Atlantic 10 Basketball: 5 key storylines to watch in 2023 offseason

5) A Lot of Rosters Are A Mess Right Now

A contender will be created with some terrific roster moves in the next month but predicting who it will be is an absolute shot in the dark. St. Bonaventure has some nice pieces but with basically everyone coming back, can they convince any impactful players to join? At the time of this writing George Mason is beyond a mystery, Loyola-Chicago has already lost about half of their rotation to the transfer portal (which is probably a good thing as long as Norris, Alston and Schweiger stay) and George Washington might lose everyone to graduation except Maximus Edwards, while also adapting to the oddity of possibly being named the Blue Fog.

The New England schools are absolutely confounding right now.  It’s not a coincidence that Frank Martin started publicly criticizing his players’ effort while his son Brandon was injured and unable to provide that energy himself.  Now the younger Martin and two of the four players credited with having the proper mentality (TJ Weeks and Isaac Kante) are all gone. But even after ending the year with a blowout loss where it looked like the whole team gave up immediately, not one player brought to the school by Martin is in transfer portal and that is a very talented group, led by a future superstar in RJ Luis.

Rhode Island always seemed to be looking towards the 2023-24 season when Archie Miller put together last year’s roster but now the team’s two best players (Brayon Freeman and Ish Leggett) are gone and it feels like the Rams are kind of restarting again, although Brandon Weston and a hopeful healthy Josaphat Bilau are definitely keepers.

There’s some hope in Philadelphia, especially with both schools ending the year strong.  Fran Dunphy did great things for La Salle in his first year but the Explorers’ roster still needs a big talent infusion this spring. On the opposite end, St. Joe’s finished the year strong to get people excited for next season. It could be deceiving though, as the Hawks were a defensive debacle basically the whole year, even when they were winning and they will be relying on a lot of inexperienced players to fix that issue, since Coach Billy Lange heavily recruits freshmen over transfers.

However, they have a bona fide POY contender in Erik Reynolds II, a do it all point guard Lynn Greer III, who played the last two months at an All-Conference level, and possibly the league’s most talented group of young players, with Rasheer Fleming, Christian Winborne and newcomers Christ Essandoko, Shawn Simmons, Anthony Finkley and Xzayvier Brown (one of the best usages of late alphabet letters we’ve ever seen).

Those teams will be in the headlines at various points of the offseason and Davidson, with an almost fully finished recruiting class, won’t be.  The Wildcats shouldn’t be forgotten, as they played their best basketball of the year in February and only lose Foster Loyer, with his replacement, Villanova transfer Angelo Brizzi, already on campus.