The NCAA transfer portal gave and took away locally in men’s hoops

Since the entrance door of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball undergraduate transfer portal is now closed, and most of the movement is finalized, it’s a good time to look at how the local programs fared in this wild offseason of free agency.

Let’s look at the Big 5 schools (yes, Drexel, too) in rough order of how they fared:

Maybe Villanova benefited in one huge sense from missing the 2023 NCAA Tournament. Maybe alumni who had been told they had to contribute to an NIL collective saw the stark need for it. Business as usual wasn’t going to cut it. Pay up or stop dreaming of playing with the big boys.

They obviously paid up.

By every metric, Villanova got in the game for transfers. The Wildcats even took in a transfer staffer, with Baker Dunleavy leaving his job as Quinnipiac’s head coach to become general manager of ‘Nova hoops, another sign of how seriously this new world is being taken on the Main Line.

» READ MORE: Baker Dunleavy as Villanova’s basketball ‘general manager’ shows importance of NIL

The Villanova model of developing players over a longer stretch of their college careers — say goodbye to it, at least for now. Transfers are in from the Big Ten (Hakim Hart, Maryland), the Pac-12, (TJ Bamba, Washington State), the SEC (Lance Ware, Kentucky), and last but certainly not least, the Atlantic 10 (Tyler Burton, Richmond). This all means veteran help developed elsewhere is on the Main Line, but only for a season or two.

We’re putting ‘Nova on top here not simply because of any of the new arrivals, but also the retention of Justin Moore. Multiple sources say Moore was almost out the door, but Villanova’s collective came through and he’s around for one more year. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this move. Say Moore had left … would Eric Dixon have stayed? Would all those portal newcomers have come?

Anyone who judged Kyle Neptune by his first season as a head coach simply wasn’t looking at the roster. Now, this is Neptune’s team. His tenure should be judged by how it all plays out. His biggest challenge might be figuring out how all this talent can coexist. Always a nice dilemma to have, a rich school’s problem. That’s ‘Nova, by any metric.

It was tempting to put SJU at the top of the list for the simple reason that retaining Erik Reynolds II was so vital to the Hawks, just as important as Moore’s staying is for ‘Nova. The Hawks saw some bench pieces hit the portal, but the starters remained, led by Reynolds. With a big freshman class coming in, keeping Reynolds and having Cam Brown come back, and young talent such as Rasheer Fleming staying put, the decision to stay with Billy Lange already has paid dividends.

The Big 5 “newcomers” enter as one of a handful of schools nationally that didn’t lose any players to the portal. The Dragons also added a key piece in Lucas Monroe, who couldn’t stay at Penn as a graduate student but decided to walk down the street to another school that had recruited him hard as an Abington High player.

The Owls suffered the biggest local losses during their coaching change but added enough key players from the portal to show there is a future on North Broad Street. When you lose players to Houston (Damian Dunn), Arkansas (Khalif Battle), Penn State (Zach Hicks), Cincinnati (Jamille Reynolds), and Memphis (Nick Jourdain), you have to acknowledge that you’re almost starting over.

Retaining Hysier Miller at point guard, and Jahlil White as a player who contributes at both ends, will provide the holdover stability, while bringing in Jordan Riley from Georgetown, Steve Settle from Howard, and Matteo Picarelli from UMBC indicates that Adam Fisher can make moves. How big, these moves? That heavily depends on how big the collective war chest grows in the near future.

The Quakers already knew they were losing graduates such as Monroe and Max Lorca-Lloyd, who is going to UMBC. Then Jordan Dingle hit the portal. The Big 5 player of the year had sat out classes during the pandemic year, so he still had a season of eligibility plus a year of classes to get his Wharton degree. Instead, Dingle announced he was going back to his hometown, transferring to St. John’s. The Quakers will have to replace Dingle’s points, but with Max Martz, Nick Spinoso, and Clark Slajchert returning, the cupboard isn’t bare. Still, the Dingle loss is the biggest individual loss in the Big 5.

If there’s a poster child this offseason for how the transfer portal is rough on mid-majors, it could be the Explorers. First, the Drame twins, who found a solid home after transferring from St. Peter’s, hit the portal. Let’s assume they wanted to stick together for a third school, but maybe they didn’t find a market for two such similar players. They ended up at Duquesne, which ended its 2022-23 Atlantic 10 Tournament with a loss to La Salle, so it hardly seemed a competitive step up for them, whatever the NIL dollars turned out to be.

The Explorers lost another big part in Josh Nickelberry. The rumors were out there during portal season that while Nickelberry was high on his La Salle experience, he might join his cousin Kevin, who was out as Georgetown associate head coach when Patrick Ewing was let go but joined Leonard Hamilton’s Florida State staff. Sure enough. A significant loss for La Salle, with Nickelberry returning to the ACC, where he began at Louisville.

All three of those players, who had started their careers elsewhere, are living proof that the transfer portal can provide but just as quickly can take away.