The Athletic - Winners of Men's Basketball Transfer Season

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In the early stages of the offseason, in that wild, boundless moment when seemingly every player in college basketball was throwing his name into the transfer portal, a funny thing happened: Everyone mentioned Kentucky. Or, OK, not everyone, but it felt like it. A player would announce his decision to enter the portal, and within a few days or a few hours or a few minutes it became clear that said player was “strongly considering” — or at least listed among his final, like, eight choices or whatever — Kentucky. At any one point at least a couple dozen guys thought they were playing in Lexington next season, roster limits be damned.

Within this messy landscape, one thing was clear: John Calipari wasn’t messing around. The defining recruiter of the modern college basketball era was coming off a horrendous season, would be losing more than a few players who didn’t work out a season ago, and would approach a massive offseason with his classic brand of ferocious salesmanship. He and his staff would cast a wide net. They would track down anyone who could help them win basketball games, and quickly. The transfer portal provided a kind of opportunity that once suited Calipari’s freshman-led teams in the height of his mid-aughts’ recruiting dominance, the chance to remake your roster entirely in the matter of one offseason. This much was clear: By the time the new season rolled around, one way or the other, the 2021-21 Kentucky roster would be remade.

And so it has been. A good deal of this expected improvement will come, per usual, from the freshman class, where Kentucky has already landed five-star power forward Daimion Collins, a top-10 newcomer in the Class of 2021, and where No. 30 overall player Bryce Hopkins will be in the mix too. (Nolan Hickman’s decommitment stings, but that’s not really what we’re ranking here, anyway.) Really, one of the bigger gets of Kentucky’s offseason came all the way back in January, when UK landed West Virginia forward Oscar Tshiebwe, a highly effective, proven high-major interior piece — one of the best rebounders in college basketball on his best day, and the type of rugged, veteran big Kentucky desperately missed a year ago. This spring, after all of the dozens of potential Kentucky enrollees gradually weeded themselves out, the Wildcats emerged with one of the best perimeter pieces anywhere, Davidson guard Kellan Grady. He was a four-year starter at Davidson, where he never averaged fewer than 17.1 points in a season, and where he shot 492-of-900 from 2-point range and 233-of-644 for his career beyond the arc. For a Wildcats team that consistently depressed its fans with bad (or just plain nonexistent) shooting from range in 2020-21, the idea of watching Grady operate for 30-plus games next season must sound like heaven.

And he might not be alone. Iowa guard C.J. Fredrick, a native of Alexandria, Ky., who starred at Covington Catholic, is expected to wind up back in Lexington whenever he announces his transfer decision in the coming days. It would be a huge surprise for him to end up anywhere else, frankly, so much so that we’re basically including him for the purposes of this exercise. And, yeah, that thing we said about Kentucky being able to shoot now? Fredrick is one of the best perimeter shooters in college hoops. He could totally change how Kentucky can — and frankly should — play offensively. The shot charts will look so much better.

Of course, Fredrick’s decision still awaits formal announcement, and Kentucky is still figuring out plenty of things about its roster, up to and including Davion Mintz’s decision to test the draft waters and whether guys still on campus working out with the team ultimately decide to return. The roster may look even more different in a few weeks’ time. But however things shake out, the players added via transfer already indicate what felt pretty apparent from the very beginning of the offseason, if not sooner: No one was going after the transfer portal harder than Kentucky. It already has paid off.

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In a men’s hoops landscape dominated by transfers, perhaps no 2020-21 team was a better example of the brave new world than Arkansas. Eric Musselman, a former NBA head coach with very modern ideas on roster building and player development, and one who has had great success with transfers, built almost an entire rotation on transfers, had some minor struggles early in league play while everyone figured it out, and then turned his Razorbacks into a low-key juggernaut from the start of February on. (Arkansas went 11-2 in its final 13 games, one of the two losses by single digits in the Elite Eight to eventual national champ Baylor. Not too shabby.)

No surprise, then, that Musselman is right back at it again. You can already start to see how the latest arrivals in Fayetteville will begin to gel with their new teammates, and with each other, once they all get on the same page. In the meantime, it’s hard to decide which piece Arkansas picked up ranks as the best. Guard Chris Lykes was a projected All-ACC pick who shot 38 percent from 3 as a junior in 2020 before injury robbed him of most of his 2021 season at Miami, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to imagine him leading Arkansas’ attack next season. Then again, South Dakota transfer Stanley Umude did average 21.5 points, seven rebounds and three assists in 32 minutes per game this season. The 6-foot-6 forward is a super-high-volume attacking wing with legitimate playmaking skills. He had a 21.0 percent assist rate with just 13.5 percent turnovers and shot 35 percent from 3 to boot. He’s really good.

Umude was maybe the best mid-major talent in the portal, and/or the most productive, and he’ll dovetail quite nicely with 6-foot-6 Pitt transfer Au’Diese Toney, who profiles similarly and will give Musselman at least two players who can do multiple things on offense and switch almost everything on the other end. The more the merrier. If you watched Arkansas even a little bit this season, you can already start to picture what this finished product is going to look like. Hint: It will be fun to watch, but not very much fun to play against.

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