Will Gopher men’s hoops be good this season?

Call me crazy, but I’m strangely confident.

Believe it or not, Gopher basketball is right around the corner. Two exhibition games are complete and the season tips off on Wednesday the 6th against Oral Roberts.

It is hard to garner any excitement for this upcoming season for a number of valid reasons. The team has not been very competitive since the 2018-19 season. Most of the young core that Ben Johnson was potentially molding into a competitive team has left the program. The annual roster turnover leaves you with an unfamiliar roster and we are stuck in this ugly cycle of trying to gain a foothold in the Big Ten while losing huge portions of your roster every offseason.

This new era of college basketball is exhausting and leads to serious apathy.

But as the season inches closer and closer, I have a strange confidence that this Gopher is going to be a solid, Big Ten team.

As usual, it comes down to expectations. Is this team going to compete for a Big Ten title? No. Are they going to be among the top 4 or 5 teams in the league? I highly doubt it. But the preseason media poll had Minnesota as an unprecedented 18th place in the new conference.

I’m here to suggest that not only will they not finish 18th, but this team is going to be in bubble talk as we get into February. Am I drunk? No. Am I high? Also, no. Am I crazy? Time will tell, but here me out.

Here are 3 reasons why Gopher basketball will not only be better than expected, but they may be competing for an NCAA bid.

1 – Leadership exists.

It was incredibly disappointing to see several key players transfer out of the program after last season. Pharrel Payne and Elijah Hawkins were All-Big Ten caliber players who left for more NIL money and Braeden Carrington was a key contributor off the bench who headed to Tulsa for more playing time. Their minutes, production and experience were huge losses for a team that was poised to be competitive this season.

But lost in the disappointment is that Dawson Garcia and Mike Mitchell Jr. are both returning. Garcia was 2nd team All-Big Ten last season and Mitchell is an experienced and capable scorer in the backcourt. And let’s not forget that Parker Fox is back for his final season. Another veteran leader on this team who is fantastic off the bench for both

Ben Johnson is not starting from scratch with this year’s roster. There is some star power at the top, and perhaps more importantly there is veteran leadership he can count on.

Those three guys (along with Kadyn Betts, who is entering his third year with the program) are able to be an extension of the coaching staff and lead this team, in spite of the significant roster turnover.

2 – Experience matters.

Similar to his very first season as the head coach, Johnson has brought in a number of transfers who have been around the block. And this was very intentional.

There are eight (EIGHT!!) new transfers on this year’s roster and every one of them is a senior.

• Frank Mitchell – 4th year senior from Canisius
• Femi Odukale – entering his 5th season, started his career as 4-star recruit at Seton Hall
• Brennan Rigsby – Oregon transfer who will be a traditional senior.
• Lu’cye Patterson – entering his 5th season, the last two at Charlotte.
• Tyler Cochran – entering his 6th season after playing his first five at various MAC schools.
• Trey Edmonds – 4th year senior from UT-San Antonio
• Caleb Williams – 4th season after scoring a LOT of points at D3 Macalester
• Lincoln Meister – 5th year senior who played 4 years at D2 UM-Duluth

Some of these guys are going to be contributing more than others, but the key thing here is experience. Every one of these guys have played significant minutes of college basketball. The idea here is that they already know how to put the work in, they understand what it takes to succeed at this level and the learning curve is shallow.

This group is reminiscent of Ben Johnson’s first season when he brought back Peyton Willis and added other experienced players like Luke Loewe and Eylijah Stephens to go along with a talented Jameson Battle. The result was a team that understood what to do on defense and how to work the ball on offense as a group for good shots.

3 – Star power.

At the top, this team still has a go-to scorer and a player who can carry his team through stretches. Garcia is potentially a 1st team All-Big Ten player and ESPN ranked him as one of the top 50 players in the country. This is probably the biggest differentiator from Johnson’s first team. Battle was surprisingly good during his first year with Minnesota, but Garcia brings significant experience and more upside.

And along with Garcia, you have Mitchell Jr. who averaged over 10 points per game last year while shooting nearly 40% from three.

There are certainly questions with this team and they are not good enough to win on talent alone. But they have the right makeup to be an experienced and balanced team that can compete in the Big Ten. If the pieces come together and a couple of the new names provide some additional scoring and/or toughness, this team might even be good.

Time will tell, but I have more optimism than most outside observers.