The transfer portal is a weird, eerie place, especially nowadays with multi-million-dollar offers flying around left and right. The ballooning money in the 2025 portal cycle has made it even harder to find the correct convergence between the best basketball situation and the most lucrative deal.
Do you pick once-in-a-lifetime money? Or the best fit for your game? Can you possibly have your cake and eat it, too?
It’s a complicated, nuanced discussion.
History is clear: fit can make-or-break a transfer’s case. JT Toppin-to-Texas Tech looked perfect on paper last summer and proved to be even better than most optimists expected. Toppin won Big 12 Player of the Year, Texas Tech advanced to the Elite Eight (it should have made the Final Four) and Toppin earned a rumored $4 million bag to run it back.
Danny Wolf to Michigan was met with complaints and criticism, but Dusty May‘s nifty plan helped Wolf and fellow 7-footer Vlad Goldin blossom into a terrifying tandem. Wolf is slated to be a first-round pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, largely because he decided to trust May’s unique strategy. Go digging and you can find examples of the right fit making transfers a whole lot of money, and the wrong fit proving costly for both the team and the hooper.
Portal combat is still raging, but dozens of the best transfers are off the board, and roster-building choices made in April can have an enormous impact on how transfers perform next season.
Point blank: Here’s our pitch on why these teams have made smart decisions to target, land and build around these players, and why these studs made sharp calls to hop on board.
READ MORE: Michigan, Louisville, Kentucky headline college basketball’s top transfer portal classes
Let’s dive in.
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