Dayton Basketball: 2021-22 season preview and outlook for Flyers

A year after the season that Dayton Basketball fans will forever remember, a Dayton team with veteran guards and young forwards put together a moderate (14-10, 9-7, NIT Appearance) year that will likely soon be forgotten.

Jalen Crutcher, Ibi Watson, and Jordy Tshimanga have all graduated and moved on to the G-League as they chase their NBA dreams, while Rodney Chatman chose to use his extra year of eligibility at Vanderbilt. With these four moving on, no scholarship players remain from the legendary 2020 team and the Flyers are ushering in a new and very exciting era.

Dayton moves forward with an extremely young but supremely talented roster, as only two players have more than one year of experience.  Coach Anthony Grant brings in a Top 20 (per ESPN) recruiting class for the first time in school history, to go along with a pair of transfers from power conference schools and all of last year’s talented first-year forwards.

Mustapha Amzil returns after scoring 9.9 ppg and pulling in 5.6 rpg, an impressive year for a player who didn’t arrive on a college campus until December. He’ll be joined by late-season starter Elijah Weaver, a former five-star recruit who will now get the chance to be a lead guard, and forwards Zimi Nwokeji, RJ Blakney, and Koby Brea.

The biggest standout amongst the newcomers is Georgia transfer Toumani Camara, who was 4th in the SEC in rebounded last year with 7.7 a game. The freshman class is led by a trio of ESPN 4-star recruits, top 100 big man DaRon Holmes II and guards Lynn Greer III, son of the Temple star by the same name, and Malachi Smith, brother of Scoochie.

The most important person for the Flyers this year is Coach Anthony Grant, who will be tasked with navigating a good dilemma all season, as he will have to put together a winning rotation out of a roster that appears to have 13 players who could all find their way into minutes.  It will be the ultimate coaching task, developing young players, determining systems that will fit those players on both ends, keeping the players who don’t get early minutes engaged, and winning enough to keep pulling in top recruits.

Patience will be necessary this year for the Flyers and their fans, and lineups will frequently change as Grant will likely lean on his veterans early.