The most anticipated season of Rutgers basketball ended with a whimper in a 97-89 double-overtime loss to USC in Wednesday’s Big Ten Tournament opener. As usual, Dylan Harper was tremendous, pouring in 27 points, eight rebounds, eight assists, two blocks and two steals in 46 minutes. Foul trouble plagued Ace Bailey, but the presumed top-five pick still finished with 17 points and fueled Rutgers’ furious second-half rally with a flurry of buckets in the paint.
When a year like this goes astray, there’s blame to be had everywhere. None of it should fall on Harper’s shoulders. The dazzling five-star lead guard returned from a painful ankle injury to play for a team well outside the NCAA Tournament picture when no one would’ve faulted him for shutting it down to prepare for the 2025 NBA Draft. Harper finished his lone season in college basketball averaging 19.4 points, 4.6 rebounds, 4.0 assists and 1.4 steals with terrific efficiency marks across the board.
When fully healthy, Harper was as advertised: a physical, paint-touch monster firmly in the discussion as the best guard in America on any given night.
Bailey was a tad more up and down, but that was to be expected. Bailey’s barrage of tough 2s could frustrate or tantalize based on the night, and the Big Ten is widely praised for being incredibly well-scouted. Opposing offensive coordinators took advantage of his inconsistent awareness off the ball, but Bailey had flashes that were incredibly impactfulful defensively. Overall, Rutgers would’ve signed up for the 17-and-7 with good enough defense that Bailey produced on a nightly basis.
But Steve Pikiell’s 2024 portal haul will go down as the worst of any high-major team. There are 79 high-major teams in college basketball now that Oregon State and Washington State have been forced to ship off to the West Coast Conference. Marquette is the only one that didn’t take a transfer in the 2024 portal cycle. Seventy-seven other programs had at least one transfer average more than seven points per game.
Rutgers is the lone outlier.
None of the quartet of Jordan Derkack, Tyson Acuff, Zach Martini or PJ Hayes IV managed to average north of six points per game, and there was a reason why all four moved in and out of the rotation throughout the season. Derkack played hard and brought it on the defensive end, but his offensive output was shaky outside of a nifty shot-fake that had defenders biting left and right. Opposing defensive coordinators quickly quit guarding him to send an extra defender toward Bailey or Harper. Acuff was a knockdown catch-and-shoot sniper, but his defense waned. When he wasn’t making jumpers, Acuff struggled to make much of an impact. Hayes was supposed to bring spacing, but the 6-foot-6 transfer from San Diego left a ton to be desired defensively. Rutgers specifically recruited Martini out of Princeton after being impressed by his defense on Cliff Omoruyi in the 2023 season opener, but the 6-foot-8 forward looked overmatched on both ends in the Big Ten.
Try as he might, Pikiell had no answers. His rotations were revamped almost daily during the heat of Big Ten play when injuries to Harper and Ogbole hit. He bemoaned scheduling a tough nonconference slate for a young team. He bristled and pushed back vehemently at questions in the preseason about whether Martini and the unproven Emmanuel Ogbole could form a competent Big Ten center platoon. Unfortunately for Rutgers, those concerns had merit.
There was no defensive bite. These pieces did not fit, and it had ramifications everywhere. Jeremiah Williams struggled with a rash of turnovers and couldn’t find his 3-point stroke. Freshmen like Lathan Sommerville and Dylan Grant were forced to take on much bigger roles. Both showed some promise, but the defense with four freshmen on the floor together was, objectively, a disaster as you might expect. Rutgers finished with the second-worst defense a Pikiell-coached team has ever had dating back to 2009 at Stony Brook.
There will be offseason think pieces galore about whether a team built around five-star freshmen can be successful in an era of college basketball that’s older than ever. 2024-25 Rutgers will be brought up as an example of what can happen when you build a team around two superstar freshmen.
But Harper and Bailey didn’t build this team.
The transfer portal miscalculations has to be the story of this lost Rutgers campaign.
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