College basketball fans know Michigan had a special season this year. The Wolverines won the national championship, their first since 1989. But what happened a couple months later at Barclays Center in Brooklyn might be just as impressive.
On June 23, Michigan put three players in the NBA Draft lottery in the span of just four picks. Within about 20 minutes, Morez Johnson Jr., Yaxel Lendeborg, and Aday Mara all heard their names called in the top 12. It was a historic moment the program had never seen before
Michigan became just the fifth program to have three or more players selected among the top 14 picks in a single draft since the lottery expanded in 2004, joining North Carolina (2005), Florida (2007), Kentucky, and Duke. That’s elite company by any measure.
What makes this story even better is how these three guys got there. All three came to Michigan through the transfer portal, and coach Dusty May built them into the most dominant frontcourt in college basketball. Everyone around the sport told them it couldn’t work with three big men sharing the floor. They proved everyone wrong
Lendeborg led the team with 15.1 points per game, earned Big Ten Player of the Year honors, and became Michigan’s first recipient of the award since 2014. He went 11th overall to the Golden State Warriors. Mara, a 7-foot-3 center from Spain, went 12th to the Oklahoma City Thunder after winning Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. Johnson went 9th to the Dallas Mavericks, where he’ll reunite with coach May, who left Michigan to take the head coaching job there right before draft night.
Johnson summed it up perfectly: “We talked about it during the season. We got our ultimate goal of winning the national championship and we just got drafted together, all lottery picks.
The trio is also the first Big Ten teammates drafted in the top 15 since Indiana pulled it off back in 1976. That’s 50 years ago. Half a century.
Michigan didn’t just win a championship this year. They built something that the NBA Draft history books will remember for a long time.
