After a complete roster turnover full of transfers from the NCAA Transfer Portal in 2020-2021, coach Eric Musselman and Arkansas Basketball are at it again.
Arkansas Basketball finished the 2020-2021 season at 25-7 overall with a season-ending loss to Baylor in the Elite 8. This was easily the Razorback’s best season since the 1994-1995 season when they made it to the national title game, but how do they sustain the success from this season going forward? It’s quite simple, do what got you here.
The Razorbacks only returned one rotation player this past season from the 2019-2020 team (Desi Sills), with the rest of the roster coming to Fayetteville from the Transfer Portal. Eric Musselman builds a team capable of competing atop the SEC this past season with transfers and freshmen, and that is exactly what they will do next season as well. The first big piece of the 2021-2022 roster? Pittsburgh transfer guard Au’Diese Toney.
Toney announced his commitment to the Razorbacks a few days ago and is a pairing that makes a lot of sense. The Razorbacks clearly had success with multiple transfers this past season, why not next?
Toney, a junior guard, will step in immediately next season to play a big role for the Razorback’s normal rotation. Even though he only played in 16 games before entering the transfer portal this past season, Toney was putting up some of the best numbers of his career.
Toney was 2nd on the Panthers in scoring averaging 14.4 PPG on 46.4% shooting, while also averaging 5.9 RPG and 2.3 APG, all career-highs. In fact, despite the smaller sample size, “career-high” was a common theme for Toney during the 2020-2021 season.
Toney averaged career-highs in every major statistical category this past season, and while it came in almost half the number of the games of a full regular season, it’s still very encouraging to see what he did this season. Toney is an experienced player who can do it all, and that is big for an Arkansas team that may lose multiple important pieces off of this year’s team.
While Arkansas will not be done adding transfers this offseason, the Razorbacks got off to a very nice start with the addition of Toney. With these additions that have happened and will happen, it looks like Arkansas will once again be one of the top teams in the SEC again next season.