UCLA men’s basketball coach Mick Cronin spent the offseason trying to atone for the mistakes that plagued last year’s team, which went 16-17.
Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Cronin were having a conversation last May when he turned to leave and let the nine-time NBA champion get back to his practice. As Cronin walked away, Kerr noticed a list in Cronin’s back pocket and asked what it was. Kerr was blown away by the fact that Cronin had a list of free agents his team needed.
“Our list of needs, our budget,” Cronin said of what he wrote down. “He was blown away. He goes, ‘What is going on?’”
Well, what’s going on is that team building in college basketball now resembles the NBA more than ever before. Because of the advent of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness (NIL) coming into play, college programs now have to augment their roster yearly.
Because of rampant player movement, talent is more spread out as teams decide whether they want to live in the portal or build from within. Those two different modes of team building will likely define the Big Ten this season.
The league might not have a team that is a dominant power, but it does have a deep stable of teams that could contend for the top of the conference. All 18 teams ranked in the top 75 of KenPom’s preseason rankings.
Six teams — Indiana, UCLA, Illinois, Michigan State, Ohio State and Purdue — all received first-place votes in the annual preseason media poll.
Purdue coach Matt Painter — who won the Big Ten last year and is predicted to win this year — prefers to recruit high school players, but he’s not oblivious to the realities of the portal. He picked Lance Jones from Southern Illinois University and he was one of Purdue’s most indispensable players.
But the Boilermakers opted not to add any players through the portal, instead banking on internal improvement with three starters returning.
“I’ll go into the portal when I have to,” Painter said. “I don’t think it’ll be my decision. We’ve taken two guys out of the portal in four years. I do not think we can continue at that clip.”
From a roster-building standpoint, the portal is a fascinating tool. The portal results in more immediate gratification — USC added 11 players through the portal — than the slow process of developing high school players. However, living in the portal can be taxing for a coach trying to sustain a program.
“It’s impossible for somebody not to live in the portal that gets a new job,” Painter said. “But I think everybody would rather do it the way we’re doing it, but I don’t think everybody is in that position because there’s so much change in college basketball.”
Michigan coach Dusty May was a coach who had to revamp his team almost from scratch. May took over the position in March and was active on the recruiting front, securing six players from the portal — guards Tre Donaldson (Auburn), Roddy Gayle Jr. (Ohio State) and Rubin Jones (North Texas), forwards Sam Walters (Alabama) and Danny Wolf (Yale), and center Vladislav Goldin (FAU) — and three players from the high school ranks.
May was able to revamp the roster to be competitive more quickly because of the portal, and he secured some highly recruited players which is impressive given Michigan’s struggles getting transfers admitted. He was intentional about the type of players he pursued; May wanted players with a reputation for passing rates and reputations for being good teammates that came from winning programs.
Though he acknowledged that rampant roster building is the new normal in college basketball, he wants to build his program similarly to how he ran FAU.
“We put a lot of time and effort in recruiting high school players, and we would like retention and continuity to be staples of Michigan basketball going forward,” May said. “We would like a majority of our roster to be freshmen coming in and growing together, learning and having some institutional knowledge of Michigan.”
There’s no right or wrong way to approach roster building. Indiana revamped their team through the portal, adding However, cohesion and chemistry are two components that will define who will win the Big Ten this season, and it can be any number of teams that finish season atop the rest.