Michigan beat Toledo, 96-92, on Friday night in an exhibition contest. The Wolverines were led in scoring by L.J. Cason and Roddy Gayle Jr., who each scored 20 points. Head coach Dusty May met with reporters after the game to discuss the narrow victory.

Here's everything he had to say.

Yeah, I thought his ability to make free throws, he finished through contact. You know, we're not a super physical team by nature. We have, typically, you're either skilled or you're super physical. I'm not saying we're not physical, but we're not as physical as we need to be. So potentially that's why we struggled finishing around the rim. But I think late our guys went with more aggression and more pop. And I'm anxious to look at what happened around the rim because sometimes the ball just doesn't drop. Sometimes you don't have enough power. Sometimes there might have been a foul missed or whatever the case. But a lot of those missed conversions around the rim seemed to turn into transition baskets the other way. We didn't have great rhythm and flow, and I think that impacted our defense.

I think majority were after they got out in transition. And then once you're in a rhythm and you've made some shots and it's just like any other mid-major, when they go into a high major, it's house money. So they're playing loose, they're playing free. And like I said, they made some plays. The beautiful thing about college basketball, there are so many good players. And when they get comfortable and they get going, they're capable of doing that. Now we stepped up and made big free throws. After a turnover and a press break, I thought we cleaned that up and was able to turn their press into a couple of easy baskets. We got a lot out of this game. We were exposed in a couple areas that we thought we might at some point this season be exposed in, and it happened early, and now we still have time to fix it.

I think there were a couple questionable decisions, but I do think the pace we're playing at is all of our players didn't play like this in the past. So you're in a game environment, and they went on a run. I probably could have helped them with the timeout, but I wanted to see how we would be able to respond. And we were getting great looks. We were getting point-blank shots, and they just weren't dropping tonight. Is it time to set off the alarms?No, it's just we'll have to clean up a few things. Our guys work. They want to get better, and we're not going to be at practice protecting our egos. We're going after the things that we were exposed in, and we're going to get better at them.

Absolutely. I do feel like we generated really good looks. I'm not sure if the ball moved and the shots were as many paint-touch kick-outs as we would like. But when you just evaluate the shot, when you freeze it on the shot, I think we're going to be pleased with our shots. I hate even talking about offense after scoring 96, winning the rebounding margin by nine, turning it over 15 times is too many for us. But, once again, it's early. The season hasn't begun yet, exhibition. And for us to walk out of here with a win and also having some things we've learned about our team helps.

Always, yes. We want to beat the defense down the floor as much as possible. I thought Will Tschetter really, really ran once we started taking it out quicker. I thought we ran well in the second half. I thought we had a lot of the same looks. We didn't convert. And in that situation, the way we want to play, we feel like because we play more guys and we're in really good conditioning because that's the way we play every day, we feel like usually there's a spurt there at eight or ten minutes to go. And it just didn't happen that way tonight. We do believe, though, by pushing this and staying with it, then we'll have much more separation at that six to ten-minute mark in the second half.

Well, we did finish. I don't have the shot chart in front of me, but I think we left some points at the rim. Tre Donaldson, I thought he generated really good looks, and sometimes the ball doesn't go in for whatever reason, and we'll get better at that. Same thing with Vlad. Vlad missed some shots that he makes regularly, and I think part of it is probably wanting to perform really well in front of our fans and play and get to where we want to get to right now, but that's a beautiful thing. Usually the teams that are playing really, really well right now, it's a long season to play at that level, and this definitely keeps us humble and striving to get better versus obsessing about the results or whatever.

His confidence, I thought he handled the press well late in the second half. I thought he made the two big free throws when the game was still on the line. His ability to make threes off the bounce, I do think Nimari Burnett has set a couple really good screens for him, which confused their switches and got him a couple clean looks. But, yeah, he's done that pretty consistently. He's got a lot to learn as a freshman, but he plays with great moxie, great confidence, and I think it's fairly obvious that he's a difference maker when he checks in. He's a guy that can really change the complexion of a game.

We challenged their catches, and I thought in the second half that they really just played a lot more isolation basketball, which is ultimately what our defense is typically designed to do, to force tough pull-ups. Isaiah Adams is a good player. He was 6 of 8 from the field, and I thought all of his shots were tough, high degree of difficulties, where he just gets to a spot, and he's 6-foot-7. He's listed as 6-foot-7. He's an older player. He played at UCF. I've seen him since he was in high school. He's a good player. He was getting to his spots, and he was knocking them down tonight. I thought they made some really good individual plays where they, you know, Toledo, I mean, I can't remember them ever not being really good. And, you know, just it was a good, good preparation game for us because they exposed the things that we needed to be exposed at this point.

I can't recall. You know, it's tough for freshmen to play major roles on really good teams, so in recent memory, we haven't had a lot. They could come in and play with the type of confidence and shot-making ability. It's early. It's still exhibition season, but he's his body of work. He continues to get better. He's obviously someone that has a lot of belief in his own game.

We learned we have a lot of contributors. I thought Phat Phat Brooks came in and really gave us a jolt in the first half. When you look at our bench production, I don't even call those bench because I look at those guys as starters, those guys have all performed really well over two games. It shows the depth that we thought we have. We do, in fact, have that depth. And we have a lot of different guys that can step up and be our best player on any given night. As you see tonight, we had two leading scorers, and I can't imagine that Danny, Vlad, Tre, Rubin, Nimari, Will don't lead, Sam, they don't lead us in scoring in other games. So it's an affirmation of what we thought and the balance of our team. And overall, we learned a lot about ourselves. We played against a zone, so there will be some stuff to refer back to. And then we played a team today that typically executes really well in the half court. And they did, but they also lined us up and went one-on-one and played exceptionally well in that facet.

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