Team: Seton Hall Pirates

2023-24 Record: 25-12, 13-7 Big East

2023-24 Big East Finish: Fourth, one game behind Creighton & Marquette tied for second, two games in front of St. John’s in fifth.

Final 2023-24 KenPom.com Ranking: #50 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #56.

Final 2023-24 BartTorvik.com Ranking: #38 out of 362 teams, up from their preseason rank of #54.

Postseason: Seton Hall did themselves no favors by getting blown out by St. John’s, 91-72, in the Big East tournament quarterfinals. I’m not saying that was the difference between the Pirates being Last Four In to the NCAA tournament and ending up First Four Out, but it definitely didn’t help, that’s for sure. They needed overtime to beat Saint Joseph’s in their first NIT game, but the next three were romps, and then they made a furious comeback in the final three minutes to erase a seven point deficit and beat Indiana State to win the 2024 NIT.

Key Departures: I just want to say this part out loud before we narrow it down to only the notable guys. There are 11 men on the 2023-24 Seton Hall roster who are not present on the 2024-25 roster. That’s a lot.

Now, in fairness to the coaching staff (or in critique, from a certain point of view), five of the 11 didn’t have a notable role on last year’s squad and two of the guys who were in the rotation were on their fifth year of eligibility and were always going to be departing South Orange no matter what. The two rotation guys in question are Jaden Bediako, who started all 37 games at center, and Al-Amir Dawes, who you would think was the starting point guard if you looked at the five guys standing next to each other just because he’s 6’2”. Bediako averaged 8.1 points and 6.9 rebounds per game along with 1.6 blocks, while Dawes went for 15.0 points, not far off the team scoring lead, along with 2.8 rebounds, 2.3 assits, and 1.2 steals. He also knocked down just short of 39% of his three-point attempts, and that’s a big deal because the Newark native fired off more than six per game.

That brings us around to the guys who left with eligibility remaining, and that includes two of SHU’s other three starters. Both Kadary Richmond and Dre Davis had a bonus season of eligibility to go, and they’re both going to spend it somewhere else. Davis is off to Ole Miss after two years at Seton Hall and two years at Louisville, and he was neck-and-neck with Dawes on the scoring chart at 15.0 per game. He also added 5.9 rebounds a night and shot 35% from long range. Richmond is the loss that’s going to sting the Pirates most of all, and not just because he left with a year to go after leading in points (15.7), rebounds (7.0), assists (5.1), and steals (2.2). No, the real sting here is potentially quite literal, as Richmond transferred to St. John’s for 2024-25. As I write this, the Big East schedule isn’t out yet, so we’ll just have to ruminate on what his return to the Prudential Center will be like as opposed to actually marking it on the calendar.

You hate to fault anyone for guys deciding to spend their bonus seasons somewhere else, especially if they have their degrees in hand. However, questions must be asked of the Pirates about the transfer of Elijah Hutchins-Everett and Jaquan Sanders. Both men came off the bench for every appearance last season and both played less than 14 minutes a night. Hutchins-Everett leaves Seton Hall after just one season following two at Austin Peay, and the 6’11” local guy will spend that fourth season at James Madison. Sanders hails from Queens, and after two years as a perfectly reasonable rotation guy in the Big East, he’ll head to Hofstra. Neither man is a gigantic loss from the rotation due to their relatively limited minutes, but both figured to have bigger roles for the Pirates with Bediako and Dawes departing, so that’s where their departures hurts SHU.

Key Returners: Seton Hall returns two rotation guys from last season. One is the fifth starter, Dylan Addae-Wusu. He was pretty good, adding 8.6 points, 5.3 rebounds, 2.2 assists, and 1.6 steals. The Pirates are going to need him to find his shooting touch again. After hitting over 37% as a sophomore and junior for St. John’s, Addae-Wusu only connected on 29% of his nearly four attempts per game this past season.

The other guy coming back is Isaiah Coleman, who started three times in 33 appearances, and missed SHU’s final three games of the year with an illness issue. The 6’5” Virginia native earned Big East All-Freshmen Team honors last season after averaging 5.4 points and 2.6 rebounds per game.

Key Additions: Seton Hall adds three freshmen to the roster for this coming season, none of whom fall into the category of a 247 Sports top 150 prospect. One of them only joined the recruiting class in May and doesn’t even have a 247 Sports page.

And so, we turn our attention to the eight transfers that they list on the roster. We have to come up with some kind of organization system here, as we can’t possibly figure out how they fit into the Pirates roster. If we’re being honest, from a certain point of view, the question is more about how the SHU returning roster fits in around these guys.

Let’s sort them by Years Of Eligibility Remaining.

One Year

Chaunce Jenkins (6’4”, 185 lb, Newport News, Virginia) didn’t seem like he was going to crack the rotation in two years at Wichita State, so he spent the past two campaigns at Old Dominion. Things went statistically better for him there, as he averaged 14.7 points, 3.6 rebounds, and 2.8 assists per game as a most of the time starter in 62 appearances. Yacine Toumi (6’10”, 215 lb, Meudon, France) started his collegiate career at Arkansas Little Rock and didn’t play much at all, went to Indian Hills Community College for a season, and then spent the last two years at Evansville. He was a reliable big man for the Purple aces, putting up 10.6 points and 6.1 rebounds in 64 games. Even though he’s Tall Man and not Big Man, Toumi was almost exclusively an inside player for Evansville.

Just to clarify: Both men are on their COVID-19 bonus years of eligibility.

Two Years

Zion Harmon (6’0”, 184 lb, Temple Hills, Maryland) started 53 times in 60 games for Bethune Cookman over the past two seasons. He was pretty good the whole way through, averaging 14.1 points, 2.1 rebounds, 3.4 assists, and 1.3 steals across the two years. He was a decent three-point shooter as a freshman at nearly 34%, but took a major step back last season. Harmon connected on less than 26% of his 5.4 attempts, and that was an increase in attempts, too. Prince Aligbe (6’7”, 228 lb, Minneapolis, Minnesota) was at Boston College for the past two years, but he saw his role shrink as his time in Chestnut Hill continued, especially late in his sophomore year. All told, he averaged 5.3 points and 3.8 rebounds in 62 career contests, but the Pirates are going to need him to do better than his career three-point shooting percentage of 22%. Emmanuel Okorafor (6’9”, 225 lb, Abia, Nigeria) played sporadic minutes at best across two seasons at Louisville and now has a fresh start in South Orange after the coaching change that the Cardinals desperately needed. He does have NBA Academy experience, so there’s a little bit of diamond in the rough here.

Three Years

Garwey Dual and Scotty Middleton did not have the kind of freshman seasons last year that you might expect from top 50 prospects. Dual (6’5”, 205 lb, Houston, Texas) never quite lived up to his top 40 ranking and averaged 3.3 points and 1.3 rebounds in less than 19 minutes per game at Providence. I’m not sure what’s going to change about his ability to play in the Big East going forward, but he’s going to try it in New Jersey instead of Rhode Island. Middleton (6’7”, 181 lb, Miami, Florida) was exactly #50 in the 247 Sports Composite rankings coming into college, but he couldn’t crack the rotation for Chris Holtmann at Ohio State….. right up until Holtmann was fired last year. Middleton’s minutes jumped up after that, but he missed the end of the Buckeyes’ season with a family issue. He did shoot 45% from long range in 15.3 minutes per game as a season long average, so there’s promise there for sure.

Four Years

Yes, a transfer with all four years of eligibility remaining. Gus Yalden (6’9”, 258 lb, Appleton, Wisconsin) never got on the floor last season for Wisconsin, so while Seton Hall is listing him as a sophomore on the roster, he is a redshirt freshman. Did he not get on the floor because he never lived up to the absolutely insane Baby Jokic hype from 2021 or because he was arrested twice before the basketball season even started and then missed a practice, too?

Coach: Shaheen Holloway, entering his third season at Seton Hall and seventh season as a Division 1 head coach. He has a overall record of 106-85 and a 42-28 mark with the Pirates.

Outlook: Last year, Seton Hall was a frisky team that kind of got sidelined by a non-conference slate that gave them absolutely no help for the NCAA tournament. They could defend for sure, but turnover problems loomed all season long, and they ultimately couldn’t get into the Field of 68. They were good enough to win the NIT, even if it took overtime at home in the first round and a furious rally in the final, but they did it.

And now, almost nothing from that roster remains and we’re left wondering what Shaheen Holloway can do with what he has in his 2024-25 roster.

Let’s set it up this way: Both of Holloway’s two Seton Hall teams have undershot expectations. Last year, Seton Hall started out the year at #54 in the BartTorvik.com algorithmic rankings, and following a 20 point road loss at Xavier on December 23rd, they had dropped out of the top 100. Yes, they recovered to get back into the top 50 by mid-February, but hooooboy, it wasn’t fun along the way. Yes, they finished the season at #38, but that required stacking up five top 100 wins in the NIT. The Pirates went into the Big East tournament at #52 and got shelled by St. John’s, a team they had swept in the regular season.

The year before, Holloway’s first season in charge, Seton Hall started the season at #55 in the Torvik rankings. To a certain extent, that’s a carry over from Kevin Willard’s seasons in charge, but that’s still a projection of what the roster Holloway actually had would do. They didn’t slide as badly, but they did spend chunks of the Big East season in the 70s, including their #75 ranking before their regular season finale. Yes, they ended up at #58 when everything came to a stop, but they were also #62 before their one point NIT loss at Colorado.

With the idea that they’ve managed to scrape together a respectable final ranking after really struggling with consistency as the season went along, what does the Torvik algorithm say about the Pirates for 2024-25?

They’re currently projected as the #92 team in the country. That’s not a grotesquely bad spot, it involves a 7-13 record in Big East play. It’s not good, but they’re not awful either. We saw what awful looks like in the league last season in both Georgetown and DePaul. They’re not projected to be that, but this would be a step backwards for them in Year Three of Holloway’s tenure. Stepping backwards when you have to rebuild the roster this much isn’t a surprise, and if at least four of their transfers don’t hit…. and if Addae-Wusu and Coleman don’t take a big ol’ step forward, Seton Hall’s in a lot of trouble.

I feel comfortable saying that Holloway is going to figure out how to get this roster to defend. That feels like a given after what we’ve seen from him, both at SHU and at Saint Peter’s. However, there’s no guarantee that there’s anyone here who can score at a Big East level. Harmon and Jenkins have gotten buckets for their teams in the past, but that was in the SWAC and the Sun Belt respectively. If you can’t score, then it doesn’t matter how well you can defend, and man, it gets a lot harder to defend when you can’t build up your energy from putting up numbers on the other end.