Inside Michigan Basketball’s transfer portal sprint this offseason

The college basketball transfer portal timeline does not do any favors to the teams that make it the furthest in the NCAA Tournament. When the Michigan Wolverines won the National Championship, minutes stood between the final buzzer and the official opening of the portal.

When Dusty May took the Michigan job two years ago, he filled his starting lineup with four portal players, getting the Wolverines to the Sweet 16 after winning just eight games the previous year. Last offseason, he obtained one of the top portal classes in the country and won it all 12 months later.

In both instances, May had a key factor to build his classes that he didn’t have this offseason — time.

May and his staff were balancing preparing for a championship while keeping one eye to the future. When the portal opened, May had to make scholarship offers to guys he rarely spoke to, and he brought none on campus for an official visit. Nonetheless, May secured three signees less than three weeks after winning it all, and he is still talking to a few more guys to round out his roster.

“Every big guy that went in the portal became our list,” May told the media recently. “Like, literally 100 percent of the big guys that were high major players became our list because we didn’t know what the other guys were going to do. You just have to put yourself in as many positions as you can to be successful. It happens so fast. There’s a title wave coming at you and you’re trying to find the best fit, and there were a couple times when we thought there were guys that were going to come and just for whatever reason didn’t want to risk waiting on an NBA process. Each case is just drastically different.”

It is a balancing act with recruiting transfers. Unlike high school prospects being recruited under a long-term plan, transfers are looking to maximize their opportunities within a few years. Players leave programs as well, and players can enter the NBA Draft process while maintaining eligibility, making it more complicated to construct next season’s roster.

With all this in mind, coaches need to gain advantages in the recruiting process, gathering information other programs don’t have and building relationships with players in a short period of time.

“You better be able to trust your relationships and your contacts,” May said. “Moustapha (Thiam), we talked to all the coaches at Cincinnati. My son played at UCF. We know the coaches there. We felt like we had great intel on him, and then he visited and you spend a couple days with him and realize, man, this is another great guy. J.P. (Estrella) is one that after he committed, we went out and visited with him, met his family, and same thing — you talk to their youth coaches, their agent, their high school coaches, the coaches of the program they’re leaving. You talk to anyone, just like the NBA does. … As soon as you feel like you’re close on a guy, you dive into the intel and try to see if it’s the right fit.”