Which team lands the 5-star recruits or gets the top available graduate transfer often garner most the preseason attention of college basketball media but oftentimes looking at what incoming players are impactful isn’t an accurate way of predicting what teams will be great.
Sure, everyone loves something shiny and new and feels that the grass is always greener on the other side but when it comes to college basketball banking on continuity has, in recent history, been a much safer bet than teams changing their chemistry with incoming recruits or new transfers to the program.
Specifically, teams that have experienced greatness recently have had the fortune of fringe NBA players who might have snuck into the last round of the draft or gotten signed as a two-way player returning to college.