Basketball Recruiting: With Four Sit Out Transfers, What Can We Expect Of The Broncos Next Season?
Boise State adds mid-season transfer in Devonaire Doutrive.
Contact/Follow @HardwoodTalk & @MWCwire
Leon Rice has to figure out how to put some pieces together next year.
Boise State in part has been a small player in the transfer market that has effected low, mid, and high-majors alike. Where other teams around the Mountain West have either been on the benefiting end of the graduate transfer rule or have seen their best players year in and year out looking for greener pastures.
Boise State has seen little to any departures that change the landscape of their team overnight and has partaken minimally in bringing graduate transfers in from other programs to provide an instant boost to their roster.
This is the world college basketball fans live in now, and your star player could catch the eyes of a high major coaching staff one game and be on a plane at semester break before you blink. Or your coach’s reputation will precede him nationally and you could build a small dynasty around transfers in the biggest little city in the world.
Now your team could be on either end of this and we have seen team’s across the country either benefit from it or have their talent pool wiped clean annually from it, but it’s something Boise State’s head coach Leon Rice has slightly avoided during his time in charge of the Bronco’s program.
Rice has found success during his time in Boise after coming over as an associate head coach from powerhouse Gonzaga under arguably one of the best coaches of the century, Mark Few. His first season in charge was the Bronco’s last in the WAC and he took a team that finished eighth the previous year to second the next.
He then took the program to the Mountain West to compete at a level that only those inside the program may have thought they were capable of. Rice is only the second coach at Boise State to have taken the program to multiple NCAA tournament appearances and the only one to reach seven 20-win seasons in its history.
Now, in a college landscape that witnesses names entering the transfer portal day in and day out Rice has weathered the storm. He hasn’t needed to bring in transfers in bulk like we’ve seen at Nevada or New Mexico, or has he lost his most talented players to bigger programs like Colorado State or San Jose State.
Rice has been able to ride it out by bringing in relatively unknown talent and developing them at a high rate which has been relatively unnoticed around the conference, well besides on game day.
This isn’t to say he has completely abstained from bringing in transfers all together, but up until this past off season there was a very countable four players brought in from other division one schools during his tenure. Guard Lonnie Jackson came over from Boston College for the 2015-16 season as a graduate transfer. Followed by guard James Reid who sat out the 2015-16 season after coming over from Arkansas-Little Rock.
Lastly the additions of graduate transfers Lexus Williams (Valparaiso) and Christian Sengfelder (Fordham), who helped boost a talented 2017-18 squad to a second place finish in the conference and a NIT appearance.
Other than that, Rice has found a competitive formula that includes recruiting guys out of high school, international players mostly out of Australia and bringing guys in from junior college. Each outlet for recruits proving effective for him and his coaching staff throughout the years. Star Broncos Derrick Marks, Chandler Hutchinson and Paris Austin were all recruited to Boise out of high school.
Hutchinson still the schools highest ranking recruit all-time per 247 sports during the modern ranking era.
Australian players have had a huge amount of success for Boise State too. Guys like Anthony Drmic, Igor Hadziomerovic and maybe most popular Nick Duncan, have been major impact guys during their time at ExtraMile Arena. And don’t forget about junior college recruits who have been key to Rice’s success.
His first team in Boise was led by two former junior college stars in La’Shard Anderson (Irvine College) and Robert Arnold (Antelope Valley College), not to mention James Webb III (North Idaho College) who is one of only two Broncos coached by Rice to play in the NBA (Hutchinson being the other).
So where guys have built programs around transfers and others unable to grow them because of their departures, Rice has done it a bit differently until now. It’s hard to stay on the sideline for long and in 2018-19 Abu Kigab a former Oregon Duck transferred into the program at semester break.
Even though Kigab was a top-200 ranked recruit out of high school and coming from a high major program was impressive, this in and of itself wasn’t a program changing addition. As I said, Rice has brought transfers to Boise in the past but this became a trend in the coming months.
Next was former five-star guard Emmanuel Akot who left Arizona in February, then former East Tennessee State big man Mladen Armus said he’d join the program May 4th, and former Portland Pilots leading scorer Marcus Shaver Jr. did the same just four days later. The latest addition from the transfer portal was more recent, as Akot’s former teammate Devonaire Doutrive another former top-100 recruit announced he was transferring to Boise State via twitter in early December.
So with five seniors on the roster and leading scorer Derrick Alston Jr. (a redshirt junior) still on the radar of NBA teams, we can begin to speculate on the future. There are three high school players committed to the Broncos with speculation that one may serve a two-year mission before enrolling in school. So expect a grand total of at least six new faces on the court next season with possible additions in the coming months. But for the first time during Rice’s tenure we see a team filled with expectations. He has been able to do a lot with guys who may have been relatively unknown in high school or abroad before successful seasons under him in Boise, but next year should be different.
Looking forward
There are a total of three former top-200 ranked recruits sitting on the bench right now, one more than the program has had in the last twenty years. And though stars or ranking systems may not mean a whole lot to everyone that equates to a combined 35.5 PPG, 4,730 minutes played and 253 games played at the division one level. It’s hard to scout a high school, junior college or FIBA under-19 game and see that kind of proven production in a group of players and get all of them to come to your school in the same year. Now how you mold all of those proven players and talent into one team that you put on the court every night is another question.
It is certainly something to try and contemplate, and I’m sure Leon Rice and his staff have been thinking this over all year. But the same questions arise no matter what team or coach you are talking about in these kind of situations.
“How do you find minutes for all of those guys?”
“These guys were the stars on their past teams, how do you get them all to share the ball effectively once you have figured out a way to divide up all of those minutes?”
In recruiting sometimes promises are made, how do you manage a locker room where those promises need to be adjusted or sometimes broken in order to put W’s in the win column. It’s a lot, and it takes a certain kind of coach to start it up and keep it thriving. I for one am really looking forward to next year in Boise, we will see what path Alston Jr. takes and who else may join the Broncos. And for a program who has consistently looked at multiple avenues for bringing in talent the past decade, well see how the transfer portal favors them in 2020-21.
