The season is here, and I'm certain of very little
I’ve spent a (frankly) embarrassing amount of time over the last seven months thinking about the 2024-25 Providence Friars. And so it’s all the more embarrassing that, as I sit here on the cusp of the season, I don’t know what to expect of this team. Yet again, Kim English nailed the offseason by bringing in six pieces to build the sort of depth he admitted was lacking last year, and yet there were enough key departures and enough uncertainty about how this core will come together that the season could go any number of directions. Even if I don’t have strong takes on where PC ends up in March, I do have some thoughts.
For those of you looking for many more words on the Friars, please read Kevin Farrahar at FriarBasketball and Brian Reddy at pcbb1917.com. And here are many words on the other 10 Big East teams:
Here are the three most important things contributing to my optimism entering the season followed by the three that point in the other direction.
Reasons to Believe…
Shooting: PC shot the most threes it ever has last season in Kim English’s first year in charge. George Mason, likewise, set a program record in English’s first season. But unlike at George Mason, where the Patriots made 35.7% of their threes, PC made just 32.5% in 2023-24, and that lack of shooting gravity made the offense stodgy. There was just one offensive metric where Providence ranked in the top 150 nationally, and that was 2-point field-goal percentage, thanks mostly to two preternatural bucket-getters in Devin Carter and Josh Oduro.
Carter and Oduro are gone now, which means the offense will need space. The good news is that Kim English brought in spacers. Jabri Abdur-Rahim, Bensley Joseph and Christ Essandoko should be reliable spot-up shooters to go with returners Jayden Pierre and Rich Barron, not to mention Justyn Fernandez, whose reputation is as a knock-down shooter.
Even if Miyakawa doesn’t think as much of Essandoko’s likely shooting equity as last year’s small-sample numbers (37% on 38 attempts) would indicate, English has fielded a roster of shooters this year, raising the ceiling of the offense. Too many 3-pointers can mean inconsistent offense, since the randomness of 3-point shooting from game to game can make for wide fluctuations. However, my hope for this team is that the spacing generated by the shooting means more driving lanes that lead to the easy buckets and free throws that are the building blocks of good offense. If PC is good offensively this year, it will probably be because its shooting is much better, thereby making everything else on offense easier.
Depth: To requote my quote of Kim English from a column this spring: “We got caught with our pants down [this season] ... without the depth we needed — where we're going to build this roster to withstand an injury or two. We're going to have 13 dudes next season."
That was after PC lost to UConn on Senior Night, and English was not messing around. There are 13 scholarship players and a walkon (Nilavan Daniel) who could realistically see minutes and, more than that, English can run out a nine-, 10- or even 11-man rotation as good as any seen in Friartown since 2000-01 (when 10 players averaged 12 minutes) or perhaps 1993-94 (hello, freshman Austin Croshere playing the ninth-most minutes).
To my opening point on uncertainty, I don’t know who the ninth, 10th or 11th players are on this roster, and that’s a good thing. This summer I had penciled in Corey Floyd Jr. as ninth man, Justyn Fernandez as 10th and Ryan Mela as 11th. Floyd looked like one of the best players on the floor vs. UMass and Mela looked precocious despite limited practice reps. That so many players were unavailable vs. UMass due to injury (we’ll get to that) isn’t great, but this is the whole point of depth. It may be needed; it may not be needed — but if you don’t have it, no one has sympathy when you come up short of your goals in March. This team should have the depth of players needed to weather an untimely illness or short-term injury, and that wasn’t true last year.
First-year coach becomes second-year coach: According to much beloved and reviled college basketball statistical pundit Ken Pomeroy, a coach in his first season at a program tends to underperform the roster. It makes sense – everything is new and with newness comes a learning curve and the need to establish a culture from the ground up. Of course, first-year struggles are not universal (hello, Jerome Tang), but a young coach moving up a level and facing some of the most accomplished coaches in the profession is bound to have some growing pains. Then, add in that English’s preseason all-Big East performer went down in early January, and that made the first season even more trying.
This is not to imply that English’s first season was either a disappointment or underachievement. Twenty-one wins on Selection Sunday was no worse than could have been expected for a team picked seventh in the preseason. That the team missed the NCAA Tournament is mostly a historical anomaly due to how Champ Week frustrated the Friars’ at-large hopes and to having to play five games against execrable DePaul and Georgetown. English showed he could build a top defense without a top rim-protector, and he was able to keep the team together through the season’s ups and downs.
All that is to say that I am hopeful for is a second-year bump. English has a year of Big East learning under his belt; his program is established; and seven of his 13 scholarship players are back from last season. That should mean something – it’s unclear how much – when it comes to implementing an offense and defense, not to mention having already laid the groundwork in establishing program expectations and culture. It means that each road trip will be the second time this staff has done it (more than that, in some cases, for Dennis Felton). Familiarity may breed contempt, and newness can be exciting, but it also comes with a mental and perhaps emotional toll. Think of it with your own workplace – after years of messaging via Slack, you’re told you must move to Microsoft Teams (not speaking from personal experience, of course). The friction of the transition alone is costly, even if Teams were better. Friartown is clearly better than George Mason (unlike the move from Slack to Teams), but all that change comes with a cost.
I’m hopeful that a more settled program – yet one still at a fever pitch of energy and passion – can mean more winning.
Reasons for Concern…
Shot creation: I define shot creation as the ability of a player to generate good shots for himself or for teammates. It often means a player who can create shots off the dribble or penetration to find teammates for open looks or finish those opportunities himself. PC’s two best “shot creators” from last season – Carter and Oduro – are gone. With better shooting (see above), the need to create something from marginal advantages is somewhat mitigated, but every team needs players who can create their own disadvantages with the ball in their hands.
There are five players who have some traits of a primary shot-creator, but all come with question marks. Hopkins is coming off the injury and is also a limited passer, though he showed flashes as a sophomore. Cardet has carried a high usage and has shown decent assist rates, but that was at Chicago State, and even at that level, he couldn’t crack a 105 offensive rating. Joseph has never had a very high usage, barely cracking 18% for a career-high last season and with just a 102 offensive rating. Pierre exhibited major growth last season, but even then he didn’t crack a 100 offensive rating or 20% usage. Finally, Essandoko had the highest usage on a talented Saint Joseph’s team and scraped over a 100 offensive rating as a freshman, but his turnovers (more on this later) and inexperience are concerning.
Shot creation can be a team project, rather than needing to fall on one player, but ultimately every lineup needs enough of it to bend the defense in order to get the open looks that every good offense requires.
Turnovers: Typically, an offense that is heavy on 3-pointers is light on turnovers. This is not an ironclad law, of course, but teams who shoot more threes tend to do — on average — less driving into traffic, posting up and interior passing, which means less of the sorts of passing and dribbling in areas most likely to lead to deflections, fumbling, traveling, charging, etc. Only nine of the 33 teams that shot more threes than PC last year turned the ball over at a higher clip than the national average. But despite the Friars jacking up 45% of their attempts from deep in conference play (second most in the Big East to Villanova), PC still had the league’s fourth-worst turnover rate and finished 212th nationally. There are a few reasons for this, but part of it is that English’s offense is a reads-based one that requires proper mental processing to make the right decisions. Make the wrong decisions or the right ones too slowly – and do your reads tentatively – and turnovers are bound to come.
The Friars said goodbye to Carter and Oduro, two high-volume players who had relatively low turnover rates last season, and they will likely be putting the ball in the hands of Pierre, Joseph and Cardet, three players who have struggled with turnovers for much of their college careers. The projected starting center Essandoko was one of just seven players 6-foot-10 or taller who played 30% of his team minutes while sporting usage and turnover rates greater than 22% (below is the list of all players who hit the 21% mark for both usage and turnover rate):
Essandoko’s season was full of caveats – long layoff from competitive play, injuries, etc. – but it means that one of PC’s most common lineups this year with Pierre, Joseph, Cardet and Essandoko plus a forward may struggle with turnovers.
Players can improve – and, even in season, the Friars saw their turnover rates decrease last season even as the defenses improved in league play. And the comfort the returners should have with the offensive system should lead to fewer turnovers of the head-scratching variety. Still, turnovers will be a concern for me this season until Pierre and Joseph, in particular, prove otherwise.
Injuries: We know that Hopkins is out for at least the first few games as he recovers from surgery to repair the ACL tear he suffered in January. He’s expected back at some point before the calendar flips to 2025, and speculation pegs his return any time between mid-November and New Year’s Eve (or even later for the pessimists).
Some absence for Hopkins was always baked into the season, but the injuries have been hitting in waves. Barron had labrum surgery right after the season (though the labrum was injured last summer); Abdur-Rahim had a foot issue; Mela was suffering from a back injury. For Pierre, it’s a groin problem; for Cardet, an ankle; for Essandoko, a hand or wrist.
English’s goal was to build a roster of “13 dudes” so that the team could withstand an injury or two, but not seven. The good news is that we saw Mela and Cardet against UMass and that Abdur-Rahim likely would have played if not for the tragic death of his uncle Amir. English has said that he expects all but Hopkins could be ready for the season opener Nov. 4, though one or two others may take a game or two to come back.
This matters for two reasons – basketball as a sport and English’s offense in particular flourishes through continuity and making the right reads as a five-man group. The less time together and healthy on the floor means less time to build that chemistry. Second, the college basketball season is short. A team’s window to make its case to the Selection Committee (from the first game until the Big East Tournament final on March 15) is less than 19 weeks – 132 days this year. Every game the team plays short-handed means that the chances of a bad loss increase and the chances for a good win decrease. It’s 23 days between Monday’s season opener and three critical games in the Bahamas, starting with Oklahoma on Nov. 27. This thing comes at you fast, and though a slow start would be understandable, the schedule is unforgiving.
What’s at stake…
The last year and a half since Ed Cooley left and English arrived in Providence has been a whirlwind. PC has, for better or worse, been one of the most talked about programs in the nation, and our fanbase is now widely recognized as one of the sport’s most rabid. We’ve had a Big East Player of the Year and an NBA Lottery pick. We’ve had another 20-win season and made the Big East Tournament semifinals. We’ve enrolled four sought-after transfers and an elite freshman big man and gotten commitments from two other top-100 recruits for 2025. We’ve upgraded our multi-team event from Mohegan Sun to Atlantis.
To keep the momentum going, the payoff has to come on the floor this winter and spring. For what it’s worth I can envision a top-25 defense led by multiple shot-blockers and a slew of athletic wings who can make life very hard on opposing scorers, particularly on the wing. And I can envision an offense that can space the floor with shooters, opening up driving lanes for Pierre, Joseph, Floyd and Cardet with the extra space mitigating any turnover issues. That same space also creates room for the lobs that Oswin Erhunmwunse seems born to finish. Meanwhile, I could see Hopkins returning to form by conference play to give the team the all-conference player it needs. Put all that together with the complementary depth of a Barron, a Fernandez and a Mela and this is a team that can survive foul trouble and injuries.
That’s the vision. It’s a vision that would make Selection Sunday more of a matter of seeding and site concerns and not one of trepidation. Getting there will probably require 23-25 wins.
There’s plenty of downside to this vision – the transfers don’t pop, Hopkins isn’t himself, Pierre continues to struggle with turnovers and the Friars have an uphill climb in conference play after a slow start. The offense never quite comes together – not enough juice – and the Friars fall off the bubble in early March. Most of the predictive metrics have PC finishing short of 20 wins, even if you add in an extra win or two for games not officially projected yet in the Bahamas and the Big East Tournament.
Those are the two poles. PC’s season will likely land somewhere between them, and even hundreds of hours of thinking about this program have not made it easier for me to figure out where along that spectrum this team will settle. I can write the story both ways today, but there’s a team of players and coaches who will be able to author their own story for us to watch. For the next 132 days, I’m all in.
Great article