ROSEMONT, Ill. - Kevin Borseth is all about the motivation.

He plans on using different stories to show that just because his team was picked to finish last in the Big Ten - or not picked at all - it doesn’t mean that will be the end result.

“I have to go back and tell them what place we finished,” Borseth said. “This is what people think. Let the games begin, see what happens. Talk is cheap.”

Borseth, though, understands why his team was picked at the bottom of the league. They bring in four new starters and will be fielding the youngest team Borseth has had in a career that spans 20 years.

So he’ll go back and tell the story of his father, who almost died this summer and is now 84-years-old and walking a mile a day, and he’ll bring up Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech, which centered around using people who counted him out as a motivation tool.

And he’ll hope it works to inspire a team not expected to do much this year.

Borseth knows he’s in the midst of a rebuilding job from a program that has struggled over the past decade.

“For the most part, the first two years went as predicted,” Borseth said. “First year was better than expected and the second year was a little more difficult because your expectations are higher.”

So while he won’t set goals with his team this year, he’ll prepare them for everything, both good and bad.

“I don’t know that we’ll really talk about (goals),” Borseth said. “But I think deep down inside, each one of us wants to have a good year obviously, we want to have a harmonious year, we want to get to the NCAA tournament and see where we can go from there.

“Without saying that, I believe the players feel that.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein