Oklahoma basketball: Porter Moser takes over an OU roster in flux
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma men’s basketball team has its new coach, but the uncertainty now is who will the Sooners have on the court next season.
Unlike Lincoln Riley, who took over a fine-tuned OU football program that was at the top of its game and loaded with individual talent when Bob Stoops retired in 2017, Porter Moser inherits a basketball roster from Lon Kruger that is also loaded, but this time with more questions than answers.
That was not Kruger’s intention, obviously, but it is a reality inherent in a year altered and extraordinarily affected by a virus run rampant and a coaching transition brought on by the retirement of a coach who had been a fixture on the Sooner bench for a decade.
Oh, and there was also the growing student-athlete free-agency movement known as the transfer portal
Two starters from this past season and the team’s top two scorers, Austin Reaves and De’Vion Harmon have said they are declaring for the NBA Draft. Senior 6-foot, 10-inch Kur Kuath has also declared for the draft.
In addition, freshman Trey Phipps is transferring to Oral Roberts and freshman Anyang Garang and sophomore Victor Iwukor are entering the transfer portal, along with senior starter Brady Manek. Manek has entered the transfer portal, but according to sources close to the team, .he said he was keeping his options open.
In case you’re not counting, that is at least seven players off of Oklahoma’s 17-man 2020-21 roster who are not planning to be back next season. I say not planning because unless a player signs with an agent, he can pull out of the NBA Draft process and return to school. Also, the act of entering the transfer portal does not necessarily preclude a player from returning to his former team.
Who knows what might happen after new head coach Moser is able to sit down and have conversations with the players who have entered or plan to enter the transfer portal.
Reaves has said he does plan on retaining an agent, so it appears he, in fact, he does not plan on returning, although he and senior teammate Kuath have been granted an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA because of the COVID-19 pandemic year should they elect to return for the 2021-22 season.
That leaves the Sooners with five scholarship players on the 2021-22 roster: guards Elijah Harkless , Umoja Gibson and Josh O’Garro, forward Jalen Hill and center Rick Issanza.
Gibson and Harkless both transferred to Oklahoma and will be seniors next season. Both were starters the second half of this past season and averaged 9.1 and 8.1 points, respectively. Hill, who will be a junior, saw action in 25 games and averaged 4.4 points.
Issanza and O’Garro played in a combined seven games this past season and totaled just four points between them.
The Sooners will have incoming freshman C.J. Noland, a four-star guard from Waxahachie, Texas, joining the team next season. But with a fairly long list of players in the transfer portal this offseason, it is a fairly good bet that Moser and his OU staff will be looking to supplement, and even complement, next season’s roster with transfer reinforcements, as Lon Kruger did with success in recent seasons.
His first order of business should be to get Brady Manek off the fence and perhaps set the stage for De’Vion Harmon to return to the team when he discovers he could benefit greatly from another college season to boost his NBA stock.
It is unclear whether Moser will retain any of the current Sooner assistants or whether he brings with him any of his Loyola Chicago assistants. The one thing we do know is that Loyola assistant coach Drew Valentine won’t be joining Moser in Norman. He has been named to replace Moser as the new Loyola head coach.