Column: Different challenge at hand as Penn State basketball hopes for linear progression

Penn State basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry tied a neat little bow around his offseason mission following the conclusion of the Nittany Lions’ 2021-22 campaign.

“Don’t take steps back to take steps forward,” he said. 

The Nittany Lions concluded their season with a nice run in the Big Ten Tournament. They dispatched a bad Minnesota team and upset former Nittany Lion guard Jamari Wheeler and Ohio State, before giving Purdue — a top-10 team in the country — all it could handle. 

The optimistic onlookers will choose to interpret that as a sign of things to come. It very well could be. Shrewsberry did well to mold this Penn State team — patched together by five scholarship transfers — into a cohesive group. 

He did little to make anyone doubt his coaching chops. Shrewsberry employed a slow, methodical style that kept the Nittany Lions in games against opposition in a different tax bracket when it comes to talent. Penn State struggled to turn those narrow defeats into wins before earning some catharsis in Indianapolis against Ohio State. Still, the year-one showing is worthy of praise. 

But his second-year challenge is totally different. 

Why? Two words: Five freshmen. 

Penn State was old in 2021-22. Only one power conference program had more experience on its roster according to data compiled by KenPom.com. That was Providence. The Friars punched their ticket to the Big Dance as a No. 4 seed. 

RELATED: Penn State transfer portal needs expand with Sam Sessoms exit: Analysis

The Nittany Lions will lose four players with five years of experience to their names ahead of next season: John Harrar, Greg Lee, Jaheam Cornwall and Jalanni White.

Senior Sam Sessoms entered his name in the transfer portal on Wednesday. Myles Dread can return for a fifth season, but hasn’t yet made his intentions public.

Granted flexibility upon his arrival by the departure of seven scholarship players, Shrewsberry smartly maneuvered smartly in the transfer portal to replace them with a group of veterans who could win some games in year one. They were coachable. They bought into his notion of defense first, and Penn State closed the year with the best scoring defense in the Big Ten. 

Now, Shrewsberry has to mold a quintet of freshmen into something similar. Or, as he alluded to in his end-of-season press conference, he must work the transfer portal again to provide them with some cover — this time with far less roster space available. 

“For next year’s team, we do want to add a couple older guys so we don’t have to lean on those freshmen just to be primetime players right off the bat, which is really hard to do as a college freshman,” Shrewsberry said. “No matter how good you are, freshmen struggle a little bit.” 

Certainly, there are capable players within Penn State’s freshman class. 

Guards Jameel Brown and Evan Mahaffey, along with forward Kebba Njie, are each ranked inside the top-200 prospects in the cycle, according to On3’s Consensus rating.

RELATED: Where PSU basketball targets stand in updated On3 rankings

They are, however, freshmen — as Shrewsberry emphasized. The Nittany Lions didn’t have a single first-year player on their roster this year. 

“The time that we have in the summer will be really important to get those freshmen up to speed as quickly as possible,” Shrewsberry said. “They’ve got to learn our system in terms of what we do, how we guard, how we play, so using that time wisely is something that’s gonna be really beneficial.” 

Indeed, it’s worth noting that Shrewsberry and his staff will have something more representative of a ‘normal’ offseason this time around. 

The Nittany Lions won’t need to re-recruit their entire roster, which Shrewsberry said proved to be a considerable time suck last spring. Their transfer portal needs will not be nearly as expensive, and COVID-19-related restrictions seem unlikely to be as prevalent. 

Penn State can devote itself to this new challenge — one that more closely resembles long-term program building rather than scrambling to make the Nittany Lions competitive in a single-season one-off. 

“I’m excited about really digging in and teaching these guys,” Shrewsberry said. 

“We’ll get a chance to, offensively and defensively, kind of establish how we want to play and what we want to do.” 

The demands of the short term linger over all of that. There is momentum to be seized from what the Nittany Lions were able to do in Indianapolis to close the season. 

Can Shrewsberry get these five freshmen ready to play at the Big Ten level quickly? If not, can he buy them some time with a few key transfers?

Time will tell. But to take steps forward without any steps back, that’s what it will take.