Basketball roster dotted with some huge holes

Weeks after the men’s college basketball season ended, Pitt’s roster is mired in a state of uncertainty.

The Panthers have just six scholarship players definitively returning for the 2021-22 season and could have as many as seven scholarships to fill.

They’re not the only ones in a precarious spot. The transfer portal to which they lost five players is packed, with about 1,400 Division I players in it. With 357 Division I programs and 13 scholarship players per team, that represents roughly 30% of the sport.

“It’s different than it was five years ago, six years ago,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said in late February after the transfers of Xavier Johnson and Au’Diese Toney. “It’s constantly changing. You have to evolve. You have to be able to adapt.

“Back when I was in school, guys weren’t leaving as much. I think my sophomore year, four of the top five picks were in my class. That’s when you started seeing — you didn’t really have one-and-dones then — two-and-dones.”

When evaluating the exits of Johnson, Toney, Abdoul Karim Coulibaly, Terrell Brown and Gerald Drumgoole, however, a resigned sigh of “well, this is happening everywhere” does little to address a multilayered situation. A puddle isn’t comparable to an ocean because it, too, contains water. Players are transferring from their schools at a record rate, but a program losing two players is in a drastically different position than one losing, say, six players.

So where do Capel and the Panthers stand in the broader context of major Division I men’s basketball?

As of Friday, Pitt’s five transfers are tied for the second most among programs in the ACC (the average is 3.1). The Panthers’ three starters in the portal also are tied for the second most in the conference (the average is 0.8, with only 3 of 15 programs losing more than one starter).

The full impact of the