Tennessee hoops will once again rely on transfers

The transfer portal has drastically altered the landscape of college basketball, for Tennessee and every other program in the country. The influx of new faces into a program in the summer is nothing new, but what’s changed is that these days more often than not the newcomers are veterans and not wide-eyed freshmen.

The off-season has always been important in college basketball. And it can be argued, based on their track record of player development, that Tennessee’s staff and head coach Rick Barnes has done a better job than most of putting the summer months to good use.

Things have shifted a bit though with the proliferation of the transfer portal. Off-season development is obviously still pivotal. But now instead of just trying to get a handful of freshmen up to speed while also working with your returning veterans to get better, it’s also vitally important to integrate experienced transfers into your existing roster.

Tennessee has four transfers; Chaz Lanier, Igor Milicic, Felix Okpara and Darlinstone Dubar who all figure to play major roles on this year’s team.

In the past figuring out how to mesh four transfers who are going to play big minute with an experienced core coming off an Elite Eight run would have been a big story.

These days in college basketball it’s just par for the course and Tennessee’s showed last year—with Dalton Knecht’s decimation of the SEC—that they have a plan to assimilate new talent with existing talent.

According to assistant coach Rod Clark, that plan isn’t all that different from how the staff was previously operating.

“I don’t think it’s changed our process much,” Clark said of using the summer to incorporate transfers into a roster with veterans who have been successful. “If you ask coach, I think he could say the same thing, expectations are just what they are.

“We spent the first few practices of the summer, I think kind of going through baby steps and doing more teaching, talking guys through, helping guys understand why we do things and why we want to do them at this pace and this speed and now we’ve kind of knocked the training wheels off.”

It’s probably safe to surmise that the ‘Dalton Knecht Experience’ is one reason that the Tennessee staff is facing the challenge of working four talented transfers into the existing roster.

Tennessee could have hired a slick Madison Avenue advertising agency and giving them a blank check to come up with a campaign to endorse the Vols’ program as an attractive landing spot for transfers and it wouldn’t have been as effective as a 10-minute Knecht highlight clip culminating with him walking across the stage and shaking Adam Silver’s hand last month.

Knecht didn’t just mesh with a good Tennessee roster last year. He was the best player on the team and the best player in the conference. But he didn’t alienate teammates in the process of dominating. He was embraced with open arms, and that that kind of detail, along with the prolific numbers he put up and the success he had, is the kind of thing that transfers notice when they’re looking for a landing spot.

Generally speaking, older players who enter the portal are looking for a a few specific things. They want to win. They want to go to a program where they’re going to get some exposure and they want to go somewhere where they can feel reasonably confident they’re going to get developed.

Well, it’s hard to check those boxes more emphatically than Tennessee did with Knecht last season.

“It was great,” Clark said succinctly of the impact Knecht had on Tennessee’s reputation with players in the transfer portal. “We’ve always been big on development and he was a guy that no one really knew much about a year ago or around this time a year ago and now everybody in the world knows him because he plays with Los Angeles Lakers and because of the success he had.”

“I would say, as far as recruiting, obviously it’s been great. You know, every kid that can shoot the ball who is 6-foot-7 thinks that they can come here and play that way, which is not that easy (he said with a chuckle), but definitely, we reap some benefits from it for sure.”

It’s unlikely that Tennessee—or anyone for that matter—is going to find a hidden gem in the portal like Knecht from a small school that bursts onto the college basketball scene to become a legitimate national player of the year candidate.

Maybe Tennessee doesn’t have a first-team All-American among its quartet of transfers, but the Vols definitely have brought in four guys who are going to play huge roles on this team. That much is already apparent from summer workouts.

The addition of the high-scoring Lanier (19.7 ppg, 44% from three last season) stole a lot of the headlines back in the spring when the class was first assembled, but there’s a lot more to like about this group than Lanier’s scoring prowess.

But the Vols also transformed their interior with the addition of Okpara and Milicic. For starters the Vols will be longer in the post now when those two are on the floor together than they were with Jonas Aidoo and Tobe Awaka.

The new duo also possess a much different skill set. Okpara doesn’t have the offensive skill set that Aidoo had, but he brings a much different level of athleticism and energy to the five spot.

For his part, Milicic is a different kind of ‘four’ than Barnes has ever had since he got to Knoxville. At 6-foot-10 he’s got enough toughness to bang inside (8.5 rpg last season at Charlotte) and he can also step out and be a legitimate threat from outside the arc.

“Igor is, is different. When I talk about the guys that have changed the dynamic of our team, he’s probably one of the main guys that you think about since coach has been here,” Clark said of Milicic’s potential impact.

“You guys have watchedTennessee basketball, when have we had a guy play the four at 6-foot-10 who can dribble, pass and shoot. And when I say shoot, I mean he could possibly shoot 38% plus three.

“He plays really, really hard. You know, his dad is, is a high level coach program in Europe and his dad called in and said, Igor said his hardest thing he’s ever done and it’s the most fun basketball he’s had.”

In the current era of college basketball recruiting the transfer portal has very obviously become a point of emphasis.

But that’s just the beginning, you’ve also got to blend those newcomers in with your exiting team, something that can be easier said than done at times.

Tennessee showed they’re more than capable of handling that last season. If the staff can pull the trick against could be another memorable year.