Season preview: Princeton is ready for its close-up

"At the end of the day," Caden Pierce said, "I tell Xaivian, I tell myself, I tell all the guys, 'None of this matters if we don't win games.'"

Caden Pierce dribbles during Princeton’s game against Furman on Dec. 2, 2023. (Photo by Adam Zielonka)

PRINCETON – Mitch Henderson knows college basketball players have no shortage of options in this day and age. His top two stars in particular, Caden Pierce and Xaivian Lee, could have transferred up to a major program if their hearts desired, and Lee had more than a little interest from the NBA.

On Monday, Henderson was asked when he became certain that Princeton would have both Pierce and Lee back for the 2024-25 season.

“May 2 at 12:01 a.m., whatever time that was,” Henderson said, referencing the moment the transfer portal closed for good. “I did a bunch of backflips.

“I don’t know, it’s not lost on me, the opportunities that these guys had and have and will continue to have. Even for us, the team looks similar but it’s a different world. But I love Princeton basketball the way it looks with this team, and our objective is to keep this going in a really good manner.”

Princeton basketball may go about its business the way it has for time immemorial, but the transfer portal is far from the only thing that sets 2024 apart. As the Tigers have won the Ivy League regular-season title three years running, highlighted by a run to the Sweet 16 in 2023, more and more outsiders have started to take notice.

Six NBA scouts were in attendance at Monday’s combo practice/media day at Jadwin Gym. One was repping the Memphis Grizzlies, a team that briefly rostered Princeton alum Tosan Evbuomwan last year.

Rutgers is back on the Tigers’ schedule, and some cream-of-the-crop mid-majors now want to test themselves against Princeton, at Princeton, namely Iona, Loyola Chicago and Akron. The Tigers received two votes in the Associated Press preseason poll, and the preseason KenPom ratings pegged Princeton No. 77 in the country, 12th-highest among mid-majors and ahead of normally stalwart programs like Virginia.

If the Tigers were sneaking up on anyone in years past, forget that was ever a possibility. Henderson called it “really good noise” surrounding his program. But Princeton’s simple approach to blocking that out is to do everything the same as it always has and keep the main thing the main thing.

“We’re starting to gain some momentum as a program,” Pierce said. “We’re winning games, that definitely helps. At the end of the day, I tell Xaivian, I tell myself, I tell all the guys, ‘None of this matters if we don’t win games.’”

Why Pierce and Lee stayed

Lee declared for the 2024 NBA Draft last spring and went through the evaluation process while maintaining his collegiate eligibility. Lee looked impressive in some drills at the NBA G League Combine, but after not receiving an invite to the main draft combine, he knew his best move was to grow for a third year at Princeton.

When going up against players who didn’t have remaining college eligibility to fall back on, Lee said he needed to have a mindset of “kill or be killed.”

“This is now not just like for fun, it’s almost like your livelihood,” he said. “I was trying to learn from them, playing with the best. I think it helped my confidence the most out of anything, just knowing I can compete at that level defensively, obviously offensively.”

He gave a nonchalant “It’s cool” when asked what it was like to have six scouts at a practice on a Monday in October.

“My freshman year there wasn’t really scouts there, so it’s cool to see kind of the program developing in that sense,” Lee said. “Coach was saying before, midway in the year hopefully that number is doubled.”

As for Pierce, there would be no shortage of suitors if the Ivy League Player of the Year entered the portal. After all, Yale 7-footer Danny Wolf is now at Michigan and Harvard star guard Malik Mack transferred to Georgetown. Such moves out of the Ivy League were unheard of till the past few years.

“It’s hard – you can’t avoid the transfer portal in college basketball nowadays,” Pierce said. “You hear things and people tell you things, and so at the end of the day you do kind of evaluate, but I love Princeton and I’m happy to be here and I think this place has done more for me than I could have ever imagined.”

Both Pierce and Lee, who are not only teammates but classmates and fellow economics majors, had thoughtful answers for what made Princeton stand out to them.

“Me and Xaivian, we’re pretty much best friends,” Pierce said. “If you’re looking elsewhere, one thing that brings you back is you want to have friends for life. That’s one thing this place does well. You grow up with your class and your teammates, and eventually you become best friends and you don’t want to leave that behind.”

“There’s a lot of factors that went into my decision,” Lee said, “but honestly I just thought Princeton was the best place for me to get ready to get my next level, next goal, in terms of strictly basketball where I can grow the most and let my game be on display the most. I felt comfortable coming back here and I love the culture, the coaching staff, my teammates. Princeton basketball as a whole has been great to me and is everything I could have asked for.”

Deep diving

Pierce has stood out since his freshman year for his tremendous rebounding, but Lee was not a starter on that Sweet 16 team and wasn’t circled on any scouting reports to start 2023-24. There’s no hiding them this time around.

Both Henderson and Lee believe this year’s Princeton team will be deeper after seeing a seven-man rotation fizzle out by March. Those seven players accounted for 91% of the Tigers’ minutes, and when one starter was in foul trouble or not 100% healthy, they had issues.

“I think we know what it’s gonna take now to kind of sustain that level of play throughout an entire season. I think we were kind of burnt out a little bit last year,” Lee said, later adding, “… We could really use a deeper team this year, so I think a lot of (freshmen) could definitely contribute.”

“We didn’t play that many guys, and we won 24 games doing that,” Henderson said. “(This year) we’re a bit deeper.”

Four starters are essentially guaranteed: Senior Blake Peters and sophomore Dalen Davis will join Lee in the backcourt, and Pierce’s best fit is at the four. Who’s the starting five? (This seems to be a question across New Jersey, from Rutgers to Seton Hall and back.)

Henderson is eyeing Jacob Huggins, Philip Byriel and freshmen CJ Happy and Malik Abdullahi for time at the five. Huggins seems to offer the most, given his playing time as a freshman and his 6-foot-8, 225-pound frame. The starter on opening night against Iona may not be the starter by the end of the month as Henderson tests guys out.

The coaching staff is excited about their latest freshman class, which also includes New Jersey natives Zio Kim and Peyton Seals and three-star Chicago guard Jack Stanton.

Deven Austin’s return

Two other names are worth noting from that standout junior class I first profiled during 2022-23.

Princeton will have Deven Austin back from a knee injury that cost him the end of his freshman year and his entire sophomore season. In limited minutes off the bench as a freshman, Austin had several promising flashes and averaged 5.4 points and 2.5 rebounds.

Austin said his knee feels great, and the hardest part for him about last year was watching his teammates have another terrific season, knowing he could have helped them if not for the injury.

“Obviously no one wants to go through this and you never think it’s gonna be you, but when it is it’s such a hard thing mentally having to trust your knee every day,” Austin said. “And then when I finally started to get on the court I was really scared. But I trusted my work that I did over the summer and in the spring, and when I finally got back on the court it just felt natural. Now I just gotta get back up to speed and everything.”

What might his role be this year? Could Austin work his way into the starting five?

“Honestly, I just hope I can help us win, whatever that may be,” Austin said. “If Coach wants me to play defense on their best player, I’ll do that. If he wants me to come in, post up, score, I’ll do that. If he wants me to be a cheerleader on the bench, I’ll do that. Honestly whatever he wants me to do, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

The coaches are reminding Austin that his comeback has to be a day-by-day process.

“The game tends to come your way when you’re not trying too hard, and then when you’re trying to do too much you get frustrated,” Henderson said. “I would just say again, have a little grace that it’s gonna take some time. He has such a unique ability to affect the game. He’s so long and athletic, similar to Cade. He can kind of take the game over at times. But there’s not an eight-point play out there where you’re gonna do that.”

There’s also Jack Scott, son of former Princeton coach Joe Scott, who’s back on the roster after committing to transfer to William & Mary in May.

Scott changed his mind about the move and decided to return to Princeton. Henderson said the Tigers were thrilled he came back, but Scott will not play this year.

The end goal

There’s no point in asking a Princeton player or coach what his goal is for the upcoming season. It’s an Ivy League title or bust. That was reflected in a conversation Henderson had with Peters, the team’s top senior.

“(We) said in the spring, ‘What are your goals?’ And he said, ‘Four titles.’ And that was about the end of the conversation,” Henderson said. “If we get there, it’ll be because of Blake’s leadership and the group coming together around our unified goal.”

The Tigers received 15 of 16 first-place votes in the Ivy League’s preseason poll, with the other being allocated to Brown, the team that knocked Princeton out of the Ivy Madness semifinals.

The bar has been set pretty high. More people are watching than ever. Will this team stack up to those that took the Jadwin court in the recent past?

“We can be an unbelievable team if we all buy in,” Pierce said.

………

Hi there, and thanks for reading. Monday was a packed day for me, as both Seton Hall and Princeton held their preseason media days. I’ll publish a season preview of Seton Hall on Thursday, with more stories and interviews coming soon after.

For now, let’s clean the glass:

• Rutgers will start the season ranked No. 25. It’s a continuation of the complete discord among groups of voters not knowing how to rank this freshman-laden team: The AP voters scattered across the nation have the Scarlet Knights 25th, with one voter I saw putting them as high as No. 17. KenPom’s computer model pegged them 63rd in the country – that’s second to last in an 18-team Big Ten. (I don’t know how that accounts for incoming freshmen – certainly not as well as human voters do.) The unofficial Big Ten preseason media poll put Rutgers a healthy seventh in the Big Ten, while Blue Ribbon decided on 15th. It won’t make sense until we see the product on the court.

• I blocked a Twitter account farming engagement by calling it “disrespectful” that Illinois was unranked to start the season, “behind teams like Rutgers & Ole Miss.” Never mind that Illinois is even more of an enigma full of new pieces than Rutgers is, as Eamonn Brennan perfectly pointed out this summer. Rutgers edged out Illinois 102 votes to 92. Definitely super disrespectful. Don’t interact with these accounts that bait people bored on their phones at work. This is what I think many people mean when they complain about “the media” and bias, at least in the sports world, and it does nothing but hurt our discourse.

• I mentioned to Henderson the added wrinkle in this year’s Princeton-Rutgers game: that Zach Martini would be wearing scarlet. “Hate that part of it, for both of us,” he grinned. “When the game came out, Zach wrote me a note, something like, ‘Screw you’ or something. I love that game. I’m really happy that Rutgers wants to play. … I think New Jersey basketball’s terrific. We want to play everybody in the state that would play us.”