Atlantic 10 Basketball: 5 key questions heading into 2021-22 season

Can Dayton’s young team perform up to its talent?

A year after starting four seniors, Dayton’s roster has just one scholarship upperclassman, junior guard Elijah Weaver.  Coach Anthony Grant also brings back a trio of high upside, inconsistent forwards in Zimi Nwokeji, Mustapha Amzil, and RJ Blakney to team up with a few interesting transfers and the Flyers’ first-ever Top 25 recruiting class.

For Dayton, 13 players can make an interesting case for rotation minutes, and even if some of the young players aren’t ready, depth shouldn’t be an issue for the Flyers. But with only Weaver seemingly locked into a starting role this early on, Dayton will need more than consistent contributors, they need some players to emerge into stars and anyone has a chance to be right in predicting who will step up.

Nwokeji and Amzil both put up the occasional star performance in their first year despite Nwokeji playing limited minutes early and Amzil not even getting to campus until winter break.  Nwokeji scored double-digit points in a game just three times but had 29 to go with 9 rebounds while dragging the Flyers into double overtime at Rhode Island. The next week, he scored 13 in a bizarre broken offense game against St. Joseph’s.  As the year went on, he became more aggressive offensively as he learned to better utilize his athleticism.

Amzil was a midyear enrollee after his prep school canceled its season and in his first game, the forward from Finland scored 22 points on what is still a career-high 14 attempts.  He has proven more than the rest of the players on the roster but faded down the stretch as defenses began to key on him. A full summer of training will likely do wonders for Amzil’s conditioning and keep him fresher late in the season but he will need to be more consistent off the bat to keep getting big minutes at a logjam position.

Adding to the list of big forwards, Toumani Camara transferred in from Georgia after scoring 12.8 ppg and leading the Bulldogs with 7.7 rpg.  Camara’s scoring upside is less than some of the others at the position but he will fill a space that the Flyers desperately lacked without Trey Landers last season, a grinder forward who specializes in rebounding.  That gives him the best possible chance to earn minutes helping out the young, high upside players.

A whole bunch of those high upside guys is part of the Flyers’ highest-rated recruiting class ever. Daron Holmes is an all-around big man who may need to play some undersized center with the aforementioned positional glut. In the backcourt, Dayton adds a pair of guards with great basketball genetics, Malachi Smith (brother of Scoochie) and Lynn Greer III (son of the Temple star by the same name) will battle for minutes with just two returnees, Weaver and Koby Brea.

Dayton may have the hardest to predict roster in the country right now, but if Anthony Grant finds the right combination, any of these players could take a leading role on a winner.