Keeping Young Core Together Critical to Next Season's Success
STILLWATER – This basketball season for OSU has certainly had its challenges and whether any of us, or the coaches, like it or not, the offseason isn’t going to be any easier with this new era of transfer portal.
Mike Boynton and Co. have a very talented core of young players on this roster, a group of players who’s learning and growing by trial of fire. Eric Dailey Jr. and Brandon Garrison are third and fifth, respectively, on the stat sheet for the Pokes, Dailey with 9.3 points and 4.9 rebounds per game and Garrison with 7.2 points and 5.6 rebounds per game. Garrison’s also averaging 1.5 blocks per game and both are averaging more than 20 minutes and less than two turnovers per game.
Then you’ve got the physical sophomore guard in Quion Williams, who’s averaging 6.5 points and 5.5 rebounds.
One national analyst who’s been a big proponent of Mike Boynton is Fran Fraschilla, who’s also very high on this young core. So much so that he mentioned during the Houston game the other night that this team has a chance to be very good in the near future if the coaching staff is able to keep them all together.
And I agree with Fran; yes, while this team still has a long way to go, there’s a lot of promise amongst the youth. So, that makes this upcoming offseason that much more important, and challenging, for the coaches in trying to keep them in Stillwater as there’s bound to be a whole host of teams, legal or not, clamoring to try and pull them away through the portal.
“I want to go back because I think this time last year, as we get closer to senior day and all the guys who could come back, we didn’t want any of those guys to leave,” Boynton said. “We had a good nucleus of older guys who could be good help to the guys that we’ve got now. And that they wouldn’t have to be out there for 25-30 minutes in these games not quite ready to do it. But the reality is, we don’t necessarily control their decisions at that point and there’s some things maybe we can continue to enhance here to make it to where those guys do want to stay. But we just weren’t in that space at the time. So, here we are [now] and the plan is to make sure the guys that are playing [now] are getting better. So, to [Fran Fraschilla’s] point, yes, if they continue along the trajectory that they’re going, then they will get better. You just can’t assume that’s the case like you could, say, seven years ago; there wasn’t the [transfer] portal, there wasn’t NIL, you could say ‘Alright, man, we’ve got a good core of freshmen,’ like we did with Avery [Anderson III], Chris [Harris] and Kalib Boone. Kind of saw those guys become all-league caliber, starter for sure, players in our conference. They helped the team win eight games and fell just one game short of making the [NCAA] tournament and without a couple of injuries one way or the other, maybe could’ve been even better. But that’s not the reality of athletics. We’ll do everything we can to help these guys understand what the experience like this could be over time, but we also have to be realistic. I think everyone in this room have heard other coaches talk about our young guys. That’s not a mistake. I’m not calling anybody out for doing anything wrong because nobody’s doing anything wrong, but I think people are sounding the alarm because everyone knows that players are movable. They’re able to be influenced. That’s college athletics now. That’s the reality we have to embrace if we want to continue to get guys like [Brandon Garrison], for example, and keep them so that you can see what Brandon Garrison going to look like versus as a senior.
West Virginia’s interim head coach Josh Eilert said following their loss to the Pokes a few weeks back that Boynton and Co. need to do everything they can to keep Garrison in Stillwater. He’s obviously one of the coaches Boynton talks about in his answer. OU’s Porter Moser had some great things to say about the freshmen as well.
So, while last year’s a great example of how difficult it is to keep players on a team, Anderson III, Ka. Boone, Tyreek Smith and Moussa Cisse just to name a few, Boynton and Co. probably have more work to do in this offseason than they did last season.