With new addition, what might Oklahoma State men's basketball starting lineup look like?
Scott WrightSTILLWATER — With the painful departures of the baseball and softball teams from their postseason tournaments, the Oklahoma State athletics calendar is winding down.
Eleven OSU athletes will be competing at the NCAA track and field championships this week, and that will close the book on the 2022-23 academic year.
The softball team reached a program-record fourth straight Women’s College World Series and will say goodbye to a few foundational players in coach Kenny Gajewski’s development of the Cowgirl program.
The baseball team suffered an early exit with losses to Oral Roberts and Dallas Baptist in the Stillwater Regional.
The Oklahoman’s Scott Wright will address a variety of topics in this week’s OSU Newsletter, including a few questions from the reader mailbag:
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Have there been any interesting recruiting developments for OSU in summer camps?
Wright: Not anything huge yet, with one possible exception. It seems the Cowboys might’ve targeted another quarterback prospect they like, and his name screams OSU.
Adrian Posse, from Miami, Florida, has several high-level offers already, but after OSU coaches got their eyes on him in person at camp over the weekend, he apparently got some special treatment, according to Pokes Report.
The Cowboys don’t have a quarterback in the 2024 class, though they don’t necessarily have to take one. But if a good prospect comes along, they won’t turn him away.
Former Cowboys Tatum Bell and Ricklan Holmes both tweeted out info about their sons, Tatum Bell Jr. and Ricklan Holmes II, working out at camps over the weekend, and both will certainly continue to be in focus for OSU coaches. Holmes is at Del City High School, which has sent a few players OSU’s way recently.
Now to reader questions.
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From @brianhd79 on Twitter: Potential starting lineup and first three off the bench for OSU men’s hoops?
Wright: With the most recent addition, 7-foot-1 Isaiah Miranda from North Carolina State, the roster is really taking shape. In terms of settling on a starting five, the big men are the toughest question. Who starts, and how is the rotation used? How often will coach Mike Boynton use two of them on the floor together? It’s all very interesting.
But to the question. I see East Carolina transfer Javon Small settling in at point guard. He had 100 assists in 18 games last season before suffering a knee injury and looks like a strong facilitator who can also score. Then returners John-Michael Wright and Bryce Thompson at the other guard positions, giving the backcourt a solid collection of ball-handlers and scorers.
At 6-foot-7, incoming freshman Eric Dailey Jr. has the game to be a versatile forward who can stretch the floor. When Boynton wants to go with a big lineup, Dailey has the skill to play on the wing.
And for the big man, I’m going to project another incoming freshman, McDonald’s All-American Brandon Garrison of Del City, as the starter. Maybe he’s not the guy at the very beginning of the season, but I think he becomes the guy they want to get the most minutes for.
Mike Marsh, the 6-foot-11, 240-pound transfer from Jacksonville is the only true big man with any college experience, so that might help him fight his way into the starting job. While Miranda is intriguing, he redshirted last year at NC State, so his college potential is still hard to project, though he was a top-50 high school recruit.
As for guards coming off the bench, look for Quion Williams, who gained valuable experience playing in 34 games as a freshman last season, and North Florida transfer super-senior Jarius Hicklen, who is a career 38.7% shooter from 3-point range.
This is fun speculation right now, but with the overseas trip in the fall, Boynton will have a lot more knowledge of how this will shake out by the time the season opener gets here.
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From @BankerBoggs on Twitter: Cowgirls won the portal game. Agree?
Wright: In terms of what women’s basketball coach Jacie Hoyt brought in via the portal, I think you can definitely make that argument. It’s harder to tell how this team will compare to last year when you start weighing their total losses (graduation and portal) against what is coming in.
This team was already losing a lot of talent to graduation, with five super-seniors (three starters) exiting. Then you add in the portal losses, with two starters and two role players departing, and Hoyt found herself in position to be an attractive option for portal players looking to replicate what players like Terryn Milton and Naomie Alnatas did for the Cowgirls last year.
Hoyt put together a portal class that has all the variety her team needs. Frontcourt, backcourt, scorers, defenders, glue players. Add that to the remaining core which included two key pieces from last year in Anna Gret Asi and Lior Garzon, plus a couple of bigs who didn’t see the floor last year — Hannah Gusters and Praise Egharevba — and the roster offers plenty of intrigue.
But Hoyt will have another offseason of chemistry-building to do. Of course, that seems to be one of her specialties.
From @coffeemanzac on Twitter: Does (OSU baseball coach Josh) Holliday get the boot? If not, what changes are to be made to the baseball program?
Wright: I understand the fans’ level of frustration with the way the season ended, but I think Holliday’s job is safe. He has taken the Cowboys to 10 straight regionals, earning a national seed of 11 or better in three of the last four.
Yes, the Cowboys have turned those into just one College World Series appearance in that span, but everyone outside of the SEC is battling that conference’s stranglehold on CWS berths. Dating back to 2016, when OSU last made it, only three programs outside of the SEC have made more than two CWS appearances. And one of them is Texas, which will soon be flying the SEC banner.
While losing your own regional — in an embarrassing way — is rightfully viewed as an underachievement, from a wider lens, this team really overachieved. Everyone knew pitching was going to be a struggle this year, based on the MLB Draft gutting the staff last summer.
The offense was so good, it hid a lot of the other issues this team had.
Now, will changes be made internally? That’s certainly possible, though no rumblings have begun to emerge just yet. Baseball teams can add a fourth paid assistant coach next month, so Holliday is already working on deciding what his staff looks like going forward.
If you’d like to submit a question for the mailbag, email it to OSU beat writer Scott Wright atswright@oklahoman.com.
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