Penn guard Jordan Dingle enters transfer portal, has Calipari connection

A familiar name in more ways than one is on the market. Penn shooting guard Jordan Dingle will enter the transfer portal today, per multiple reports. Why should Kentucky fans care? Dingle was the second-leading scorer in college basketball last season, averaging 23.4 points per game, and is the son of Dana Dingle, a member of John Calipari’s 1996 UMass team.

So far, Indiana and Washington have already expressed interest, per Travis Graf. Dingle is also testing the NBA Draft waters. He earned Ivy League and Philadelphia Big 5 Player of the Year honors last season and was also a finalist for the Lou Henson Award, given to the most outstanding mid-major player. He will have two seasons of eligibility remaining.

The Athletic’s CJ Moore and Sam Vecenie updated their Transfer Portal player rankings this morning and Dingle is No. 3 behind Hunter Dickinson and Tylor Perry.

The nation’s second-leading scorer and Ivy League Player of the Year should have no shortage of suitors. This is a big one to hit the portal late. Dingle’s father, Dana Dingle, is the director of the New York Lightning, a Nike EYBL grassroots team, so he has relationships all over college basketball. Dana also played for John Calipari at UMass. His son is a three-level scorer who averaged 23.4 points and did so efficiently for such a high-usage player. Dingle helps himself get buckets with his movement off the ball. He knows how to free himself, back-cutting or using screens to get loose. He’s also so strong that a teammate can just lob the ball to him and he’s able to hold his defender off.

Dingle is a good catch-and-shoot guy — 40.2 percent on those opportunities, per Synergy — but he had to do most of his work off the bounce because he always had a defender glued to him. He knows how to create space and get to his spots. He can play through contact at the rim, and he also has a nice floater in traffic. He’s also a willing passer when he draws two to the ball. It’s clear through his numbers he’s put the work in to be a good shooter. He shot 33.9 percent from 3 and only 58.3 percent at the free throw line as a freshman in 2019-20. The Ivy League did not play the next season and when he returned as a third-year sophomore, he shot a nearly identical percentage from 3 on a higher volume but bumped his free throw percentage up to 81 percent. This past season he shot a career-best 35.6 percent rom 3 and 85.6 percent at the line. Dingle is also testing the NBA Draft waters.

Over three seasons at Penn, Dingle averaged 19.5 points, 3.5 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and 1.1 steals per game, while shooting 34.4% from three-point range. He is a high-volume shooter, averaging 2.5 threes per game on 7.4 attempts in his career. Last season, he scored 18 points, including four threes, in Penn’s loss at Missouri in November and 25 points in the Quakers’ loss at Villanova in December.

Antonio Reeves is expected to return to Kentucky for another season, but adding another shooter following the departure of CJ Fredrick, and another legacy player alongside DJ Wagner and Adou Thiero? It’d be worth it just to have Justin Dingles on both the football and basketball teams. Watch him work below.

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