the night it won a national championship will not be on either.
Morez Johnson Jr. went ninth to Dallas in the first round on June 23. Yaxel Lendeborg went eleventh to Golden State and Aday Mara twelfth to Oklahoma City, the same evening, off the same team. So the exhibition against the Lithuanian men's national team on August 23 is the first look anyone gets at what Michigan puts in that space instead, and the answer is three transfers who arrived in April.
What left, and the number that makes it hard to replace#
Here is what those three did in 2025-26, from ESPN's season lines.
| Player | Games | Minutes | Points | Rebounds | Blocks | FG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yaxel Lendeborg | 40 | 30.2 | 15.1 | 6.8 | 1.2 | 51.5 |
| Morez Johnson Jr. | 40 | 25.1 | 13.1 | 7.3 | 1.1 | 62.3 |
| Aday Mara | 40 | 23.4 | 12.1 | 6.8 | 2.6 | 66.8 |
Michigan played 40 games. Each of the three played all 40, which is 120 appearances out of 120 available, and the ordinary way to say that is that none of them missed a game all year.
Add the minutes and the three of them were on the floor for 78.7 minutes a night. A regulation game gives a team 200 player-minutes, so that is a little under 40 percent of everything Michigan played, held by three men who were never unavailable. The 78.7 and the percentage are added up from rounded per-game averages, so read them as close rather than exact.
That is the thing being replaced. Not 40.3 points a game, which can be found elsewhere on a roster with Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney on it. The availability.
What arrived#
Michigan signed three frontcourt transfers, all announced on April 28: Moustapha Thiam, a 7-2 center from Cincinnati; J.P. Estrella, a 6-11 forward from Tennessee; and Jalen Reed, a 6-10 forward from LSU. Their last two seasons, again from ESPN:
| Player | Season | Team | Games | Minutes | Points | Rebounds | Blocks | FG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moustapha Thiam | 2024-25 | UCF | 34 | 28.7 | 10.4 | 6.4 | 2.6 | 49.8 |
| Moustapha Thiam | 2025-26 | Cincinnati | 31 | 27.2 | 12.8 | 7.1 | 1.6 | 52.5 |
| J.P. Estrella | 2024-25 | Tennessee | 3 | 10.3 | 4.7 | 2.7 | 0.7 | 66.7 |
| J.P. Estrella | 2025-26 | Tennessee | 33 | 18.3 | 10.0 | 5.4 | 0.4 | 59.6 |
| Jalen Reed | 2024-25 | LSU | 8 | 23.8 | 11.1 | 6.5 | 1.0 | 60.4 |
| Jalen Reed | 2025-26 | LSU | 6 | 18.0 | 9.5 | 5.7 | 0.3 | 57.1 |
Read the games column against the one above it and the season's real question is already visible.
Thiam has been available. He started as a freshman at UCF and played 34 games while the Knights played 37, going 20-17, and he played 31 at Cincinnati last season. Two years, two schools, no missed month.
Estrella has been available for one of the two. Tennessee announced on November 25, 2024 that he would have surgery on his left foot and miss the rest of that season, after three appearances. Tennessee went 30-8 that year and reached the Elite Eight, so Estrella watched 35 of his team's 38 games. He came back and played 33 of Tennessee's 37 in 2025-26, and one of them was the Elite Eight loss to Michigan on March 29.
Reed is the one the arithmetic will not soften. He tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee during LSU's win over Florida State on December 3, 2024, eight games into that season, when he was starting and averaging 11.1 points and 6.5 rebounds. He came back the next November, played six games, and tore his left Achilles tendon in the second half against Drake on November 28, 2025. He had surgery in Baton Rouge on December 2.
LSU played 32 games in each of those seasons, going 14-18 and then 15-17. Reed has appeared in 14 of the last 64 games his team has played. He is Michigan's frontcourt depth.
The block that is hardest to find again#
Blocked shots per game are not comparable across three schools and three roles, so here they are per 36 minutes, computed from the rounded per-game figures above and therefore approximate.
| Player | Season | Blocks per game | Minutes | Blocks per 36 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aday Mara | 2025-26 | 2.6 | 23.4 | 4.0 |
| Moustapha Thiam | 2024-25 | 2.6 | 28.7 | 3.3 |
| Moustapha Thiam | 2025-26 | 1.6 | 27.2 | 2.1 |
| Morez Johnson Jr. | 2025-26 | 1.1 | 25.1 | 1.6 |
| Jalen Reed | 2024-25 | 1.0 | 23.8 | 1.5 |
| Yaxel Lendeborg | 2025-26 | 1.2 | 30.2 | 1.4 |
| J.P. Estrella | 2025-26 | 0.4 | 18.3 | 0.8 |
| Jalen Reed | 2025-26 | 0.3 | 18.0 | 0.6 |
Mara's number is the outlier on the whole list and Michigan finished first nationally in KenPom adjusted defensive efficiency with him doing that. Thiam is the closest thing on the roster to a like-for-like answer, and his own rate fell from 3.3 to 2.1 when he changed schools, which is one season of evidence in a different scheme and should be treated as one season of evidence in a different scheme rather than as a trend.
The calendar the roster has to meet#
The trip was announced on May 18, and the coach quoted in that announcement was Dusty May, who said that getting a group together in the summer to actually play games is huge. May took the Dallas Mavericks job on June 23. Dallas used the ninth pick on Morez Johnson Jr. the same day.
Mike Boynton inherited the itinerary along with everything else, and he is not a bystander to the number this piece keeps coming back to. May hired him in 2024, the year he arrived, and made him defensive coordinator for 2025-26. The defense that finished first nationally is the one Boynton built, and he built it with Mara standing in front of the rim. He ran the program as interim through the summer and agreed to a two-year deal on July 10.
Speaking in Grand Rapids on August 9, Boynton put the trip in the context of a summer development program he described as about eight weeks long: "We're going to extend that to a trip to Europe next week for about 10 days." The trip carries ten extra preseason practices, which is the real prize and the reason programs take them.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| August 21 | Michigan arrives in Lithuania |
| August 22 | Practice day |
| August 23 | Game 1, Lithuania men's national team |
| August 24 | Game 2, Lithuania B team |
| August 25 | Travel to Croatia |
| August 26 | Practice day |
| August 27 | Game 3, Mega Superbet |
| August 29 | Return |
| November 3 | Season opener vs Oakland at Crisler |
Three games in five days, then 80 days until the opener. Boynton, asked about his roster on August 9, talked about the backcourt: having Cadeau and McKenney back, two guards who contributed in the title run. That is the settled part. Behind Thiam, Estrella and Reed the frontcourt is freshmen, and Michigan has not published a 2026-27 roster, so the count of who is on the team is a reconstruction rather than a fact off the school's own page, and jersey numbers are not something anyone can state yet.
Nobody from this site will be in Vilnius or Dubrovnik, and nobody from this site has watched a Michigan practice. What August 23 offers is the first minutes any of these three play in a Michigan uniform, in a game, against grown professionals. Two of the three have spent most of the last two years unable to do that.
Michigan can replace 40.3 points a game. It is replacing 120 appearances out of 120, and the men it signed to do that have played 34, 31, 33, 8, 6 and 3 games in their last two seasons apiece. Called Shot: no Michigan player averages 2.0 or more blocked shots per game in the 2026-27 regular season, after Aday Mara averaged 2.6 last year. Thiam is the reason that call could lose, because he put up 2.6 himself as a UCF freshman, and it is the single number that will say soonest whether the rim still belongs to Michigan.
Michigan's 2026-27 season opener against Oakland at Crisler Center is Monday, November 2, 2026, not November 3. Michigan Athletics' own non-conference schedule release of September 4, 2026 states the date in prose, and the official 2026-27 schedule page carries it; both supersede the Detroit News report of July 11, 2026 that this piece was written from. The date appears in the calendar table only. Nothing in the argument depends on it.
GSP
Sources: season and schedule statistics for Michigan, Cincinnati, UCF, Tennessee and LSU from ESPN's team pages for 2024-25 and 2025-26; per-36 figures and the 78.7-minute total are computed from rounded per-game averages and are approximate. Reed's ACL injury and its date via ESPN, December 4, 2024; his Achilles injury and December 2 surgery via Tiger Rag, December 2, 2025. Estrella's left-foot surgery via On3, November 25, 2024. Tour itinerary, the ten extra practices and the Dusty May quote via UM Hoops, May 18, 2026. May's hiring by the Dallas Mavericks on June 23, 2026, and Boynton's prior role as the assistant May hired in 2024 and his defensive coordinator on the championship team, his interim tenure and the two-year agreement announced July 10, 2026, via ESPN. Boynton's remarks via West Michigan Ballers, August 9, 2026, from the Bank Hoops camp in Grand Rapids. Draft positions via the June 23, 2026 first round. Michigan has not published an official 2026-27 roster, so the composition of the frontcourt is a reconstruction from the April 28 signing announcements rather than a fact off the school's own page, and no jersey numbers are stated here for that reason. This site has no access to Michigan and spoke to no one.
