The EvanMiya College Basketball Show

Evan (00:00)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Evan Mia College Basketball Show. I'm your host, Evan Miakawa, and it is time for some transfer portal content. The portal's been open for about two weeks now, and we are seeing some insane amounts of transfer movement, asking prices for players are super high. So I really wanted to spend some time on this. During the regular season, what I did was I released episodes once a week.

on Tuesdays. This off-season it's going to be a little bit more sporadic. I'll do a little bit more stuff over the next month or two. We'll probably have a cooling off period while I'm focusing on other stuff and then we'll ramp it back up for the pre-season. What I want to do is instead of having full length hour-ish episodes, I think I want to do shorter episodes on more bite-sized topics and they'll come out maybe a little bit more frequently than if I were to jam it all into one big episode. So today what we're going to do

is I'm doing a solo pod that's gonna be kind of a transfer portal 101, a short guide to how teams are navigating the transfer portal. I'm gonna cover some of the most interesting trends in the NIL market based on the proprietary data that I have at evamia.com. I think in a few days I'll have another episode breaking down my favorite transfer portal signings of the cycle so far. So we'll do that in a little bit and then we'll kind of go from there.

But today we're gonna focus on kind of what are the trends that we are seeing in the portal and in roster building this off season. So let's get into it here.

I posted a blog post ⁓ last week on Tuesday that turned out to be my most, probably my most widely read piece of analysis that I have ever done. It's a blog article called NIL Market Trends You Need to Know. And so if you haven't read that, go read it. I'll put it in the show notes below. We're going to cover a lot of the stuff that I talked about in this article, but get into it in a little bit more detail than what I had space for in kind of that short article form.

But basically what I kind of get into in this article and what I want to talk about today is what are the general trends that we are seeing both from a roster building standpoint in terms of how teams are building their rosters and constructing ⁓ the squads that they're going to have next year based on kind what we saw from team success this last season. But we're also going to talk about just like NIL market in general, how much are players going for this off season and how has that been different than last year?

There have been a couple notable changes in terms of the infrastructure of the offseason, obviously, if you're keeping track. The transfer portal didn't officially open until the night of the national title game. Now, realistically, players were announcing that they were intending to go in the portal a lot earlier than that, but we saw a flood of names come in basically that Tuesday morning after the title game was over. And now we're north of 2000 student athletes in the portal. think if I check my portal,

ratings right now there's 21,145 Division 1 players who have entered into the portal. Now will all of those players transfer and leave their school and go to another D1 school? No, we typically don't see all of them leave. A lot of them are just trying to figure out what other options are out there, but a vast majority of them will.

So here are the things to know. I wanna focus first on the sort of financial piece and then we'll talk about how that translates to roster trends and then kind of how all that stuff goes together in terms of supply and demand.

So the big thing that you need to know about how the NIL market is trending this off season in the portal and as teams are resigning players from their previous team and all that stuff is that the NIL market.

for Division 1 players is up 65 % from last year. What that means is a player good enough to be worth around $1 million last off-season, be that through the portal or if they were returning to their own team, that same level of player this off-season would be getting $1.65 million. That's already up from a couple weeks ago when I was estimating it was up 35 % last year. Now we're up 65 % and specifically at the high major ranks.

It is up 73 % from last year and low and mid-major conferences, it's a little lower at 44%. Now, how am I able to get those numbers before we kind of put stock in them? Basically, I have a product that I've mentioned before called the Front Office Suite. It's a set of tools that I created for teams specifically for general managers and coaches who are navigating the portal, navigating ⁓ roster building each off season because we have so much turnover.

and now of course have the responsibility of figuring out how much are we actually going to pay our players. It's not just a matter of identifying the best talent, it's figuring out how much to pay that talent and what's the most efficient use of your resources.

So the front office suite is a set of tools that allows for coaching staffs to ⁓ get NIL evaluations for players. Basically, how much is this player, should this player be worth in this market?

that's actually responsive to where the current market is at, because it would be incredibly foolish to just hard set values for each player each off season and say, this off season, this player is worth exactly this much, without having any sort of flexibility that responds to what are the actual trends that we're seeing. No one had any idea exactly how much the market would go up this off season. Some theorized it would actually go down because of the fact that we now have

⁓ revenue sharing and that there is a little bit of a cap to what teams can easily dole out to their student athletes based on their rev share that they have allocated for basketball. However, what we're seeing is that a lot of other teams, the rev share is only a portion of the budget that they are dedicating towards building the roster and the rest is coming from other places sort of similar to how we've seen it before in that there can be deals for a variety of reasons for student athletes.

Now all that stuff theoretically has to go through a clearing house where Deloitte, this sort of third party company, basically has to approve every single NIL deal on top of RevShare that a player might be getting as a part of their total contract, if you will. So say if player was offered $2 million, maybe 400K of that is coming through RevShare and the remaining 1.6 could be coming from elsewhere.

That 1.6 through a variety of deals has to get approved as basically being like, this player, this is a reasonable amount of money to be paying that player. I am not privy to all the details of how this works. Initially, when this was set up, a lot of people were fearful that Deloitte would basically cancel or nix most of these deals and say, there's no way that this guy should be worth $1.2 million for doing a few ⁓ ads for your company. There's just no way. But we have seen...

I think last off season, we saw more of these deals getting cleared than we thought. And so now teams are basically operating under a strategy of whatever money that we raise for a roster, let's say we want to put $12 million towards our roster, regardless of whether that stuff is cleared or not, we're just going to assume that it's going to work and we will figure out the, the, you know, dot our I's and cross our T's later, but we're just going to operate with the amount of money that we have on offer between our rev share and the other

know, NIL collectives and other resources that we have. So for that reason, the market has still gone up a lot this off season. And so the front office suite, coming back to that real quickly, what it does is it allows each team that uses it to put in Intel based on what they know that represents where the current market is at. So basically how this would work is a team might say, okay, we're returning these four guys from our team last year and we know either we already know the contracts that we've agreed with them.

or we know roughly what we're probably going to pay them. So you would enter in data points of this player is worth roughly this amount. This player, he's returning to our team, we're paying him this much. And you would also enter in data points that represents going rates for other players that you might be recruiting. So you might say, we're interested in this guy from this other university and we know that he's considering us amongst other schools, but we think we're going to roughly or whoever gets him is going to roughly pay this amount. You would put in that amount for that player. You could report other publicly heard stuff like, hey,

This coach at another school told me he got his star player for $3.2 million. You would put that in as a data point. All of these data points don't have to be exactly accurate, but if they're close to the ballpark of what those players are actually receiving, then if you do 10, 15, 20 of these data points, it does a pretty good job of summarizing where the market is at overall, how much has gone up from last year, how much the best players and middle players and low players are worth. And so...

Basically what happens is a team will put in that intel that is their best understanding of where the market's at based on kind of the types of players that they're recruiting or interested in. Then my model goes in and says, if this player's worth roughly this amount, this player's worth roughly this amount.

then this is how much every single player in division one should be worth next year based on sort of the market intel that you have provided the machine. Now, basically what that does is when I actually spit out those NIL evaluations, they're not all going to completely match the data points that they put in because someone might say, hey, we're paying this guy 2.5 million. And my model will say, actually he's worth 3. million based on the market summary that you've put in and overall where we think the market is at.

But what it does is it allows for you to kind of be flexible even within a given offseason to say, hey, players are going for a lot more than what they were three weeks ago. Let's update our data points in Intel and allow for the NIL approximations that we're having for everybody in Division 1, not just transfer portal players, but literally everyone who could return. It allows you to be more flexible to that. And so there are around 30 teams who are using it this offseason, which is awesome. I literally just launched this a year ago. And so I never share those data points across teams that's

It's supposed to all stay private to them, so if a team puts in one data point, it's not like another team sees that. But I do have the ability to across all of these teams and all of the data points they're entering at the high major, mid major, and low major ranks. I think I have, what did I say here? 12 different conferences represented by these clients who are using the front office suite. Point is, there is a lot of data put in that basically gives a good idea of how much are players going for. And if I compare that to the same caliber of players last season,

and how much they were going for, I can get a good understanding of how much the market is at overall. So big picture, based on using all of this data, the market is up 65 % from last season off season as I entered, as I mentioned before, it's a little bit higher for that for mid-major players, for high major players, and a little bit lower for low major players and mid-major players. Now, first of all, just the general reaction is how on earth is that possible? Is this sustainable? My answer is no.

But we have been saying no to the sustainability question for the last two to three years. And somehow the, basically each coach is saying, Hey, you want to be more competitive than we were last year. We want to have more money to compete with these other teams. Well, every team is doing that. They're all raising more money than they had the year before. And as a result, the team budgets have gone up. Have they actually gone up 65 % on average? Probably not. ⁓ Based on my sources, talking to people.

I don't think on average the Division 1 high major team has 65 % more money to spend on players than they did last year, but I think that represents what players are actually going for compared to last year. So it's possible we might see a crash or a dip at some point when teams have spent 80 % of their budget and they still have four or five more players to sign, it's possible that those players will go for less. Or it's possible they will find even more money to get the players that they want.

It's really hard to say, but that is right now where the market's at. A lot of the best players in the portal have already signed and those are still the numbers that we're seeing. So pretty crazy to see that level of increase, but that is one big point.

The other topic here as a part of this ⁓ financial study and the thing I find the most interesting is the trends and how teams are spending their money on different types of players. So last year, mean, this literally this last season, Michigan ended up winning the national title with a type of blueprint that has not really been done quite in this way in the modern era before where they had

Both they had a Daimara, Merez Johnson and Yaxle Lendeborg, all players who would traditionally be considered bigs or playing at the four or the five spot, all starting in their starting lineup. Yaxle Lendeborg had played at the four previously and he played down off the three this year and was versatile enough and good enough from wing positions that they didn't really suffer in that way. And they were just able to physically outman and outathlete many other teams that they played.

but they weren't the only team that was successful doing it this way.

You look at all the other one seeds that played in the tournament. Arizona also had a massive loaded front court and a lot of big physical players. Florida came into the season with three traditional bigs that they were all starting in with Thomas Howe playing down at the three position, which was a new thing that they tried this year that was successful. Duke had a loaded front court and you you look at Illinois who was in the final four. They also had a lot of front court players who, you know, played down at positions. The point is

This was a massive trend that was successful for a lot of the best teams in the country this year.

So as a product of that, teams are trying to build their rosters more this way to just physically be better than a lot of the lesser teams that they would play in their conference or a non-conference. And so as a result, very predictably, the going rate for bigs in this market has been extraordinarily high. And I've talked to a lot of coaches who have expressed this that like, wow, I'm just trying to get a service so big.

and I feel like I'm paying double for what I should be paying for this player. Well, if you actually look at the data based on all of my, the front office suite, ⁓ NIL, ⁓ Intel that teams are entering to my tool, and then looking at how good are these players actually and how much production are we expecting from them, what I have found is that if you divide it across positions, point guard, shooting guard, power forward, small forward, and center,

It's not a surprise that teams are overpaying the most for the same level of productivity at the center position. Specifically, if you are looking in the current market for a player who would actually be worth $1 million in terms of their overall value that they would bring to your team, in this current market, teams have to pay on average $1.3 million for a center, or in other words, 30 % more than they actually should be paying based on the level of productivity or value

that those centers will be bringing their teams. That's just where the market's at. So basically what that means is right now, ⁓ bigs and specifically fives centers, traditional centers, are 30 % more expensive in the context of this current market than they should be based on the actual level of production that we would expect from those players. So in other words, teams are having to pay a lot more for maybe a lower level of quality in these big men than they have in the past. Well, where does that equal out? It equals out on the other side of the spectrum.

Point guards right now are not cheap. No positions are cheap, if we're being honest. Point guards aren't cheap, but for the level of productivity that we would expect out of these players based on all of the player evaluations that I do at evamia.com, point guards are a little bit cheaper or more of a bargain than the other positions right now. If you're trying to get a $1 million player, you may only have to pay $813,000 or in other words,

close to 20 or 25 % less than the actual level of production that they're worth. If you look at the difference between point guards and centers, this is where it gets really interesting because basically what this data means is that it is costing 61 % more money to get the same level of quality out of a center versus a point guard. Now, what I'm not saying is that point guards are the cheapest position to acquire in the market right now. That's not true.

Point guards, generally speaking, an elite point guard is worth more to a team in college basketball right now in this current era than a wing traditionally would be. But what I am saying is that based on the amount of money that you could spend to get a certain level or quality of player, point guards are the best bargain right now. And on the flip side, centers, or basically anyone who's super tall, is costing way more money than the level of productivity that they'll get out of them. Now teams still have to start someone.

at the center position, they still have to start someone at the power forward position. So it's not like they just can't spend this money. But because some teams are trying to build their rosters to accumulate more of that front court talent, they're having to spend a lot of money there and maybe the quality at other positions will be less. What this, the interesting discussion that this leads for me is number one, what is the actual difference in quality of player if you're spending the same amount of money based on these market trends?

Let's create an example here where let's say a team has already established a lot of their other rotation and they're trying to figure out we want to get one more player in and it can either be a point guard or a center and we have $1 million to spend on that position. Based on the ⁓ supply and demand for bigs right now, if you were to spend $1 million on a center based on how much they're typically going for and the quality that you would get, they would have a projected Bayesian performance rating of

3.9 next season, that's BPR, which is my measurement of player value relative to Division 1 average. So 3.9 would represent a player who would add 3.9 points per 100 possessions of value compared to an average Division 1 player. So that's a rough guess of the value that you could get for $1 million in the bigs market. That player would be around a borderline top 450 player in college basketball season, so not bad.

But if you were to spend that same one million on an extra point guard instead of an extra center, they would have a projected BPR of 5.1 as opposed to 3.9. That would be roughly a top 250 player next season. And if we're taking, say, how much does that actually matter to a predicted team's success if they have a 5.1 versus a 3.9 on their roster? Well, based on looking at the overall preseason roster talent rankings that I have, if a team was kind of hoping to make the NCAA tournament their ranked

you know, somewhere in the thirties, forties or fifties before taking this player. The difference between getting the point guard versus the center would be worth about a five spot jump in their overall roster talent ranking, which is not insignificant. So that is just a really interesting trend to monitor that teams are having to pay that much more for centers. Now, where will you see teams potentially find value because of this market inefficiency? I think it is looking at rosters like Vanderbilt,

and Nebraska last year that could be examples of these types of roster builds may not win a title, but they might be a lot more successful by building that way versus trying to also chase the market and over invest on bigs and get less quality out of them. So last year Vanderbilt's roster, Jalen Washington was their only true sized big who played regular minutes. He was 6'10 and according to BPR, he was just their sixth best player.

The other front court spots were undersized guys who were wings or, you know, small size bigs. Tyler Nichol, Devin McLaughlin, aka O'Carickie were all 6'7", and their two best players were Duke Miles and Tyler Taner, who was 6'2". Both super, super skilled, super talented guards. And a part of why they were so successful last year was because they got a lot of these underrated pieces who weren't traditional bigs, and they were just able to overwhelm a lot of teams with their skill and talent level and their chemistry across the board.

Nebraska is another great example who ironically enough beat Vanderbilt to get to the Sweet 16. Rinked Mast and Burtay Buktengel were both 6'10". They were basically their only real true front court players. They averaged 53 minutes combined to gain between the two of them. Everyone else on the roster was 6'7 or smaller. Again, a lot of smaller size skill. They also had incredible chemistry together and that's what allowed Nebraska to be so good.

So basically my kind of working theory at this point is that I would probably expect that the 2027 national champion will have a build more similar to Michigan or Arizona this season just because the best teams will have the money to spend and invest on those massive front courts. But for a lot of the other teams that are maybe more in the 10 to 40 range in terms of their preseason outlook, I think a lot of them who are

Loading up on front court talent will end up being having just generally speaking, their rosters just won't look as good once we get into the season because they had to overpay for all that front court talent and rosters who buck the trend a little bit and load up more on guards and smaller wings who may not have the length and athleticism that a Michigan did, but they're just better players. They might end up being more successful this season compared to other teams who are investing their money in different ways. So.

I find that trend to be very interesting and I'm super interested to see when we get to the beginning of the season which teams have said, we're not going to bite and we're not going to pay, put $7 million into our front court this year. We're still going to have serviceable players who play at those positions, but if we're going to accumulate extra talent, we're going to do it at some of these other positions that are at the guard spots and smaller wing spots where you can find more of a bargain right now in today's market.

I will also point out two other interesting portal trends or things to monitor as people are evaluating portal prospects, which I, you know, are extra outside of this article, but I think are really interesting. The first is that one of the player types that is often going to be the, the rated the highest, according to my portal projections at evamia.com are freshmen who are going into their sophomore season and specifically freshmen who came out of high school with a relatively good recruiting profile.

be that a five star or a four star, who may not have been a full finished product in their freshman year, but they showed a lot of good flashes and they're deciding to stay in college for their sophomore year. First of all, we are seeing more and more of these types of players who would normally just go to the NBA draft and be a second round pick. They're coming back to college, which is awesome. But two, specifically, there is often a really big average

jump in productivity and effectiveness from their freshman to sophomore season for a lot of these guys who were four stars or five stars out of high school and were good in their freshman season, they're often really good or excellent in their second season as a sophomore. mean, just a few names off the top like Christian Anderson at Texas Tech was a great example who was really good as a freshman, was unbelievable as a sophomore. There are a lot of other examples of players like that who take a freshman to sophomore year leap.

and often do that as transfers.

Morez Johnson going from Illinois to Michigan was a great example of that last year. He was a freshman who was really productive in his time at Illinois, but didn't play a ton, but his underlying metrics are really good. And he ended up being one of the most dominant players in the country this year on a, the best team in the country. And, you know, I think he could have been scoring even more points than he was if he wasn't kind of playing within his role at Michigan this year. There are a lot of examples of that. So if you go to the portal ratings at Evanmia.com

You will often see a lot of freshmen who are rated really highly because there is a predicted freshman to sophomore year leap. Just looking through some of these players right now in my top 20 or so, Alan Graves at Santa Clara, Akaden Lewis at Villanova, Isaiah Johnson from Colorado. ⁓ Let's see here. Jalen Petty from Texas Tech, ⁓ Najay Hines from Seton Hall. There's a lot of these guys. Kaden Mingo from Penn State. ⁓ A lot of these guys.

were solid, maybe they weren't finished products, but solid as a freshman, not good enough to go to the NBA and be a lottery pick, but typically take big jumps in their sophomore year leap. So that is something to really keep in mind as being one of the most valuable things that you can find in a portal prospect. There was a big difference between that projected leap versus someone who's a junior going into their senior year. Usually they're around the same level of player, maybe just a little bit better going into their senior year, but the freshman to sophomore year leap is real.

The other thing that a lot of coaches ask me is, is there a certain type of skill set or statistic that is super valuable when identifying good transfers that maybe most people don't pay enough attention to? And my general answer to that is there's a lot of helpful things, but generally speaking, I actually think it's being skilled in multiple areas that allows for players to be successful as transfers and specifically,

guys who are transferring up from a mid-major level to a high-major level, for example. So basically what I mean by that is there are a lot of players who are very ⁓ coveted in the transfer portal for doing one thing super well, be that a volume scorer or a playmaker or something. And when these guys transfer up a level, and that's their only thing that they're good at, ⁓ more athletic, more skilled defense can often take that part of their game away from them, and then they don't really have the ability to

succeed in other areas. Whereas transfers who are often more successful are excellent in multiple areas. Maybe they're a gifted scorer, but they also are a great playmaker or they're great on the board, so they're a good rim protector or they're just really stingy on defense. It means they have they have multiple facets to their game and if an opponent takes away one of them, they have other areas. Those types of players often end up having much better success rates as transfers, especially going from a lower level to a higher level. So that's something that I watch for in particular.

And I guess kind of the flip side of that is the player archetype that is often the most overvalued in the transfer portal. It's not that surprising is volume scoring bucket getters, players who score anywhere between 15 and 20 points a night at a lower school often. And these players, when you watch them on film, they pop because they're making all of these difficult shots. But oftentimes their shooting efficiency, especially if their shooting efficiency is just okay, not great like

Maybe they're not a elite three-point shooter or they're not elite at the free throws or scoring at the rim, but they do score a lot of points. A lot of times, teens will chase after these guys and hope that they'll be the next Dalton Connect, like he was coming from Northern Colorado to Tennessee. But especially if that type of player doesn't really have another area of excellence, like I mentioned, he's also not a great playmaker or rebounder or ⁓ something like that, these players...

may still score a lot at their new school, but they won't be particularly efficient doing it. So they will as by and large, the offense won't be generating as good of looks and they're not able to contribute in another area. A lot of times these guys do not provide the value that teams end up paying for. And they're one of the more overpaid types of positions that we see in college basketball. An example of this that we saw last year, and I'm not, I'm not saying this is an indictment on him as a transfer this year, but PJ Haggerty

has been a volume score for most of his career. Now, Hagerty is actually a pretty competent score in his own right in terms of his efficiency. He's above average as a three-point shooter inside the arc and at free throws, but he's never quite been the playmaker that you would want out of a traditional point guard such that someone who is shooting as much as he is is also able to ⁓ provide threat in other areas. What we saw last season,

was that he transferred from Memphis to Kansas State. I know Kansas State paid him a lot of money. His stats still looked really good this season. Did that have an impact on Kansas State's success? No. Kansas State massively fell short of expectations this year. I'm not all putting that at the feet of PJ Haggerty. I still think he's a good player, but that type of archetype, someone who scores close to 20 a night, but isn't excellent in other areas like...

that type of player is often overpaid in the transfer portal and in college basketball at this point in time. And so a lot of teams will end up paying a lot for that type of player because other teams want that type of player too. And they may still put up empty numbers, if you will, but they won't have quite the level of actual impact on team winning as what you would want. So that is the type of player that I often have a little bit of hesitancy for. Now, Hagrid is an interesting choice because I still have him rated as one of the top

15 or so players in the portal. And I think he's a good ad for Texas A this off season. But generally speaking, that type of player, especially coming from the lower mid-major ranks, does not translate, at least in their first year as a transfer, quite as often as teams would expect.

Well guys, that's all I've got for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this sort of transfer portal, NIL Primer, if you will. As I mentioned, I'll have another episode shortly soon, going over some of my favorite portal gets from the off season and we'll have even more stuff planned after that. So please stick around for that, I appreciate it. ⁓ We'll be back at some point soon. As always, this is an ad-free show, so please give us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. If you listen on the podcast platforms,

or if you are watching on YouTube, please subscribe to the channel and like it. Super fun, I'm really looking forward to what we can do this off season as I have time. So thanks for being here, thanks for listening, and I will see all of you guys shortly, thank you.