The Georgia Bulldogs got some big basketball news yesterday when guard Noah Thomasson committed to play for them in the coming season. The guy is a straight up bucket, averaging 19.5 points per game last season while shooting 38.6% from three. He's a high quality scorer and will slot right into their starting lineup for 2023-24. However, this also comes right on the heels of Blue Cain, a four star shooting guard in the class of 2023, committing to the Bulldogs last week. It brings up a larger question about roster building in the transfer portal era that I wanted to briefly dive into here.
For most of the 2010s, the ideal roster building strategy at the highest level of college basketball was to load up on 5 star talent and hope that you had the guys who would acclimate the quickest. John Calipari's Kentucky teams early in the decade set the standard, stockpiling 5 stars en route to a national championship and three additional trip to the Final Four between 2011 and 2015. They had the #1 recruiting class every year except for 2014, when the honor went to Duke, and signed an astonishing16 5 star prospects over 5 classes. Duke quickly followed suit, and had the top recruiting class from 2016-2018, in addition to that 2014 class that led them to a national title the following season. However, more recently with the advent of the transfer portal, a new way to build a roster emerged. You could quickly add proven talent to a roster and forgo freshmen all together, taking the known quality over the unknown. The face of this transfer heavy approach is undoubtedly Eric Musselman, first at Nevada and now Arkansas. The jokes of him being in contact with literally everyone in the portal are funny for a reason: he takes a lot of transfers. In his final year at Nevada, when he won 29 games and finished the season in the top 25, he ran out an 8 man rotation in which 7 guys started their careers at other schools. Other coaches quickly caught on that transfers could provide an immediate talent injection and, along with the change in NCAA rules that allowed for immediate eligibility, transfers quickly became the name of the game for almost every major program.
We now stand at something of a roster building crossroads. Freshmen are having a smaller impact than ever, with just 17 of the top 100 recruits last season averaging in double figures scoring, and the transfer portal being the new fad, with most fanbases being more excited about signing a transfer than an incoming freshman these days. In my opinion, the optimal roster construction involves a healthy balance between returning players, incoming freshmen, and transfers. Look at the team who finished #1 in last seasons AP Poll: Alabama. Their starting lineup consisted of: one new transfer (Mark Sears), two freshmen, including a five star (Brandon Miller and Noah Clowney), and two returners (Jahvon Quinerly and Charles Bediako). The rest of the rotation was freshmen (Jaden Bradley and Rylan Griffen), a JuCo transfer (Nick Pringle), and returners (Nimari Burnett and Noah Gurley). Quinerly, Burnett, and Gurley were all previously transfers as well. There's plenty of continuity on the roster, but also allows for ceiling raising talents to come in and elevate the level of the team, as evidenced by the three leading scorers all being newcomers in 2022-23. But I would argue they could only thrive because there was such a strong foundation of returning talent to begin with. This sort of roster construction is similar among many of the top teams last year, just look at Kansas, Houston, Marquette, and the two teams in the national championship, UConn and San Diego State. They all relied on a solid mix of returners and talented newcomers, and had great success. Meanwhile, Musselman's Arkansas, while having an impressive collection of talent, went 8-10 in SEC play and was an 8 seed in the tournament. Of the 9 guys who averaged double digit minutes played, only 2 had previously played for the Razorbacks. It can still be a successful strategy, Arkansas made the Sweet 16 and lost to the eventual national champion, but clearly, continuity helps.
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Mike White will have to carefully navigate his rotation next season to keep everyone happy |
What is most interesting to me now is how coaches find the correct balance of freshmen and transfers, and specifically, how to balance their minutes. This is where Georgia really comes into focus. They've brought in a lot of new talent this year, adding four transfers and four freshmen to the program, in addition to returning some guys. In the backcourt alone, Justin Hill returns, Thomasson transfers in, and Cain and Silas Demary enter as transfers. Cain and Demary have both committed in the past few weeks, and I would imagine both guys wouldn't have committed to the Bulldogs if they didn't think they would get a chance to showcase their talents right away. Maybe that isn't the case, and Mike White's sales pitch told them they'd have limited minutes year one before seizing large roles as sophomores. But given they had no shortage of suitors, I bet all four guys in that back court want to be playing 25 minutes a night, which just isn't possible. It's the same story on the wing. Jabri Abdur-Rahim and Jusuan Holt return after playing around 20 minutes a game last year, RJ Melendez transfers in from Illinois, and four star Mari Jordan joins the fray as well. Front court? Same issues. Matthew-Alexander Montcriffe started 26 games for Georgia, Frank Anselem played 15 minutes a night, Jalen Deloach and Russell Tchewa are transferring in, and Dylan James is a top 75 freshman in the country. There just aren't enough minutes to go around, so there are bound to be some unhappy players in the locker room. And these days, with the portal being so prominent, when players get unhappy, they will simply take their talents elsewhere. Back to Musselman's Arkansas program, they've already seen two recruits who were top 100 kids in last year's class, Derrian Ford and Barry Dunning, leave because the path to minutes was simply too tough given all of the transfers that join the program every year. Now, there will probably be transfers no matter what you do, it's just the way the game is played these days. But Georgia is simply exacerbating their problem by having such a gluttony of talent. They have more guys who can play than available minutes, and they run the risk of losing guys who could be positive contributors in a couple of years by chasing a few short term wins. Now, for Mike White, who's job may just be on the line this season given he went .500 last year, a few short term wins are very valuable. But it's a tightrope walk to continue bringing in transfers because eventually, some guys just won't work, and you won't have any foundational pieces who have been there for two or three years because you recruited over them and they left.
I'd personally be shocked if all four of these freshmen are on the roster for the Bulldogs next year given the way college basketball currently works. And I really don't mean for this to be doom and gloom for Georgia fans. I think the team will be much improved next year and in contention for a tournament bid thanks to all their new talent. They're simply the most recent example of a new problem for coaches to navigate in the transfer portal era that I find fascinating. I wonder if building a roster like this is sustainable in the long term, not just for Georgia, but also for the Arkansas' of the world. Musselman seems to have course corrected this year: after taking 6 freshmen last year, he's only signed 2 for the upcoming fall, and is going all in on the transfer portal once more (although there are rumors he's involved with uncommited 5 star Ron Holland, which will once again create a minutes crunch in Fayetteville). It's even happening at the biggest programs in the sport, with Kansas losing two players from the 2022 class transferring out this offseason, both of whom were 4 star recruits. And Kansas will in all likelihood be very good this coming season. I'm just simply wondering if there is such thing as taking too many transfers and having too much talent on your team. In my mind, the programs that are relying on the portal for a roster refresh every year are walking a very fine line to continue having a close to 100% success rate, because if you don't, the cupboard will be bare behind them, full of the ghosts of players who rode the pine and left for greener pastures.
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