INDIANAPOLIS — The best player on college basketball’s best team could not hide his frustration.

Yaxel Lendeborg hated that the knee and ankle injuries he suffered two days earlier were preventing him from showcasing his All-American form with Michigan locked in a tight battle against UConn on Monday night and the national championship at stake.

He winced and punched the air in frustration when he airballed an open jump shot. He walked off the floor with his jersey between his teeth after he blew a defensive assignment. He even described his first-half performance to Turner Sports sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson as “awful” and “super weak.” 

“I was very tentative,” Lendeborg said. “I felt like I was holding our team back. I felt like we could have been up way more early in the game. I kept having opportunities to make a play and I couldn’t make a play.” 

One of the biggest reasons Michigan was able to stave off UConn and grind out a 69-63 victory was because Lendeborg’s teammates refused to allow the Big Ten player of the year to let his disgust with himself fester. Nimari Burnett patted Lendeborg on the chest and told him his teammates were with him. L.J. Cason urged Lendeborg to stop being so hard on himself and reminded him that the Wolverines wouldn’t have reached the national title game without him. Roddy Gayle told him an off-color joke to get him to stop playing “soft” and to play more aggressively. 

“Yax is a very emotional guy, so I think it was my duty to push him to get out of his feelings,” Gayle said. “I felt like we needed Mad Yax, not Sad Yax.” 

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Mad Yax finally showed up in the final six minutes of Monday’s game as Michigan was trying to stave off a desperate UConn comeback. The 6-foot-9 do-it-all forward scored seven of his 13 total points over a span of 90 seconds, burying a 3-pointer, putting back his own miss and drawing a foul, and sinking a pair of free throws to keep the Wolverines’ advantage at nine despite a couple of clutch UConn 3-pointers.

“We understood that he wasn’t 100% physically,” Burnett said. “I mean, he probably wasn’t even 50%, but he persevered for that though and he did whatever it took for his team to win. He sprinted through screens even though his body didn’t feel like going. That just shows you his selflessness, his selfless nature to give to this team and help us win a national championship.”

Lendeborg’s grit helped Michigan complete a dominant season with the program’s first national title since 1989. The Wolverines (37-3) pummeled the likes of Gonzaga and Villanova in non-league play, won the outright Big Ten title by four games and then demolished their first five NCAA tournament opponents by an average of nearly 22 points.

The driving force behind Michigan’s success was Lendeborg blossoming into the “Dominican LeBron,” as teammates nicknamed him. It was the best year of Lendeborg’s life — and one he didn’t see coming a few years ago when he believed that playing college basketball wasn’t for him. 

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Lendeborg thought that working a warehouse job was going to be his life, but his mom, Yissel Raposo, refused to accept it. She forced him to board a flight to Yuma, Arizona, and go to junior college at Arizona Western. 

That was the start of a five-year journey that took Lendeborg from the anonymity of junior college basketball, to a breakout season at UAB last year, to becoming the centerpiece of this formidable Michigan team. He was averaging 21 points and 7.3 rebounds per game in the NCAA tournament before his ill-timed injuries against Arizona on Saturday threatened to end his season early. 

“I definitely felt like I did all this for nothing in that moment,” Lendeborg said Saturday. “I definitely had to calm down for a little bit, speak to myself, get out of my thoughts.”

Two days of nonstop treatment allowed Lendeborg to take the floor on Monday night with just some tape on his injured knee. He didn’t have the game of his dreams, but that didn’t diminish his joy when Michigan captured the national title. 

Championship cap perched on his head and blue and yellow confetti pooled at his feet, he wrapped his mom in a bear hug as soon as he saw her.  

How did Raposo feel at that moment? 

“So happy,” she said. “Grateful. Blessed.”

Did she have any doubt her son would push through the injuries?  

“No, because he’s a warrior,” Raposo responded. 

Before she could say more, Lendeborg interrupted with a “Come on, mom!” It was time for him to cut his strand of net. 

For Lendeborg, a day of hellacious frustration ended with a moment of pure joy. 

North Carolina’s failure to land one of its top-tier coaching targets has laid bare how much the college basketball landscape has shifted since the dawning of the NIL era. 

Being a blue blood is no longer as much of a built-in advantage. Now what matters more is how much green a program can offer prized recruits.

Over the course of the past two weeks, North Carolina has tried to coax Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, Michigan’s Dusty May and Chicago Bulls coach Billy Donovan to come to Chapel Hill. Lloyd used interest from the Tar Heels as leverage to negotiate a new deal to stay in Tucson, May also passed and Donovan apparently wasn’t interested enough to engage before the end of the NBA regular season next weekend.

That left North Carolina outgoing athletic director Bubba Cunningham and incoming athletic director Steve Newmark without many proven options as backup plans. Alabama’s Nate Oats negotiated a contract extension that will make him one of the sport’s five highest-paid coaches. Iowa State’s TJ Otzelberger also publicly removed himself from consideration for other jobs. North Carolina even tried to set up an in-person interview with Iowa’s Ben McCollum on Sunday, according to CBSSports.com, only to have him turn down that invitation. 

With options dwindling and time running out before the transfer portal opens Tuesday, North Carolina pivoted to an outside-the-box hire as it seeks to reestablish itself as one of the sport’s elite programs. The Tar Heels are reportedly set to hire Michael Malone, who won an NBA title with the Denver Nuggets but was fired near the end of the 2024-25 regular season.

If North Carolina’s coaching search was a litmus test, then the hire of Malone is further evidence that the blue-blood jobs are no longer as coveted as they once were. After all, North Carolina is taking a chance on someone who has coached in the NBA for the previous two decades and who last coached at the college level as an assistant at Providence from 1995-98 and Manhattan from 1999-2001.

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These big swings and misses from North Carolina come on the heels of a similar search at Kentucky two years ago. Athletic director Mitch Barnhart’s top targets were UConn’s Dan Hurley, Baylor’s Scott Drew and Donovan. Only when he wasn’t able to persuade any of those three to come to Lexington did he pivot to Kentucky alum Mark Pope.

What that suggests is the blue-blood jobs are no longer leaps and bounds above jobs at other power-conference programs who are flush with deep-pocketed donors or football-generated revenue. Shoe companies don’t have as much influence over where highly ranked high school prospects go to college. Winning tradition, brand recognition and top-tier facilities also aren’t as important selling points as they once were. 

Now, the first thing an agent representing an elite player usually wants to know is whether a school can meet the requisite price tag. Only then does the program’s winning track record or ability to develop pros come into play.

As Tennessee coach Rick Barnes put it last month, “Today, it's easy. You can recruit a guy now for a week and get him. You know what I mean? Hey, what's the number?”

This isn’t to say that the likes of North Carolina, Duke, Kansas and Kentucky aren’t still elite jobs in the current environment. Basketball matters above all else at those schools. They will likely keep paying top dollar to assemble competitive rosters. But there’s now less incentive to chase those blue-blood jobs for coaches like May or Lloyd or Oats who already have built strong programs and already have the resources to contend for conference and national titles.

North Carolina could have responded by either waiting another week to see if Donovan would have engaged or offering the job to a second-tier candidate like Vanderbilt’s Mark Byington. Cunningham and Newmark instead opted for the surprise hire of Malone, whose lone previous tie to North Carolina is that his daughter is an outside hitter on the Tar Heels’ volleyball team.

One advantage to going with Malone is that North Carolina doesn’t have to pay millions of dollars in buyout money like it would have for a sitting college head coach. Byington’s buyout was reportedly in the $11 million range, a lot for a coach who is two years removed from coaching at James Madison and has yet to advance to the NCAA tournament’s second weekend.

Malone also has the reputation of a shrewd Xs-and-Os coach with an understanding of modern basketball and a knack for maximizing the talent on his roster. His NBA pedigree theoretically should appeal to recruits, while his relationship with superagent Miško Ražnatović should only help North Carolina land top European talent.

Still, the track record of NBA lifers adapting to the college game is iffy at best. It isn’t even just the former superstar players like Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullin, Juwan Howard, Patrick Ewing and Jerry Stackhouse who have tried and failed. Mike Woodson won a single NCAA tournament game in four years at Indiana. Mike Dunleavy Sr. went 24-69 in three disastrous seasons as head coach at Tulane.

It also doesn’t lend confidence if North Carolina board of trustees chairman Malcolm Turner had any hand in this hire. Turner’s disastrous tenure as Vanderbilt athletic director included the ill-fated decision to fire Bryce Drew after three seasons and anoint Stackhouse as his replacement. 

While a program with the history of North Carolina probably shouldn’t have to make such a high-risk hire, the good news for the Tar Heels is they’re better off taking a swing on Malone than sticking with Hubert Davis.

After five inconsistent seasons, North Carolina couldn’t retain Davis if it was serious about returning to its customary levels of success. At least there’s upside with Malone if he can surround himself with an experienced staff and learn the nuances of the college game on the fly.

INDIANAPOLIS — As if UConn’s challenge wasn’t daunting enough facing formidable Michigan, now the Huskies could be without a key player for Monday night’s national title game. 

Junior guard Solo Ball, the team’s third-leading scorer this season, has “some kind of foot sprain” that he sustained early in Saturday’s 61-52 victory over Illinois, UConn coach Dan Hurley said Sunday. Ball is wearing a walking boot and will not practice Sunday with the rest of the Huskies.

When asked if Ball is likely to play against Michigan, Hurley said, “I don’t really know.”

“We’ll know more as it gets later in the day,” he added.

Ball has started all 38 games for UConn so far this season and has averaged 12.9 points and 3.1 rebounds. Ball was able to finish Saturday’s national semifinal against Illinois despite his injury, tallying 13 points and knocking down a trio of 3-pointers. 

If Ball is unable to play or is hampered by his injury, it would likely mean more playing time for reserve guards Malachi Smith and Jayden Ross. Ross has come up big off the bench twice in the NCAA tournament, scoring 11 points against UCLA and sinking a pair of threes against Illinois.