Head coach Sean Miller has made some decisions about his roster. Will they work the way he wants them to work?
Team: Xavier Musketeers
2023-24 Record: 16-18, 9-11 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Tied for Eighth with Butler, lost the tiebreaker by way of 0-4 record against Creighton & Marquette.
Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #56 out of 362 teams, down from their preseason rank of #34
Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #61 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #79
Postseason: After proving that they should have won the tiebreaker with Butler, Xavier got stomped on by UConn in the Big East tournament quarterfinals. They were still doing fine enough to get an invite to the NIT….. even though they had a losing record at 16-17 at the time……. and then they gave up a 17-2 run and fell behind 65-42 in the second half to a Georgia team that went 6-12 in the SEC and couldn’t recover to keep their season going. Only lost by 2, but I think we can figure out when they actually lost the game.
Key Departures: There was a massive shift in the roster from last season, with five players electing to leave Xavier with eligibility remaining, and four of them had more than one year left. Quincy Olivari was always in Cincinnati for just one season after spending four years at Rice, so it’s not a surprise that he’s gone now. He led the team in scoring at 19.1 points, helped along by canning over 40% of his team high 7.6 three-point attempts per game. After that, adding 5.6 rebounds, 2.1 assists, and 1.4 steals per game was just decorating an ice cream sundae, to be honest.
Abou Ousmane is gone after one season with the Musketeers, and it’s not like the Brooklyn native wanted to get closer to home. He came over after three years at North Texas, led Xavier in rebounding with 6.4 per game, including posting a top 40 KenPom.com offensive rebounding rate, and then headed back west to spend his bonus season of eligibility at Oklahoma State.
Generally speaking, guys electing to do something else with their bonus year doesn’t throw a red flag for me, even if it is a guy leaving after one season. Guys leaving after their freshman or sophomore seasons, moving on from the coach that they chose to start their collegiate career? That’s a little intriguing to say the least. Desmond Claude fits that category after electing to stick with Xavier through the coaching change that put the current administration in charge. After a pretty notable bench role as a freshman, he started all 34 games for XU this past year and was #2 on the team in scoring at 16.6 points per game. Now he’s at USC.
Guys bouncing after one season isn’t that odd, particularly in the transfer portal era, especially when they’re an international player who didn’t attend high school in the United States….. but it is interesting when three guys do that all at once. That’s what we have with (in descending order of average minutes played) Gytis Nemeiksa, Lazar Djokovic, and Sasa Ciani. All three averaged somewhere between 13 and 19 minutes per game, none of the three had a major impact on the stat sheet even though Nemeiksa did start 20 times and Djokovic started seven times in his 28 appearances. None of these guys were critical load-bearing components for the Musketeers last season, but they were also rotation players, and both Djokovic and Ciani were freshmen. Now, instead of making a second year jump in Cincinnati, they’ll be at Hawaii, College of Charleston, and Illinois-Chicago respectively instead.
Key Returners: There are three guys returning from last year’s active roster and five familiar names coming back on the 2024-25 roster for the Musketeers.
Let’s talk about the three guys that we saw last year for Xavier. First amongst them is probably Dayvion McKnight, who had a very good first season after transferring from Western Kentucky. He was as advertised, maybe a bit better in fact. The 6’1” guard averaged 12.4 points, 3.7 rebounds, and a team high 4.8 assists per game. McKnight is the top returning guy in points and rebounds as well, which definitely helps draw a picture of exactly how much the Musketeers have lost from lsat season. As far as “maybe a bit better” goes, McKnight was a 31% three-point shooter on a bit over one attempt per game for WKU, but he knocked down over 37% on 2.5 attempts for Xavier.
The other two returning guys were freshmen last year. Trey Green averaged 13.5 minutes coming off the bench in all of his 33 appearances last season, and he added 5.6 points per game. Dailyn Swain picked up three starts in his 29 appearances last season, as he missed the final five games of the season after an appendectomy. In nearly 19 minutes a night, he chipped in 4.6 points and 3.0 rebounds per game. Neither Green (6’0”, 160) nor Swain (6’7”, 200) were productive three-point shooters for the Musketeers, but XU wasn’t really trying to shoot a lot of threes in general a year ago.
I phrased the first sentence of this section very carefully and on purpose. Three of the returning players were on the court in 2023-24 for Xavier. The other two returning players haven’t played a Division 1 game since March 24, 2023. In fact, one of them, Zach Freemantle, hasn’t been on the court for Xavier since January 28, 2023. He missed the rest of that season with a foot injury, had surgery to fix it, and then re-injured the same foot and then had surgery again last summer. So yeah, he didn’t play at all last season after that. He was cleared for non-contact work in January, so there’s no reason to think he’s not 100% healthy for the start of the season. When the 6’9”, 225 pound Freemantle went down in 2023, he was averaging 15.2 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 2.9 assists per game while shooting — and this is not a joke — 63% from three-point land even though he was only attempting one per game on average. I mean this 100% seriously: If he’s completely 100% healthy and back to where he was in the winter of 2023, Zach Freemantle is a Big East Player of the Year candidate.
The other guy that we know but haven’t seen in a minute is Jerome Hunter. The 6’8”, 215 pound forward from Columbus, Ohio, entered the starting lineup in place of Freemantle in 2023, and averaged 10.3 points to go with 5.9 rebounds per game. A reasonable thing to think when the 2022-23 season ended was “well, if Xavier can figure out how to get more of that on the floor from Hunter with Freemantle at the same time, that’s a heck of a dynamic duo.” That plan got shot out of a window not only by Freemantle’s re-injury, but also by Hunter suffering a cardiac situation in an offseason workout last summer. Hunter had been cleared for workouts in the middle of last season….. and then he tore his Achilles tendon in early February, so he never got a chance to get back on the floor before the season ended.
Key Additions: With a total of eight guys on last year’s roster not returning for next year, you’d better believe that there’s a metric ton of new faces on the roster. The most interesting part of about the eight new guys is that only one of them is a freshman…. and he’s carrying that Preferred Walk On status.
And so, we move on to the seven transfers.
Five of them will only be with Xavier this season since they’re on their final year of eligibility. Four of those guys are only eligible because they have a COVID bonus season to play.
Two of them come to Xavier with question marks out of the gate. Cam Fletcher and John Hugley missed the end of the 2023-24 season due to injury. In fact, Fletcher has only played 17 games in the last two seasons because of his injuries. Hugley missed all of his third year at Pitt before missing the last eight games of last season with a knee injury that required a procedure. Is now a good time to mention that multiple leg injuries for a 6’11”, 260 pound guy isn’t great news? It’s probably not great for Fletcher either, as he missed time with knee injuries, and he measures in for the Musketeers at 6’7” and 230 pounds. Fletcher averaged 10.8 points and 7.5 rebounds for Florida State before his injury in 22-23, while Hugley was adding 8.4 points and 3.8 rebounds in only 18 minutes a night for the Sooners last season.
Marcus Foster (6’5”, 215 lb, Atlanta, Georgia) and Dante Maddox (6’2”, 200 lb, Chicago Heights, Illinois) give the Musketeers experienced players in the backcourt. Foster was at Furman for the past four seasons, and he saw his role increase and grow every single season, including getting into the starting lineup as a sophomore. As a senior, he averaged 17.0 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, however he was shooting way too many three-pointers. During his sophomore and junior years, Foster was a 36% three-point shooter, as a senior on nearly seven attempts a game, he was hitting less than 30%. Maddox spent two years at Cal Fullerton before playing at Toledo for the last two campaigns. He was in and out of the starting lineup for the Titans and almost always started for the Rockets. Over the past two seasons, Maddox averaged 13.3 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 2.3 assists per game. He’s a 40% career three-point shooter and knocked down over 42% of his attempts with Toledo.
We’ve got one transfer coming in with three years of experience and no COVID bonus season, and that’s Lassina Traore. The 6’10”, 240 pound Ivory Coast native had an unremarkable first collegiate season with Saint Louis before playing for Long Beach State for the past two years. He averaged a double-double for The Beach this past season at 12.4 points and 10.4 rebounds, and Traore’s ability to pull in misses had him in the top 90 in rebounding rate on both ends according to KenPom.com.
Finally, we have two transfers with eligibility remaining after 2024-25, and both men are on their third college home now. Roddie Anderson (6’3”, 190 lb, Orange County, California) was a most of the time starter for both UC San Diego and Boise State, and he saw his numbers fall a little bit in the move to the Broncos. He averaged 6.5 points, 3.0 rebounds, 2.4 rebounds, and a bit over a steal per game last year, but Anderson’s under 29% from long range on 2.5 attempts per game for his collegiate career. Ryan Conwell (6’4”, 215 lb, Indianapolis, Indiana) started at South Florida and bounced closer to home to play for Indiana State this past year. He was a most of the time starter for the Bulls and then started every time for the Sycamores as they went to the NIT title game. He made a big stat jump, which makes sense when your minutes go from 18 to 34 per game. Conwell averaged 16.6 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 2.5 assists per game and he was draining more than 40% of 7.1 three-point attempts per game.
Coach: Sean Miller, entering his third season in his second stint at Xavier. He has an overall record of 465-184 including his tenure at Arizona in between his two runs with the Musketeers.
Outlook: To steal a phrase from CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander, TRIVIA TIME!
When was the last time that Sean Miller coached a team with a losing record? I’ll give you a little help. His first year as Xavier head coach the first time around was 2004-05, and his first year at Arizona was 2009-10.
Any guesses?
Yep, you in the back of the room, goofing off and saying what you thought was a silly thing just to be ridiculous, you got it right. That was a trick question. Sean Miller has never coached a team with a losing record before last season. His first Xavier team went 17-12, and his first Arizona team was 16-15. He came close again in 2018-19 when the Wildcats were 17-15, but that’s it.
The general consensus seems to be that Xavier’s going to bounce back to being a good basketball team this coming season. The aforementioned Gary Parrish has them at #24 in his top 25 And 1, and BartTorvik.com projects the Musketeers to make a big ol’ jump up from last year, installing them at #37 in the preseason projections. And as long as everyone on the roster is available to play a reasonable amount of expected minutes all season long, that seems like a pretty solid projection for the Musketeers. Sean Miller’s a good coach, there’s a lot of talent here, why not expect them to be better, even with a big roster turnover?
Except…… that seems like a lot to ask from a team with three returning players, two gigantic returning injury related question marks, and two gigantic transfer injury related question marks. The fact of the matter is that the Torvik algorithm can’t do anything but take what a player has been in the past and project what they will be in the coming season. That’s why Zach Freemantle is projected as the #2 contributor on the roster.
But what if all of the surgeries and rehab have sapped his ability to be an All-Big East First Team caliber player? What if he’s healthy but not what he used to be? If you use Torvik’s RosterCast and subtract him from the roster, the Musketeers dip to #53. The algorithm doesn’t project Jerome Hunter to have as big of a role, so pulling him out of the mix drops the X-Men down to only #48. It’s reasonable to wonder what kind of condition Hunter is in after returning from a cardiac event and then needing to rehab an Achilles injury before actually getting cleared from the cardiac issue.
Now, sure, there’s a middle ground between “is what they used to be” and “not in the lineup at all,” but it certainly feels like Xavier’s NCAA tournament hopes are pinned to both Freemantle and Hunter just being the same dudes as they were the last time that we saw them. That feels like it’s pretty unlikely, and that’s before we get into the fact that Xavier’s also kind of hoping that Cam Fletcher and John Hugley don’t have any residual injury issues that will hamper them. To put a point on it, if you pull all four guys out of the Torvik algorithm….. all of a sudden Xavier’s #62 in the country in the preseason projections. Maybe they’re all going to be fine, but if they’re not, then how does Sean Miller adjust to not being able to coach the roster he thought he was going to have? It didn’t go all that well last year when he suddenly didn’t have Freemantle or Hunter as expected, and by “didn’t go all that well,” I do in fact mean “it was the worst year of Sean Miller’s career.”
And speaking of Sean Miller’s career…….. Freemantle and Hunter are out of eligibility after this season. So is McKnight. Five of the transfers are only here for one season. Xavier has zero scholarship freshmen on the roster. Does this sound like a program that Sean Miller is expecting to be coaching in November 2025? It sure doesn’t look like it to me. In fact, it looks like the kind of roster that you put together when you want to win a bunch of games and prove that you can win in the portal era in order to get a new job and you’re not worried about what you’re leaving behind for the next guy. What happens to Miller’s attention span if Xavier finds themselves needing wins down the stretch to get into the NCAA tournament but he’s also getting texts from his agent about jobs that are about to open up? What’s worse for Xavier: Sean Miller does enough with this mashup of guys who won’t be here next year so he won’t be here next year either….. or Sean Miller is still in Cincinnati on April 1st and needs somewhere between five and eight new transfers to fill the empty spots on his roster?