Despite the college basketball season ending roughly three weeks ago, with Michigan crowned as the national champions, the transfer portal is already in full swing.
There are already teams that have lost and acquired a large number of players through the transfer portal – and the Pitt Panthers are one of them.
Pitt has lost three key contributors from last season’s team: underclassmen guards Brandin Cummings, Omari Witherspoon, and Nojus Indrusaitis. Freshman forward Roman Siulepa also decided to enter the portal. Siulepa was arguably the biggest loss for the Panthers, due to his strength and physicality along with tons of raw talent.
These departures, along with guys graduating, left the Panthers with pretty much zero remaining production. This put Pitt in a tough spot and forced them to go all in on the transfer portal.
Early on, they began to rebuild by adding North Carolina transfer Jonathan Powell and former five-star Jalil Bethea, who was previously at Miami and then Alabama. The last of their first three guard additions was Naithan George from Syracuse, who will play a pivotal role competing for the starting point guard job.
One aspect that the Panthers also needed to fortify is their frontcourt. Assuming star center Cam Cohren is out of eligibility, that leaves Pitt with virtually no frontcourt, because Cohren was their only big man that made an impact last year.
Pitt has made two frontcourt additions so far, and one of them, Baye Ndongo from Georgia Tech, has an opportunity to be a force inside for the Panthers. Standing at 6’9” and weighing in at 240 pounds, Ndongo will add physicality and rebounding that the Panthers have generally lacked for the past few seasons.
They also added Armani Mighty, a center from Mercer, to the team. Mighty will eventually end up being a depth guy, but that is important because of how little depth they had last year. The Panthers were only able to play seven or eight guys consistently and only one of them was a legit frontcourt player. Fans would still like to see Pitt add another center or power forward in the portal to help out Ndongo in the paint rebounding and defending.
Some other additions for the Panthers are Dominique Diomande and Colin Hawkins. Both of these players will be used to round out the rotation, which will ideally be around 11 or 12 players.
One player to get excited about is A’lahn Sumler, a guard from Charleston Southern. Sumler averaged 18.9 points last season and it will be very interesting to see if his production translates to the ACC.
Another plus for the Panthers next year is their recruiting class. They were expected to bring in three four-star recruits until Anthony Felesi recently decommitted. With that being said, Jermal Jones and Chase Foster will without a doubt bring an immediate impact to the team.
The Panthers have not done enough to get back to the top of the ACC, but this is a big step in the right direction – especially coming off a down year where they went 13-20 overall and 5-13 in ACC play.
