Dusty May’s jump from Michigan to Dallas gives the Mavericks a coach with a proven track record of turning broken programs into winners faster than expected.
The Dallas Mavericks have finalized a deal to hire Dusty May as their next head coach ... and the hire signals far more than just filling a vacancy.
They are getting a 49-year-old whose career has been a steady climb from student manager under Indiana's Bob Knight to national champion, with almost no losing seasons along the way.
May never had a losing season in six years there. The program finished just over .500 for four straight years before the breakthrough nobody saw coming. In 2022-23, FAU went 35-4, the most wins in Division I that season and rode a No. 9 seed all the way to the program’s first Final Four, before losing to San Diego State on a buzzer-beater in the national semifinal.
He followed that with a second straight NCAA Tournament appearance the next year.
Michigan hired him in 2024 to fix a program that had gone 8-24 the season before under Juwan Howard, its worst record since 1981-82. May used the transfer portal aggressively, brought in his former FAU center Vladislav Goldin and immediately won 26 games and the Big Ten Tournament title in his first season, the most wins by a first-year head coach in program history.
In Year 2, with the pieces in place and expectations finally matching the buzz, May delivered one of the most dominant seasons in college basketball history. Michigan went 37-3 overall, a program record and finished 19-1 in Big Ten play to win the regular-season title by four games, also a conference record.
The Wolverines reached No. 1 in both major polls for the first time in more than a decade, finished with a Big Ten-record plus-713 point differential and became the first program to go from 10 or fewer wins to a national championship within two seasons since Michigan State in 1979.
They blazed through the NCAA Tournament, becoming the first team in tournament history to score at least 90 points in five games in a single run and capped it by beating UConn 69-63 in the national championship game, the program’s first title since 1989.
And what is May now saying about his move to Dallas?
"This is one of the most respected franchises in professional sports, with passionate fans, a talented roster, and a clear commitment to building a championship organization,'' May said in a Tuesday statement. "I look forward to helping bring another championship to the city of Dallas.'
May was named Big Ten Coach of the Year and won the Henry Iba Award as the national coach of the year. He became just the second coach since Larry Brown in 1988 to leave college basketball for the NBA immediately after winning a title.
May's coaching will translate immediately to Dallas’ frontcourt. At FAU and Michigan, they often revolved around bigs who could screen, slip, finish in the short roll and make quick reads out of ball screens rather than just standing in the dunker spot.
There are trade rumors involving Dallas' big men, but for now ...
Dereck Lively II is exactly the kind of mobile, vertical-spacing center who thrives in that system, someone who can set a ball screen, read the defense and finish above the rim without needing complicated post touches. Daniel Gafford profiles similarly as a roll man who benefits from quick, simple reads rather than a stationary post-up role.
And for Cooper Flagg? This is a coach who has built his career around spacing, ball screens and giving versatile frontcourt players room to operate. That gives Dallas’ most important young player exactly the kind of system that maximizes what he does best as a do-everything connector on both ends.
May has never had a true off year as a head coach. Dallas just hired a coach whose entire career has been building winning programs out of losing ones, on a timeline that has consistently beaten expectations.
The clock on expectations of this "winning voice'' starts ticking now.
