Media Day for the Michigan basketball team was filled with obvious storylines, as the Wolverines return from their championship-game loss to Louisville without Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway.
For the moment, though, the big questions -- who replaces Burke and Hardaway, and will that leave Michigan enough firepower for another run in March - have been overshadowed by a little one: When is Mitch McGary going to get back on the floor?
McGary was the key to Michigan's tournament run, suddenly transforming himself from a clumsy player at the back of the rotation to an unstoppable big man that dominated matchups with players bound for the NBA.
As a sophomore, he should be the focal point of the team, even ahead of Glenn Robinson III, title-game star Spike Albrecht and five-star freshman Derrick Walton. Instead, he's just answering questions about the sore back that has kept him from even practicing.
"There's no real injury," McGary insisted Thursday. "It's just a lower-back condition."
McGary could probably rest his back until Christmas -- Michigan doesn't have a grueling non-conference schedule -- but for a guy who doesn't think he's injured, he's very vague about when he expects to be back on the floor.
"I feel pretty good right now, but there's no target date or anything," he said. "Right now, I'm day to day. I'm doing some light shooting, and I'm limited in what I can do, what they are allowing me to do."
Instead of working on the basketball court, the Michigan training staff has McGary on an exercise plan that would seem perfectly normal for one group of top athletes -- the horses currently training for the Breeders' Cup.
"He's been doing these underwater treadmill workouts that are really productive," coach John Beilein said. "I know I couldn't do some of those."
Beilein knows that he needs McGary to play at a high level if Michigan wants to win the Big Ten title that narrowly escaped their grasp a year ago, and especially if they want to make some noise in the conference and national tournaments. So, while he doesn't want to rush his young big man, he doesn't want to wait forever, either.
"He's been making great progress, but we're going to be super-cautious," he said. "If he keeps making this kind of progress, day after day, and that's where he's at -- day-to-day -- one of these days, he's going to have to get out there and see what he can do."
Once McGary gets on the floor with Robinson, Albrecht, Walton, Nik Stauskas and defensive specialist Caris LeVert, Beilein can start the process of figuring out what he's got in terms of talent and chemistry.
"We aren't going to know what we've lost until we find out what we can do," he said. "There are going to be high expectations, but at Michigan, there are always going to be high expectations. That's how it should be."
