J.P. Estrella Played Thirty-Five Of Forty Minutes For A Michigan Team Down To Eight

Michigan's box score in Vilnius on Sunday listed twelve players. In Utena on Monday it listed ten, and Mike Boynton used eight of them. Everything worth reading in the second box score comes out of that one line.

Start with why it fell to ten, because Michigan said so plainly. Moustapha Thiam, Trey McKenney and Ricky Liburd all sat out with nagging injuries, rested as a precaution, and Lincoln Cosby and Jalen Reed remain out rehabbing the knee and the Achilles this site has already written about. Thiam and McKenney are the two names that were on Sunday's sheet and were not on Monday's, and both of them started on Sunday. Nothing here is a season-ending word. It is five men unavailable in the middle of a three-games-in-five-days trip, two of them from the starting five.

The scoreline barely moved. Sunday was a twelve-point loss to Lithuania's senior national team. Monday was a five-point loss to Lithuania's National B Team, 82-77, in a game Michigan tied at 73 and again at 75 inside the last five minutes. Say the discount out loud before going any further: these are August exhibitions against professionals, they count in nobody's record, and a number put up in Utena is not a number put up in the Big Ten. The minutes are still the minutes.

Four men over thirty-one minutes, a night after nobody reached it#

On Sunday, no Wolverine played thirty-one minutes. Brandon McCoy Jr. led Michigan at 30:26 and the bench outplayed the starters in raw time, 105:10 to 94:50.

On Monday four Wolverines went past thirty-one. J.P. Estrella played 35:34 and finished with seventeen points and seven rebounds. Quinn Costello played 34:34. Oscar Goodman played 32:04, took eight rebounds and handed out four assists. McCoy played 31:06. In a forty-minute game, four men were on the floor for at least seventy-seven percent of it. (These are FIBA quarters rather than college halves, and the clock stops differently, but the game is forty minutes either way, so those shares carry straight over to November without adjusting anything.)

Costello and Goodman are the two names to watch there, and for a reason that has nothing to do with fatigue. Both came off the bench in Vilnius. Both started in Utena, in the two places Thiam and McKenney had vacated. Boynton's Monday starting five was Cadeau, McCoy, Estrella, Costello and Goodman.

The seven points behind them#

Michigan's reserves scored seven points. All of them: Joseph Hartman six, Marcus Moller one, Malachi Brown none. The three of them played 44:33 and went three for twelve from the floor. Two more Wolverines were listed and did not get in, Howard Eisley Jr. and Harrison Hochberg, both at 0:00 for the second straight night.

The tidy comparison is that Michigan's bench scored forty on Sunday and seven on Monday, and the tidy comparison is misleading. Two of the three men who produced most of Sunday's forty were in the starting lineup by Monday. What actually happened is narrower and more useful: promote Costello and Goodman out of the second unit, and there is not much second unit left.

Lithuania's bench scored forty-three.

Michigan took more threes than twos#

Forty-three three-point attempts. Thirty-three two-point attempts. That is the shot chart, and it is the first time on this tour it has tilted that far: Michigan took thirty threes among sixty-five field goal attempts in Vilnius, and forty-three among seventy-six here.

The two numbers that come out of it are worth putting side by side. Michigan made seventeen of thirty-three inside the arc. It made eleven of forty-three outside it. Costello and McCoy each attempted eleven threes and made three.

The third quarter is where that arithmetic showed up as a scoreboard. Michigan scored ten points in those ten minutes, on five made shots, and went a stretch of more than three minutes without scoring at all. It had scored twenty-six in the first quarter. Lithuania went ahead 64-57 and Michigan spent the fourth quarter getting all seven of it back.

What Cadeau's minutes looked like from both sides#

Elliot Cadeau had nineteen points, eight assists and three steals in 22:09, and by Michigan's own account he scored or assisted on the team's first sixteen points. He also sat for 17:51 of a game decided by five.

Run the play-by-play and the two halves of his night come out like this. With Cadeau on the floor, Michigan and Lithuania scored forty-five points each. With him off it, Michigan scored thirty-two and Lithuania scored thirty-seven. That is a reconstruction from the official log rather than a published statistic, and the reconstruction totals to his official 22:09 exactly, which is the check. It is also a five-point gap in eighteen minutes of one exhibition, which is one possession and a free throw. Do not build anything on it yet. Two more of these and it starts to mean something.

His fifth foul, an offensive one, took him off with 1:33 left and Michigan trailing by two. He did not come back.

The last two minutes#

Cadeau's pull-up tied the game at 75 with 2:08 on the clock. Michigan did not score again until Estrella dunked as the horn sounded, off a pass from Brown, which made the final 77-82.

Boynton's read afterward went at the shape of it rather than the result. "We're seeing really, really good segments of basketball," he said, "and now we've just got to find a way for this group to sustain it." The quarters were 26, 21, 10 and 20. Segments is the right word.

Michigan flies to Croatia and closes the trip against Mega SUPERBET in Dubrovnik on Thursday, 1 p.m. Eastern. It is the third game in five days and the last look at any of this before November. The question it inherits is no longer who plays behind Cadeau. It is how many players Boynton has to answer with.

Sources: University of Michigan Athletics game release, quotes and the list of unavailable players, Tom Wywrot, August 24, 2026; official FIBA LiveStats box scores and play-by-play for both tour games; Michigan Athletics release, August 23, 2026.