Season preview: Deeper, faster Rutgers can shake off last year’s disappointing finish

After having their burgeoning streak of NCAA Tournament bids broken last March, the Scarlet Knights will hope this is the right formula to get back to the dance.

PISCATAWAY – As Steve Pikiell ran a full-court one-on-one drill last Tuesday, he requested the best offensive player on the group wearing black to face the best defender on the team in red.

Two newcomers, freshman Jamichael Davis and transfer Jeremiah Williams, both wanted to be the man on defense. They had to settle it like you used to do on the schoolyard: a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Davis won and made sure to relish the opportunity, denying Derek Simpson from getting to the hoop.

“They like to compete,” Pikiell said. “Games, if I shut a game down in the middle of it, these guys are like competitive guys. I like when a couple guys say ‘I’m the best defender, you get off the floor.’”

The competitiveness isn’t new on the banks of the Old Raritan. The speed at which Rutgers is running its offense during training camp is.

With a mixture of returners like Cliff Omoruyi, grad transfers and well-regarded freshmen, Rutgers is faster and most likely deeper than it’s been in quite some time. After having their burgeoning streak of NCAA Tournament bids broken last March, the Scarlet Knights will hope it’s the right formula to get back to the dance.

For better and worse, the Pikiell era at Rutgers has raised expectations for the program. The Scarlet Knights are now candidates to make the NCAA Tournament every season. That’ll only increase in 2024-25, when Rutgers will bring in one top-three prospect (Ace Bailey) and potentially two (Dylan Harper).

So I was curious whether Rutgers closed the book on its disappointing 2022-23 finish as soon as its final game was over, or if it’s being used as motivation in the locker room.

“As soon as the game’s over, last season’s over. You’re on to the next one,” Pikiell said. “In this day and age you live with your team for one year. This is a new group that we’re excited about. We still got a lot that we want to do, and we gotta do it in the best league in the country.

“Last year doesn’t come up a lot, it really doesn’t. We’re on to the new challenges of this year … I don’t mention it a lot, last year, although I mention we were fourth in the nation in defense and I mention that a lot. We don’t look like that right now, so I’ll bring up some of those kind of things.”

Not that Pikiell has ever needed to get his men excited to defend. That willingness has been a trait that runs through this program. But mixing it with a faster tempo on offense could yield interesting results. Pikiell spoke of an “If you rebound the ball, everyone’s a point guard” philosophy, and the Scarlet Knights have been practicing with a 12-second shot clock.

“Every year we try to play fast,” said Pikiell, whose team ranked 264th in KenPom’s Adjusted Tempo metric last season. “This group is just more athletic than we’ve had in the past. I think it’s a little different group.”

And, he was sure to point out, “The quicker you shoot the ball, the more you’re on defense.”

One player this is sure to benefit is Simpson, the rising sophomore who will anchor an otherwise new-look backcourt following the departures of Paul Mulcahy, Cam Spencer and Defensive Player of the Year Caleb McConnell.

“I’ve always played for teams that just want to run up and down, so this is more my style of play,” Simpson told me. “I’m able to kind of create off my own thoughts, my moves. … Last year I wouldn’t say I was a robot, but there were some times you had to become one in order to get to the right position, the right play. This year Coach is telling us, ‘You guys are basketball players. Be basketball players out there and hoop.’ ”

Simpson gained valuable experience as a freshman, averaging 11 points and 2.3 rebounds over the final nine games of the season against strong competition in the Big Ten and the NIT loss to Hofstra.

The backcourt will feature freshman wing Gavin Griffiths, the highest-rated prospect of the Pikiell tenure thus far, and graduate transfer guard Noah Fernandes. But the name that kept popping up more than any other Tuesday was Davis, called J-Mike by his coaches and peers.

Davis, a high three-star point guard from Georgia, is impressing those within the program by having an impact all over the court. Simpson revealed another nickname for him.

“J-Mike’s ‘Mr. Activity’ as we call him, and Gavin shoots the hell out of the rock and he’s athletic,” Simpson said.

That’s the thing with this Rutgers team, too. It looked pretty dire in the spring when Mulcahy and Spencer entered the transfer portal. No doubt, it’s still tough to lose their experience. But the roster Pikiell and his staff have assembled is the deepest in recent memory, purely in terms of how many players can have impactful minutes from the jump.

“We’ll be a little bit different, but we’ll have such depth now that we didn’t have last year,” Pikiell said. “Maybe we can withstand injuries more and do some different things.”

He was talking about the backcourt in particular there, but Omoruyi is not all by himself in the frontcourt. Antwone Woolfolk and Antonio Chol are eyeing a step forward; Woolfolk shed some of his tight end weight and Chol is developing his outside shot. Then there’s 6-foot-10, 260-pound juco transfer Emmanuel Ogbole, who is recovering from a knee injury but could be a piece down the road.

Speaking of injuries, Mawot Mag hasn’t joined in on 5-on-5 drills yet, but he was cleared for contact less than eight months after a disastrously timed ACL tear. Rutgers was never the same after losing Mag in early February, contributing to a late collapse and a tournament snub. His return is crucial to the Rutgers starting five.

It may not be discussed around the locker room, but the disappointing end to 2022-23 is on some players’ minds as they work.

“I use it as motivation, just because it was my freshman year, and I think we could’ve done way better and I really wanted to play in that tournament,” Simpson said. “I’m glad we got to play in the NIT. I think it was a great experience for me. Obviously not the way you want it to end. But you move on, past is over, move to the present and you just keep working every day.”

“Offseason’s crazy. People are talking to our players all the time,” Pikiell said. “To have these guys come back and finish what they started is very important.”

………

Happy Monday, and thanks for reading. This is the first of several overall previews I have in the works this preseason. Stay tuned for similar looks at Seton Hall, Monmouth, Princeton, the MAAC schools and women’s hoops.

If you’re just joining us, welcome back! We’re hanging out here each Monday and Thursday until the season tips off next month. At that point, I’ll be shifting to a new thrice-a-week schedule for the first time, publishing newsletters each Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. I will have a bit more to say about that as the time gets closer. Do stay tuned.

Let’s clean the glass with a few more Rutgers notes and quotes I think are worth chewing on:

• Steve Pikiell on Aundre Hyatt (emphasis mine): “He’s taken it to a different level. He’s putting the ball on the floor. He’s become more vocal. His numbers shooting the ball are off the charts, but he’s rebounding more. He leads us in assists in a lot of these practices. We stat everything, and he’s really become a complete basketball player. He’s gonna have a fantastic season.” For reference, the forward has yet to average 1.0 assist per game in a single season at LSU or Rutgers, so having him become another facilitator would be an unexpected and welcome wrinkle for the offense.

• Derek Simpson shares what he did this offseason to work on his game: “I really think I have improved a lot. I went back and watched a lot of game film. I learned from my mistakes and I learned from some of the positive stuff I did. Watched a lot of good games, watched a lot of bad games, just thought about ups and downs. I re-lived a lot of the moments and just thought about different ways I could approach this situation and stuff like that. All around it was a positive summer, it’s been a positive fall for me. Keeping all the negative stuff away and I’m ready for the season.”

• Pikiell said it’s the first time using all 13 scholarships in his tenure at Rutgers. One scholarship player, transfer Jeremiah Williams, faces two hurdles before he can play a game. First, he needs an NCAA waiver as a two-time transfer in order to not sit out a season. Williams was also part of a wide-ranging probe in the state of Iowa that investigated student-athletes betting on college sports. Williams pled last month to underage gambling stemming from his time at Iowa State. Williams, who missed last year with an Achilles injury, did not bet on his own team as far as we know. Per NJ.com, an NCAA committee is considering draft proposals that would scale back some of its punishments for first offenders. Whether that would be applied retroactively to players like Williams remains to be seen.