Atlantic 10 Basketball: Impact of league’s “European Influence”

The college basketball recruiting landscape have undergone a massive shift over the last few years, thanks to the elimination of the transfer sit-out year and the introduction of NIL. This has led to, amongst over changes, more veteran transfers going to power conferences, adjusting the available talent pool for the rest of the country. The long-term ramifications of this for mid-major schools remains very unclear but in the short term, the A-10 has seen one major shift, a massive influx of European born players at its schools.

This season there are twenty-seven European born players across the fifteen schools. For comparison in 2019-20 (the last year before the significant player movement began), there were only thirteen, and Davidson had five of them. Interestingly, the Wildcats have an abnormal lack of international players (their top seven scorers are all American born for the first time in the 21st century) and now the best groups of foreign born players reside at VCU, who could run out a positionally appropriate lineup of two players from Great Britain, two from Australia and one from Ukraine, and Duquesne, with eight foreign players, including two starters and their sixth and seventh men.

Highlighting this group is a cornucopia of talented freshmen to keep an eye out for throughout the season, like Micheal Belle (VCU/Great Britain), Christ Essandoko (St. Joe’s/France), Tunde Vahlberg Fasasi (La Salle/Sweden), Jakub Necas (Duquesne/Czech Republic), Benny Schröder (GW/Germany) and Petras Padegimas (Dayton/Lithuania). All of these players have the talent and pedigree (most have spent multiple summers with their national team) to land on the A-10 All-Rookie team but will have to deal with not just the transition to the college game but the additional obstacles of being thousands of kilometers from home. Belle and Necas hadn’t even lived in the United States until this summer.

Those players represent the future of their respective teams but the top of the conference will be dictated by the performance of multiple veteran players. Some are new transfers, like VCU guard Max Shulga (Ukraine), who started for an NCAA Tournament team (Utah St) or former All-Sun Belt forward Andrei Savrasov (Duquesne/Russia). Others are young players hoping for a breakout, such as VCU’s Tobi Lawal (England), St. Joe’s Kacper Klaczek (Poland) and La Salle’s Rokas Jocius (Lithuania), or simply just trying to make an impact.

Duquesne’s Matúš Hronský (Slovenia) falls into that final category, as he battles back from an illness that derailed the end of his freshmen season. Later, I’ll focus in on his chance to make his mark on a potentially historically good Dukes team, and his finding comfort in America through teammates and a family he has connected with.

But I’ll begin by taking a look at the aforementioned Shulga, who has a chance to be the best player in the conference after following over his Utah St Coach Ryan Odom to VCU, diving into what makes him a special player and a journey that has now taken him to four very different sections of the globe.

Over the next few months, I will continue to dive into the reasons for this recruiting shift, while continuing to share more about the players involved.