At Michigan, UNC transfer Elliot Cadeau rediscovered confidence under Dusty May and ran with it to Final Four

CHICAGO — It was poetry in motion, and Elliot Cadeau was holding the pen. The Michigan point guard directed a 21-0 run Sunday that slingshotted the top-seeded Wolverines to a 95-62 win over No. 6 seeded Tennessee in the NCAA tournament Midwest regional final.

He scored or assisted on eight of the points during that first-half surge, but most importantly the junior orchestrated the tempo for a metamorphic Michigan team that throttled the Volunteers on the break and enjoyed just as much success slowing things down and sharing the ball like it was a hot potato.

An extension of head coach Dusty May, Cadeau brought the peak version of his offense to life, balancing the gas with the brakes while the Wolverines made a rugged Rick Barnes defense look helpless.

Cadeau finished with 10 assists and a trophy in his hands, as Michigan, one of the most dominant Big Ten teams of all time, advanced to the program’s first Final Four since 2018. The Wolverines are headed to Indianapolis to play in a national semifinal against fellow No. 1 seed Arizona.

“This is Elliot. This is him,” his mother, Michelle, told Yahoo Sports, with music thumping in United Center and celebratory mayhem swarming the court. “This is what he did in high school. This is what he’s doing here. This is what he’s going to continue doing.

“Amazing to see him back to being him.”

Because Cadeau wasn’t himself, physically or mentally in Chapel Hill. That’s where he spent the first two seasons of his highly-anticipated collegiate career after reclassifying and arriving at North Carolina as a five-star prospect who was the Rivals industry ranking’s 13th-highest rated recruit in the 2023 cycle.

He started 31 games as a freshman for a Hubert Davis-coached UNC squad that won the ACC regular-season title and earned a No. 1 seed in the 2024 NCAA tournament, but he shot just 18.9% from 3 and averaged a career-low 4.1 assists per contest.

Along the way, he had surgery to address an eye condition called keratoconus, which causes the cornea to thin and bulge outward into a cone shape, leading to blurred vision.

During his sophomore year, Cadeau, a New Jersey native who’s also partially deaf in his right ear and lives with asthma, dealt with another medical issue. He coughed and coughed. He couldn’t keep his food down. Michelle Cadeau explained that Elliot was sick with an upper-respiratory infection from November to February last year.

“He kind of lost that millisecond quickness. They literally had to take him to the hospital, give him IV before games,” she said.

“That was never spoken about, though, but I know that.”

Elliot Cadeau averaged 3.3 turnovers per game over those months and ended a season that culminated in a first-round March Madness exit ranking at the bottom of the ACC in that ball-security stat category, often a barometer for players at his position.

Since transferring to Michigan, Cadeau has cut his giveaways down to 2.3 a game, and he’s posting a personal-best 37.7% clip from beyond the arc.

“To see him being healthy, him thriving like this — I mean, I’m a mom,” Michelle Cadeau said. “This is the best feeling ever. And he’s worked so hard to get here. … He’s a 6-1 guard. He has to work harder than anybody else to even be relevant. And he has.”

Rediscovering his confidence

Michigan senior guard Roddy Gayle Jr. didn’t have the smoothest first two seasons of his college career, either. Gayle was part of Ohio State’s top-10 2022 recruiting class, most of which eventually scattered after Chris Holtmann was fired in February 2024 and the Buckeyes missed out on the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row.

Gayle said Sunday the struggles he and Elliot Cadeau experienced at their past schools have allowed them to connect.

“He came from a situation where he wasn’t really like — mentally, he just didn’t feel like he could do it,” Gayle said.

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Cadeau had to rediscover his confidence at Michigan after losing it at UNC. In his mom’s words, he had to get “back to being him.”

What does that mean?

“Being confident. Being allowed to be the leader of the team, being allowed to be the extension of the coach on the floor, that’s where he really thrives,” said Michelle Cadeau, who noted that, at Michigan, Elliot has “total trust” from his coaches.

That trust was apparent even when the Wolverines’ staff was recruiting him.

“They told me that they wanted me to come be the starting point guard,” Elliot Cadeau said Sunday. “They told me they wanted to win the national championship. So they believed that I could be a national championship point guard.

“That meant a lot to me, and they were just giving me the belief that I could be that.”

He’s two wins away from realizing that potential after averaging 10.5 points, 8.3 assists and only 1.8 turnovers across the first four games of an NCAA tournament run that followed Michigan’s record-breaking regular season.

The Wolverines stacked double-digit victories against 14 different Big Ten opponents, and they joined Bob Knight’s undefeated 1975-76 Indiana squad as the only teams in league history to win all of their Big Ten road games. Overall, the maize and blue went 19-1 in conference play, setting a single-season Big Ten record for league wins. Their offense is top 10 nationally in points per game, and advanced metrics favor their defense even more.

This journey wouldn’t have been possible without Cadeau, according to May, who showed up for his point guard from Day 1. Literally.

The day of Cadeau’s final classes at UNC, his family moved him from Chapel Hill up to Ann Arbor. May and other Michigan staffers were ready not just to welcome Cadeau but to help him move in, too.

“They’re like running up and down the stairs with his couches and stuff. And Elliot literally said that,” Michelle Cadeau recalled. “He said, ‘Mama, the head coach of Michigan carried my boxes up the stairs.’

“I knew Dusty was different,” she added. “It means everything. We’re so grateful for Dusty. He’s the best thing that ever happened to Elliot.”

Gregory Shamus via Getty Images

Elliot Cadeau discussed Sunday in the locker room how May’s a leader and a coach on the floor and a friend and a mentor off it. Cadeau also benefited from that kind of dichotomy at Link Academy in Branson, Missouri, where he played his prep career under Bill Armstrong.

Armstrong, now McNeese’s head coach, is close with May. That relationship played a role in Cadeau’s portal recruitment.

“The way they recruited Elliot, we knew that was the way that they recruited everybody else,” Michelle Cadeau said of Michigan. “So we knew that this would be a very unselfish team because everybody that came to this team had to give up something.

“If it was a bigger paycheck, if it was going to the NBA, if it was not starting — like every single kid on this team has given up something.”

Michigan added four transfers, Elliot Cadeau among them. He was joined by former UAB forward Yaxel Lendeborg, now the Big Ten Player of the Year; former UCLA center Aday Mara, now the Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year; and former Illinois forward Morez Johnson Jr.

‘When he’s at his best, he really stirs the drink’

Mara lights up when talking about the moment he learned Cadeau was transferring to Michigan.

The two of them crossed paths before college at the 2023 Basketball Without Borders Global Camp in Utah. The NBA- and FIBA-run event brought the top international prospects to Salt Lake City. That’s where Mara, a 7-foot-3 big man from Zaragoza, Spain, met the much smaller Cadeau, who already had ample games under his belt representing Sweden internationally. Michelle Cadeau is Swedish, after all, and her husband, James, is Haitian.

Flash forward to last season, and that’s when Cadeau’s Tar Heels faced off against Mara’s Bruins in the CBS Sports Classic. So when Mara saw Cadeau’s commitment graphic, he knew what could be on the horizon: a point guard that would make his life easier.

“Having him as a point guard, he can pass, he’s smart, he knows where to be, what he has to do. It’s just way easier to play basketball like this,” Mara said Sunday postgame.

May has referred to Cadeau as the brain hub of the Wolverines’ operation.

“Dusty kind of hands the keys over to him offensively a lot,” said Kyle Church, a longtime May assistant who doubles as Michigan’s general manager. “Just, ‘Hey, Elliot, get a ball screen, get these guys organized, get the guys the ball where they like it, where they’re at their best.’”

Church pointed out: “When he’s at his best, he really stirs the drink. … And his play in March Madness has been pretty special.”

Along with Lendeborg and Gayle, Cadeau earned a spot on the Midwest All-Region Team. He’s tallied at least seven assists in each round of this year’s NCAA tournament. The savvy passer has set up countless other scoring opportunities.

That was evident during Michigan’s blitz that turned a two-point Tennessee lead into a 19-point Wolverines advantage on Sunday in the Elite Eight.

“He’s a wizard,” May said afterward. “I mean, to see what he was doing, he was turning down open shots. He was turning down layups to get everybody involved. And that really becomes contagious when you have someone that’s shot the ball as well as he has this year.

“He doesn’t care if he shoots. He supports his teammates. He thinks for all of us at times, and just very, very grateful because there’s no way we’re in this situation if Elliot wasn’t here with us.”

Cadeau has overcome hearing, vision and respiratory impairments, plus an arduous first half of his college career, to become the consummate point guard for Final Four-bound Michigan.

He’s back to being him.