New Year, New Start

How D1 Transfers Have Performed So Far

A number of high profile transfers have become eligible over the last few weeks.

Jabari Brown has joined Missouri and his 14.7 PPG is helping mediate the loss of Michael Dixon.

Sidiki Johnson is now eligible at Providence. Oddly his debut has coincided with two of Providence’s worst games of the season, losses to Boston College and Brown.

And Khem Birch has finally joined the UNLV active roster.

It is far too early to evaluate these players, but for the D1 transfers that debuted in November, we’ve already collected a fair amount of data. Today I look at which transfers are performing at a high level, and which transfers have failed to crack the rotation.

With hundreds of D1 transfers, I will not have time to examine them all in this edition, but I’m going to focus on transfers into high major programs, former Top 100 recruits out of high school, and a few other small conference players who have caught my eye.

Let’s start with some of the super transfer teams. Missouri forward Laurence Bowers has overshadowed Alex Oriakhi this season, but by averaging 10 PPG and grabbing 20% of the available defensive rebounds, Oriakhi has certainly been a key cog for the Tigers. Keion Bell was a high volume shooter at Pepperdine, but he no longer has to force bad shots at Missouri. While Bell’s PPG has been cut in half, Bell has become an efficient player with his new team.

Transfers who have gone from one BCS school to another have generally fared very well the last few years, but Kevin O’Neil continues to be offensive kryptonite. Neither JT Terrell or Ari Stewart have been able to play any better offensively in their new home. Their ORtgs of 82.8 and 70.5 are horrific. Eric Wise has been better. Much like Keion Bell, Wise has found efficiency through judicious shot selection.

For Utah, Aaron Dotson was a Top 100 player out of high school and he originally played for LSU. Thus Dotson was earning a lot of press heading into this season. But of all of Utah’s D1 transfers, Dotson has easily been the worst.

At Boston College, Matt Humphrey was a starter and key contributor. At West Virginia, he is getting lost in the shuffle. Perhaps he got tired of the losing at BC, but right now it doesn’t seem like his transfer has worked out.

Gene Teague has been a huge surprise for Seton Hall. The former Southern Illinois center is turning the ball over less often, and that has allowed the aggressive low-post player to become an incredibly dangerous offensive weapon.

Oregon St. recently lost to Towson and while that was an embarrassing loss, I think it is important to note that this is not the same Towson team that won only one game last year. Jerrelle Benimon, Mike Burwell and Bilal Dixon all played in the Big East previously, and while none of them were obvious stars, all three have blossomed and raised their level of play at Towson.

Focusing now on individuals, the transfers I was most interested in watching this fall were mostly at the point guard position.

UCLA’s Larry Drew may not be scoring much, but he has become the ideal passer for Ben Howland’s system.

Arizona’s Mark Lyons has turned the ball over more often, but his scoring (particularly his ability to drive to the basket late in the game) has kept his ORtg above 110.

Other transfers point guards have not fared as well. Korie Lucious is shooting the ball better at Iowa St., but his turnovers are up which has negated his efficiency.

Ryan Harrow has finally earned John Calipari’s trust and he played major minutes in the loss at Louisville, but he is off to a much slower start than expected.

And Tavon Sledge has had the unenviable task of trying to replace Scott Machado at Iona. Sledge hasn’t been horrible, but he hasn’t quite been a superstar transfer either.

Two players whose efficiency hasn’t been perfect, but who probably do deserve more praise are Penn St.’s DJ Newbill and Illinois-Chicago’s Josh Crittle. DJ Newbill wasn’t expecting to be the full-time point-guard for Penn St., but with Tim Frazier going down to injury, Newbill has elevated his game.

Despite posting point guard like stats, Crittle is actually a 6'9" forward, but his passing and scoring has helped add to UIC’s depth. The Flames started the season 9-1 before losing their last three games.

Need some physical rebounding inside, the next group of transfers has delivered that. Let’s start with a lesson about two players who were not very efficient with their former schools.

At Minnesota, Colton Iverson was nicknamed the human two-by-four because of his brutal physicality and lack of a polished scoring game. But suddenly Iverson is a star for Colorado St. His turnovers are down and his scoring is way up. 

On the other hand, Wally Judge didn’t mesh with Frank Martin at Kansas St. And now at Rutgers his turnover rate is at a career high. At one time Judge was considered to have more potential than Iverson, but Iverson is the player who has succeeded more in his new home.

The story of Allan Chaney returning to basketball after missing three seasons remains a touching one and he has done the job at High Point. But big man DeShawn Painter cannot be happy with his debut at Old Dominion. While Painter has been scoring efficiently and rebounding at a high rate, ODU is having one of the worst seasons of head coach Blaine Taylor’s career.

Valparaiso has a handful of transfers who have been little more than bench players, but with Indiana now near the top of the rankings, it is fun to recall the time when Bobby Capobianco was counted on to be a significant contributor for the Hoosiers.

Need some big time scorers? This next group of transfers has provided some scoring punch.

First, I have to laugh that the story in the offseason was that Rotnei Clarke might be the point-guard for Butler. His passing has improved, but Clarke will always be at his best as a perimeter scorer. Clarke is shooting 47 percent from three-point range this season.

Dez Wells on the other hand, was expected to be a primary off-guard for Maryland. But with Pe’Shon Howard’s continued turnover problems, Wells' passing has proven to be a nice asset.

Bryce Jones was a top 100 pick out of high school, and has always been capable of putting points on the board, but he has never been an efficient scorer. And on a deep and talented UNLV team, his low ORtg is a killer. But he played probably his best game of the season in the narrow loss against UNC, and his athleticism continues to earning him playing time.

Taran Buie’s 97.8 ORtg might be justifiable given his aggressive shooting (27% of possessions when on the floor), but I mainly included him in this table to remember how much more talent Buie could have had around him. UConn transfer Jamal Coombs-McDaniel was expected to be playing at Hofstra and Hawaii transfer Shaquille Stokes was supposed to be in the mix as well. But Coombs-McDaniel is out for the year with a knee injury and Shaquille Stokes was arrested and suspended. Not every transfer works out.

This next group of transfers has just kind of been there. None of these players has been terrible – they have all made their team’s rotations – but they don’t seem to be doing too much.

Sam McLaurin of Illinois is a huge puzzle. The forward has grabbed 14 percent of the offensive rebounds this year, but only 8 percent of the defensive rebounds for the Illini.

I think Luke Hancock is a bad fit at Louisville. He isn’t really a spot-up shooter; he’s actually a versatile wing player. But at Lousville, he isn’t a better driver than Peyton Siva or Russ Smith. And so Hancock never gets the ball in his hands. The result is that his free throw rate is at the lowest point of his career. I think he was a much better fit at George Mason where he would get the ball in an attacking position much more frequently.

And finally, we have a group of transfers who have been disappointing. These players haven’t really brought anything to the table, no passing, no rebounding, and no efficient scoring. Bo Barnes hasn’t even scored yet in 10 appearances. Barnes did start a few games as a freshman at Hawaii, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to do something this year.

And Trey Zeigler has looked nothing like a former Top 30 recruit out of high school. Clearly his DUI caused Jamie Dixon to lose trust in the versatile guard, but for Zeigler to be averaging one third of the PPG he averaged last year has to qualify as a major disappointment.

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Today, I continue to preview the early season tournaments with printable bracket links, title odds, and commentary. Click here for Part 1.

Legends Classic Printable Bracket

The Legends Classic might be the most highly anticipated early season tournament because of the potential finals matchup between Indiana and UCLA. Both highly acclaimed programs have had struggles in recent seasons, and with both teams returning to the top of the polls, this game will generate more than its normal share of interest.

Indiana should have an advantage early in the season since they can depend so heavily on last year’s starting lineup. But I would expect at least one new face to make a big impact for the Hoosiers. Whether it will be freshman Yogi Ferrell, Jeremy Hollowell, or Hanner Perea providing a key spark, or the oft-injured Maurice Creek, the joy for the Hoosiers will be seeing which new player helps take the team to a championship level.

For UCLA, adding Top-5 recruit Kyle Anderson will be a big help, but the key question will be how such a tall lineup can function effectively. Offensively, UCLA needs to worry about its spacing and figure out what to do when teams dare the Bruins to take threes. Defensively, UCLA may have to play more zone than Ben Howland has ever utilized because his players may not have the quickness to keep perimeter players in front of them. But as Georgetown showed last year, a zone with four players 6’8” or taller can be extremely effective.

CBE Classic Printable Bracket

The expectations for St. Louis are somewhat lower now that head coach Rick Majerus has left the team for health reasons. But the Billikens returning lineup still looks strong enough to win the A10, and early in the season they should be particularly dangerous. Last year ineligibility issues limited the Jayhawks, but this year’s lineup looks like what you would traditionally expect from a Bill Self team. There are the veterans with Final Four experience like Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, and Travis Releford who should anchor the team in difficult situations. And there is a talented group of newcomers like Perry Ellis and Ben McLemore who should provide the athleticism to compete against the elite teams. Washington St. lineup is not strong enough to hang with the Jayhawks, but look for Kansas transfer Royce Woolridge to try to have a big game against his former team.

Maui Invitational Printable Bracket

I think that there is a misconception that teams are only exciting to watch if they have Final Four expectations. North Carolina may be in rebuilding mode, but in my eyes that actually makes them more fascinating to follow this year. Freshman Marcus Paige will likely take over at the point-guard slot, and given Roy Williams track record as a coach who lets his elite freshmen recruits play, the team may live or die by how ready Paige is to pilot the Tar Heels fast-break offense. But North Carolina doesn’t have to depend on Paige to win this year. Dexter Strickland has some experience as a point-guard from last season and I would expect him to play major minutes at point-guard as well. But the real key is that North Carolina doesn’t have to run-and-gun to win this year. All the returning talent at the 2-guard spot should mean that North Carolina has the profile of a team that will be lethal in the half-court. If they choose to go four-guards around James McAdoo, they could attempt to replicate what Missouri did last year, and be plenty effective.

More realistically, Roy Williams will try to develop a few more post players alongside McAdoo. And Tar Heels fans may have to wait patiently as freshmen forwards Brice Johnson and Joel James make their share of mistakes early in the season. But it is all part of the broader North Carolina strategy. While Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke teams are usually in top shape in November and prepared to dominate from the start of the season, Roy Williams runs his lineup to be peaking in March. And all the mistakes Paige, Johnson, and James make in November should be worth it late in the season.

As usual, Texas has high expectations because of its talent including seven players who were top 100 recruits coming out of high school. This year the hype is focused on freshman forward Cameron Ridley. But for a team that will be relying entirely on freshmen and sophomores, Texas is surprisingly experienced. Myck Kabongo, Sheldon McClellan, Jonathan Holmes, and Julien Lewis all played major minutes last year and should be poised for breakout seasons. Their experience could very well carry Texas to the Maui title.

Marquette also has a number of quality pieces if only Buzz Williams can find a way to put them all together. How will he best utilize a roster of offensive specialists (like Davante Gardner) and defensive specialists (like Chris Otule) will determine how far the Golden Eagles can fly. But Buzz Williams has proven he can fill in for major losses year after year, and I would expect nothing less this season.

On paper, Marquette’s season outlook isn’t much worse than that of North Carolina or Texas. But this tournament ‘s title odds aren’t based on team quality as much as they are based on match-ups. Texas gets the favorable draw on the south side of the bracket with non-D1 Chaminade and offensively challenged USC or Illinois in the semis. Meanwhile North Carolina gets a favorable first round match-up with a decimated Mississippi St. roster but will face a tough semi-final matchup. On the other hand, Marquette gets the worst of all worlds, likely needing to beat a much improved Butler team to even get a crack at the semis.

Cancun Challenge Printable Bracket

Iowa and DePaul are both slowly improving, but not at a rate that would perk any national interest.

Great Alaska Shootout Printable Bracket

The two most intriguing teams are teams that are switching conferences this year. Oral Roberts is joining the Southland conference where they will immediately be the favorite. And Belmont has dominated the ASun prompting the move to the OVC this year. Look for those two teams to meet in the final.

Battle 4 Atlantis Printable Bracket

Last year’s Maui invitational may have had more big names. But the 2012 Battle 4 Atlantis tournament may very well be the strongest early season tournament that we have seen in a long time. It would not be a surprise for all 8 of these teams to make the NCAA tournament at the end of the year.

I have already explained why Duke should expect a bounce-back season. And while Louisville might have the best defensive team in the nation, the team has enough questions on offense to keep Rick Pitino up at night. I have already written about Missouri’s talented transfer class. And Josh Pastner is becoming a better coach as his roster of talented players matures into upperclassman.

But the real story here is the first round underdogs that could still make a deep run. Minnesota brings back all its key players from last year’s NIT runner-up team and adds Trevor Mbakwe back into the mix. Mbakwe was arguably Minnesota’s best player prior to his injury, and so his return is huge for the Gophers. Former Blue Devil assistant Johnny Dawkins is sadly on the opposite side of the bracket as Duke. But behind superstar sophomore Chasson Randle, Stanford might just be able to steal a couple of wins to give Dawkins a shot at his mentor.

Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson took a veteran team to the NCAA tournament and upset Kansas three years ago, and he has a veteran team again this year. With all but one key rotation player returning, this looks like the year Northern Iowa makes some noise again. Finally, leading scorer Bradford Burgess is gone which will mean VCU will be searching for a new identity early in the year. But you can never count Shaka Smart out in a tournament setting.

Old Spice Classic Printable Bracket

This is another tournament where the mid-major squads should dominate. I can’t quite decide which under-the-radar player nationally I am more excited to see, Gary Bell Jr. of Gonzaga or Jake Cohen of Davidson. All Bell did last season was make 48% of his threes as a freshmen. And he almost single-handedly kept Gonzaga in its NCAA tournament game against Ohio St. last year. On the other hand, on a points per minute basis, few players are as productive as Davidson senior Jake Cohen. Cohen has never averaged worse than 12 PPG, despite never playing more than 62% of his team’s minutes. But when the season was on the line last year, he came up the biggest. Louisville’s defense was extremely stingy last season but all Cohen did was score 24 points against Louisville in the first round of the tournament.

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The older I get, the more I see that one of the things I love most about sports is the variety of it, the diversity of it and the CHARACTERS. Men’s tennis is at its best in many years because, for the first time in a long time, the top three or four players all have wildly different styles. The Tim Tebow story was fun on so many levels, but one of those levels was that he was just SO DIFFERENT in how he played — I’d say we are entering a great time for quarterbacks, because Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers and Eli Manning and Drew Brees and Michael Vick and Cam Newton and Tebow and others are not really alike at all.

-- Joe Posnanski

As a basketball fan, I’ve never understood the division that exists between fans of the NBA and the NCAA. While the NBA has the best basketball players in the world, March Madness is compelling in its own right and as entertaining as anything that happens on the professional level.

In the NBA, the owners of the 30 franchises consider turning a profit and getting an equal shot at the top players a right, regardless of how well (or how poorly) they run their organization and the respective size of their fan-bases. Since every losing team is a few ping pong balls from the rights to a LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Dwight Howard, personnel determines scheme in the NBA.

In contrast, the vast majority of the 344 Division I programs in college basketball have little chance of ever receiving a commitment from a McDonald’s All-American. But instead of petulantly trying to sabotage the sport in a misguided effort to legislate fairness, schools try many creative ways of leveraging the talents of the players they can recruit. As a result, scheme determines personnel in the NCAA.

At Syracuse, Jim Boeheim has made a Hall of Fame career out of running a contrarian scheme, in his case an aggressive 2-3 zone. The Orange traditionally have rosters full of “1.5’s”, 6’3+ combo guards lacking the quickness to defend elite PG’s and the size to defend SG’s, and “3.5’s”, 6’8+ combo forwards lacking the quickness to defend elite SF’s and the size to defend PF’s. However, because Syracuse never plays man defense, the athletic deficiencies of their players are minimized.

So while nearly every NBA team runs a fairly similar system of isolations, pick-and-rolls and man defense, an incredibly diverse array of styles can be found in the college game. On one end of the spectrum, teams like Missouri play four guards and pressure the ball 94 feet for 48 minutes, on the other, teams like Wisconsin run a deliberate motion offense, trying to minimize the number of possessions and shoot at the very end of the shot-clock.

In the NBA, the players are too good for the “40 Minutes of Hell” system (which Mike Anderson has brought to Missouri and Arkansas in the last few years) to be successful. Like Mike Leach’s bizarre pass-happy offense in college football, Anderson’s system, which he learned as a member of Nolan Richardson’s staff in Arkansas in the 1990’s, has philosophical holes that professional athletes can exploit. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining on the collegiate level.

And with 68 teams set to compete in the NCAA Tournament, there are a lot more surprises in the college game. Even programs ranked in the top-15 like Murray State have barely been on national TV this season.

We have a pretty good idea of how teams like the Pacers and the 76ers match up with the top of the Eastern Conference but not whether an undersized Murray State squad can handle the size of an elite team from a Power Six conference. It’s an open question how Isaiah Canaan’s speed and athleticism translates outside of the Ohio Valley Conference. Non-conference play in college basketball generally ends in late December, so it’s almost impossible to gauge how younger teams like Texas, Washington and Tennessee who have found their groove in the last two months will fare in March.

In the NBA, it’s hard to envision a scenario where Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City aren’t three of the final four teams left in the playoffs. In the NCAA, as many as two dozen teams have a legitimate shot at making a run at the Final Four.

Of course, in terms of entertainment, none of this makes the NCAA necessarily better or worse than the NBA, just different. But, as Posnanski writes, there’s something to be said for the concept of “different” in the modern sports world. Basketball fans of all stripes should enjoy March Madness; the NBA will still be here in a few weeks.