With a disastrous season coming to a close, Seton Hall coach Shaheen Holloway vowed to hit the transfer portal to restock the roster for next season.
The portal opens March 24 and Holloway and his staff should have plenty of free time to dive in once their season ends, likely next week at the Big East Tournament.
“Man, I”m going to hit everything, man," Holloway said in response to a question from NJ Advance Media following The Hall’s 79-61 blowout loss to Creighton on Senior Night.
“You name it, I’m going to hit it.”
The Pirates (7-23, 2-17 Big East) are losing Dylan Addae-Wusu, Chaunce Jenkins and Yacine Toumi to graduation, and it’s possible others could opt to transfer out.
There are some key pieces who still have eligibility assuming they don’t leave: freshmen Jahseem Felton and Godswill Erheriene, sophomores Isaiah Coleman, Scotty Middleton, Garwey Dual, David Tubek and Gus Yalden and juniors Prince Aligbe and Manny Okorafor.
Holloway said this year’s team -- which currently sits in last place in the Big East -- never reached its potential due to injuries. Zion Harmon also left the team early in the season and turned out to be a wasted roster spot after transferring in from Bethune-Cookman.
“There’s a bunch of what-ifs, right?” Holloway said. “What if with Zion? What if with Garwey if he was healthy? What if Dylan didn’t get hurt? What if Chaunce? There’s a bunch of what-ifs.
“I just know that this team is better than what we showed this year, and that’s the disappointing part, that’s the frustrating part. We had some good moments, we just can’t finish it out, man. This team played hard and I’d be willing to bet you that too many teams don’t want to play us in the [Big East] Tournament because of how hard we play, right? I don’t know. We just never got a chance to put it together. Too many people were out at different times.”
The good news is that there is hope for Seton Hall in the portal because their budget is expected to grow from its current level of $1.5 million in the wake of the House settlement coming in April.
“The House settlement would just create a cap [of $20.5 million],” according to Jason Belzer, a professor at Rutgers Law School and is founder of Student Athlete NIL, an agency that manages more than 40 NIL collectives. “Even if it doesn’t get settled and go to trial, schools still intend on paying their student athletes. So they can proceed even with some of the uncertainty.”
In a day when top players in the transfer portal are receiving high-six and low-seven figure payments, Seton Hall simply hasn’t been able to match that to keep its best players from leaving. Kadary Richmond (St. John’s) and Dre Davis (Ole Miss) transferred out of last year’s NIT championship team for bigger NIL deals. Both are now excelling for their new teams, and Richmond helped lead St. John’s to its first outright Big East regular-season title in 40 years.
“You know, it’s not a level playing field,” St. John’s coach Rick Pitino said this season. “I’m hoping that revenue [sharing] comes in for Seton Hall and everybody basically gets the same, and then you’ll see Seton Hall just as good as every team in the league. Right now, they don’t have the revenue that most of the other teams have. Probably it’s the lowest in the league.”
Starting after this season, Holloway and his staff have a chance to remake their roster in hopes of a better season next year.
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Adam Zagoria is a freelance reporter and Basketball Insider for NJ Advance Media. You may follow him on Twitter @AdamZagoria and check out his Website at ZAGSBLOG.com.