Can Thad Matta break through in his third year after losing two starters to the transfer portal?
Team: Butler Bulldogs
2023-24 Record: 18-15, 9-11 in the Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Tied for eighth with Xavier, and won the tiebreaker for the #8 seed in the conference tournament
Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #61 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #96.
Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #57 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #123.
Postseason: After losing the 8/9 Big East tournament first round game to Xavier, Butler snagged a spot in the NIT. 25 Dawson Garcia points and 15 Elijah Hawkins assists later, the Bulldogs’ season was over following a 73-72 home loss in the first round to Minnesota. BU led by as many as seven in the second half and by 3 with 30 seconds left, but couldn’t bring it home.
Key Departures: If a basketball team is a Jenga tower, Butler isn’t losing the pieces on the very bottom… but they’re losing some pretty notable pieces that provided a lot of stability.
Jalen Thomas was the top rebounder on the squad last year at 6.2 per game, while Posh Alexander was the top assists guy at 4.6 per contest. Both are gone, and Alexander was #3 in rebounding as well. Both men were in BU’s top five in scoring, including Alexander chipping in over 11 points per game. Thomas was on his fifth year of eligibility, so his loss was expected, while Alexander elected to head to Dayton for his bonus season instead of sticking around in the Big East.
DJ Davis is the third and final major component to depart. He was #3 in scoring at north of 13.5 points per game, as well as #3 in assists at 2.6 a night. The 6’1” guard was only in Indianapolis for one year, and now he’ll spend his bonus season of eligibility with Washington. All three of these men started in every game they played in 2023-24, with Alexander missing a game against Creighton in February.
Key Returners: Butler will benefit from bringing back both of their top two scorers from last season, with both guys starting all 33 games and averaging over 32 minutes per game. Pierre Brooks will be a senior this fall after averaging 14.8 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 1.1 assists per game and shooting over 40% from deep. Jahmyl Telfort was the #2 scorer, edging out DJ Davis for that spot, 13.9 points to 13.5 points. The 6’7” Telfort wasn’t as likely as Brooks to shoot a three, and seeing as he hit less than 33% of them, that’s probably a net positive for the Bulldogs’ offense.
Since Butler is losing three starters from their rotation, you’d be correct to presume that they bring back a collection of rotation guys underneath the first five. Landon Moore, Finley Bizjack, and Andre Screen all played in all 33 games, and all three averaged somewhere between 12 and 16 minutes per game. Moore is the only one of the trio to earn a start, as he got the nod when Posh Alexander missed the one game in February. As a season average, the most notable thing from any of these three is Screen averaging 4.5 rebounds per game, which is a lot of rebounds for less than 13 minutes a night. If he had played enough minutes to qualify, Screen would have been top 60 in rebounding rate on both ends of the floor according to KenPom.com.
This is the part of the show where Marquette fans are shouting at their screens, saying “what do you mean, Finley Bizjack didn’t have anything notable about his season?!” Yes, he had 19 points on 5-for-10 shooting and finished with an effective field goal percentage of 65% in Marquette’s 78-72 victory over BU in Indianapolis on February 13th. 16 of those came in the second half, and at one point, he had scored 10 straight for the Bulldogs. Bizjack also came in averaging 3.9 points per game and finished the season at 4.2 a night. Yes, every night rotation guy. No, not an every night name on the scouting report, definitely not when you shoot 27% from long range for the season and 25% against Division 1 teams.
Key Additions: Butler has four freshmen on the roster. Two of them don’t even appear to have 247 Sports pages, a third doesn’t even make it into the top 280 of the Composite rankings….. but the fourth is Colt Langdon, who was #133 in the Class of 2025 but has reclassified to 2024. He’s a 6’7” forward who broke his high school’s all time scoring record and did it in just three years before departing to enroll at Butler. The previous record holder? Chris Clemons, which means that we’ve managed to talk about Camel Fighting in this blog. I don’t know if Langdon is actually ready to contribute in college hoops right now, but he also might be the closest of the four first year players on the roster.
Onwards to BU’s three transfers. All three of them probably qualify as “Well, if they take a jump forward…..” guys. Jamie Kaiser (6’6” guard/forward) played nearly 20 minutes a game as a freshman for Maryland last season, and his minutes were fairly consistent all year long. He only averaged 4.4 points and 2.0 rebounds for Kevin Willard, but if he had been hitting threes better than 27%, I bet that his scoring average would have been about three points higher. Kolby King (6’2” guard) arrives in Indiana after a year at Tulane where he averaged 10.4 points and 3.6 rebounds per game as a most-of-the-time starter, and he was a pretty effective long range shooter at 38%. If that name rang a bell in the deep back part of your brain, it’s because he was at St. John’s for Mike Anderson’s last year in charge. He didn’t do much there as the Red Storm went 7-13 in Big East play, and now King is back in the Big East.
The final of the three transfers is perhaps the one that draws the most curiosity, although more for off the court reasons. Patrick McCaffery (6’9” forward) is on his sixth year of college hoops after a redshirt freshman year and four seasons of action at his previous stop. As a part-time starter for the past three years, McCaffery averaged 9.7 points and 3.3 rebounds per game while hitting a perfectly acceptable 33% of his three-point attempts. You will notice that I have skipped over saying where he was playing up until now because 1) He was at Iowa and 2) Yeah, he’s the son of Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery. Why is he not spending his bonus season of eligibility playing for his dad like he did for the past five years? Is it just a “Iowa doesn’t have the graduate program I want to be in” situation? Does he just really want to hang out with his older brother and his girlfriend in Indianapolis?
Coach: Thad Matta, going into his third season in his second stint as BU head coach. He now has an overall record of 471-187 after stops at Xavier and Ohio State as well.
Outlook: On February 10th last season, Butler had just picked up a 75-72 home win over Providence to move to 16-8 overall and 7-6 in Big East play. They had won five of the last six, with the loss coming at UConn, which is easily forgiven especially since it was four days after winning at Creighton. They had a NET of 50, and three of their next five games were at home, including both Marquette and Creighton. To that point of the year, BartTorvik.com said that the Bulldogs were the #40 team in the country, posting the #29 offense and the #77 defense.
In short: Far from a lock for the NCAA tournament, but a team that had a chance to play their way into the bracket with a month left to go.
What happened? Five straight losses, and only a contest against a historically awful DePaul team broke it up. Butler lost by 22 at home to Creighton, by 10 at Villanova, by 12 at Seton Hall, and by 23 at home against St. John’s.
During that five game losing streak, from February 11th through March 1st, BartTorvik.com says that Butler was playing like the #145 team in the country. Finley Bizjack’s explosion against Marquette notwithstanding, the Bulldogs were ranked #213 in the country in offensive efficiency and #107 on the defensive end. That’s a far cry from a team that thinks they have a shot at the NCAA tournament, to say the least.
They folded like a cheap card table, beat Xavier in their last remaining regular season game to end up in a tie for eighth instead of in ninth, went to New York, lost to that same Musketeers team in the conference tournament, and then flubbed away a lead in front of their smallest home crowd of the year in the NIT to end their season.
Why does all of this matter?
Because to a certain extent, it’s a replay of what Butler fans watched in Thad Matta’s first season on the sideline.
In 2022-23, Butler opened up the year with an 8-3 record and maaaaaybe just maybe looked a little bit better than they were expected to be. A 3-10 start to Big East play said differently, as did their 6-14 finish. This time around, the wheels fell off 24 games into the season instead of immediately upon first contact with Big East competition.
There was a mass exodus from the roster after Matta’s first season, but we can’t say that happened again this year. Not to the same degree at the very least, but losing two of the guys that you brought in a year ago to fix things — Posh Alexander and DJ Davis — isn’t a particularly good sign, either. Making matters worse is that Butler and Matta heavily relied on their starting five all season long. Yes, bringing back Pierre Brooks and Jahmyl Telfort as the top two minutes guys is something in the general realm of good news, but losing the next three out of the rotation is not.
I don’t know if I see something in the new faces on the roster that jumps out immediately and says “ah, yes, this guy shall solve Butler’s problems.” Their non-conference schedule looks like a bunch of buy games with assorted winnable high major contests, outside of a road date at Houston in the Big East/Big 12 Battle, so there’s a real thought that they could be doing as well as 9-1 when they stick their hand into the Big East wheat thresher. Is that going to make any Butler fan feel good about how things are going if that’s what comes in? How far into Big East games will Butler have to get before the Bulldogs’ faithful starts thinking their team has a chance?
Or worse: What if they are 7-3 or somewhere below there? They’ve got what amounts to toss up games against SMU (at home), Northwestern (out in Arizona), and Wisconsin (at the Pacers arena in Indianapolis) on the docket, plus either Mississippi State or UNLV out in Arizona as well. Those games could easily turn on them, and if you can’t come out of non-con play with a win that says “hey, we’re a tourney team,” it’s going to be a very long Big East campaign……