I didn’t expect everyone to stay; from the moment he blew up in Hawaii, we knew Ace Glass was almost certainly a goner after the season.¹ I also figured Rihards Vavers probably was going to get a pretty good offer from someone as he showed off skills that complemented the 3-point shooting he always possessed. But everyone else? Who would want the other core guys from a pretty bad WCC team?² I promise I’m not trying crap all over our guys from last season, but you watched the same team I did. They were pretty bad. Turns out, I’m an idiot, because apparently lots and lots of people from the Power 4+Big East want our middling players and are willing to pay for them.³

AND YET! I would have taken them all back! Simply because continuity is actually verifiably worth something in college basketball. In a world where the average college basketball team now returns about 25% of its minutes from the previous season, teams that return a lot more minutes than that possess an inherent advantage — those teams consistently exceed their preseason kenpom projections. Evan Miyakawa reached the same conclusion a couple of years ago.

But that hope went out the window pretty quickly, which means Riley has had to rebuild the roster almost entirely from scratch. And while I am maybe Riley’s biggest skeptic, I have to say: I like what I see.

That’s not to say that I think the roster in incredible, or that we’re on a trajectory to get on the bubble, or whatever. As you will shortly see, there are so, so, SO many question marks on this roster, to the point that making any kind of prediction seems incredibly silly. Besides, after the last two seasons, I remain unconvinced that Riley actually possesses the ability to maximize the talent he’s acquiring.

But right now? All we can really do is evaluate the approach, and if we take into account the revenue sharing and NIL constraints within which Riley has to work (and they are very real, even if I hate that it often is used to excuse away poor coaching, which is a separate issue), I think his approach to finding inexpensive talent with upside on the margins has been really good.

We can place each player he recruited out of the portal into one of three buckets:

I think this diversification is really key and really smart — it’s very similar to how Kirby Moore rebuilt the football roster, and I think it gives you a about as good a chance as you can have of hitting on enough guys to improve the team. Nothing is guaranteed, but also: There’s enough ability here that you don’t even need everything to go right. You just need to hit on most of them.

That’s not nothing. It’s still a lot. But you’re not banking on lightning in a bottle, either.

For Part One, let’s tackle the first group.

This group of guys probably isn’t as big as you might have figured it would be. The dynamics within NIL at this point⁴ mean that if a guy has truly balled out at the lower levels of Division 1, he’s probably jumping right over us and into one of the five basketball power conferences.

But … there are still a couple of ways to land guys who have played well at a lower level, and Riley took advantage of both.

Sophomore | 6-0/155 | Central Missouri

Between Jaylen Wells and Tyrell Roberts, WSU has obviously had success dipping down into the Division 2 pool, and doing so again is a logical bet to make. Houston was the top freshman in Jonathan Givony’s DraftExpress D2 rankings after averaging 20.8 points, five assists and four rebounds as a freshman at Central Missouri on his way to winning just about every conference honor. If he’d done even 75% of that at a place like, say, Denver (see below) at the bottom of Division 1, he’d be jumping up above us. But as it stands, high major coaches are still a little wary of Division 2 guys, and that’s to our benefit — it appears we merely had to beat out Boise State for his commitment. (That’s a recruiting win that feels REAL good!)

Houston likely will step right in for Glass as a starter. He’s not as stout as Glass and maybe not as twitchy off the dribble, but I think he’s going to remind you a lot of Glass’ game both around the rim and beyond the arc. He’s smaller than Glass (although I think he’s grown since being listed at 6-0 as a freshman) and that might have scared away high majors from taking a chance on him. But he certainly doesn’t lack the ability to get off the floor:

I was skeptical at first of Riley going for a smallish guard from Division 2, but watching that highlight reel has convinced me this is a gamble worth taking.

Junior | 6-2/175 | Wake Forest

Akins is taking the Nate Calmese path to WSU, which is funny because he actually backed up Calmese last year at Wake Forest. Akins jumped up to the Deacons after a really good freshman year at Denver, where he earned the Summit League Freshman of the Year as a high-usage player averaging 12.7 points and 2.6 assists. But he struggled to make much of an impact for the Demon Deacons for about two thirds of the season, as Calmese dominated the point guard minutes.

But then Calmese got hurt, Akins popped into the starting lineup, and in most appearances, he was somewhere between OK and pretty good. That might sound like damning with faint praise, but remember: If he’d played lights out in those games, he probably wouldn’t be available to us. However, Akins holding his own against the ACC is a good indicator that he should be quite useful to us in the Pac-12.

His strength is getting downhill to the basket, as he’s made more than 55% of his shots at the rim. He’s also demonstrated a solid ability to create for others while avoiding turnovers. (YES!) The big question here is whether he can shoot well enough to boost his mediocre offensive efficiency metrics: Akins has only made 26% of 151 threes across two seasons, and even a marginal uptick there would make him a much more impactful player.

Riley (obviously) does not necessarily have an aversion to his point guards being bad shooters, so maybe it’s not a huge deal. And there’s a world in which he’s coming off the bench anyway, depending on how Riley wants to configure his lineup. But Calmese played really well for us after jumping up from Lamar only to flame out at Washington, so I love this kind of a gamble.

Senior | 6-6/220 | Eastern Washington

You might have forgotten that Jones is one of the guys Riley convinced to come south with him from Cheney. That’s because immediately after committing, Jones went on a two-year Mormon mission. He’s back, and while the plan — quite publicly — has always been that Jones would redshirt upon return (presumably to get back into game shape), I have a suspicion that plan will be abandoned: WSU needs dependable talent, and Riley might not even be the coach in 12 months if this season is another mess.

If Jones plays, WSU will get a guy who is a really interesting and unconventional offensive player: As a medium-usage forward during his junior season, he shot more free throws (212) than field goals (208) to lead the nation in free throw rate (101.9) after drawing a whopping 7.6 fouls per 40 minutes (sixth nationally). He’s not a great rebounder, but he’s OK for his size, and he can knock down a 3. He also was an all-Big Sky defender due to his versatility at 6-6/220.

Maybe he really does redshirt to get to work on that graduate degree while playing himself back into shape. We’ll see.

We’ll have Part Two: Reclamation Projects in the coming days.

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