A late-blooming, sweet-shooting mid-major guard transfers to Tennessee, scorches the nets at a November tournament on an island resort and serves notice that not only can he play at this level, but he can be a bona fide shooting star. It might sound like we’re talking about Dalton Knecht, who transferred a year ago from Northern Colorado, announced his presence at the Maui Invitational and went on to average 21.7 points per game, become SEC player of the year and is currently an NBA Rookie of the Year candidate with the Los Angeles Lakers.

But we’re not. We’re talking about Chaz Lanier, a 6-foot-4 super senior guard who transferred from North Florida and just lit up Virginia and Baylor in The Bahamas for a combined 51 points while sinking 13 of 22 from three-point range. Lanier scored all 25 of his points (on seven three-pointers) agains Baylor in the first half on Friday, spurring the Vols to a 77-62 win. He’s averaging a team-best 17.7 points through the Vols’ first six games.

Lanier’s lights-out early start has naturally drawn comparisons with Knecht. When I raised the question with Tennessee coach Rick Barnes when we spoke by phone Sunday night, he cautioned me not to rush into things. But he did acknowledge that there are a lot of similarities between the two stories — at least, so far. “You can’t compare the two. Everybody’s different,” Barnes said. “What you can say is both those guys are big-time shooters. They can both explode. They also ingratiated themselves with their teammates because of their humility. I had to tell both of ’em to shoot more because they want their teammates to like them.”

While Knecht grew up in Colorado and played two years at junior college, Lanier is a Tennessee native who played for The Ensworth School in Nashville. He did not draw any interest from UT or any other power conference school, so he ended up at North Florida, where he averaged 4.2 points over his first three seasons. After he blossomed as a senior (19.7 points per game on 44 percent three-point shooting), Lanier entered the transfer portal. He was No. 311 in EvanMiya’s transfer rankings. (Knecht wasn’t much higher last season at No. 213.) Yet, Lanier has been as impactful as any transfer in the country and he is the biggest reason the Vols are undefeated and ranked No. 5 on KenPom.

Barnes is the first to acknowledge that there is a considerable amount of luck involved when it comes to recruiting mid-major transfers. But the fact that this is happening at Tennessee for the second straight season is a testament to the ability of Barnes and his staff to evaluate players. Tennessee’s second-leading scorer, 6-foot-10 senior guard Igor Milici, is another transfer who came from Charlotte. A third starter, 6-foot-11 junior center Felix Okpara, transferred from Ohio State. “We have a formula for what we want,” Barnes told me. “We knew that shooting was a priority for us and we targeted guys we thought fit best with us. With Chaz being from Nashville, we talked to a lot of people who told us how solid he was as a person.”

There is, of course, one way in which Lanier hopes to differentiate himself from Knecht. While Tennessee’s run through the 2024 NCAA Tournament ended with a loss to Purdue in the Elite Eight, this team has shown it has the potential to reach the Final Four. That’s a reasonable goal if Lanier keeps shooting like this, but Barnes is quick to remind everyone that the season is long and Lanier has much to learn. “Dalton went through a couple of games where he found out things get harder,” Barnes said. “Chaz is going to go through it, too. He’s going to have an even bigger target on his back because teams are going to gameplan for him. He is off to a solid start but now he’s got to keep it going.”

Miller Has Cincinnati Winning Again, But For How Long?

Wes Miller is a basketball junkie with a deep appreciation for the game’s history. So when he was attending a Final Four as an assistant at UNC Greensboro several years ago and saw Oscar Robertson on the taxi line at the airport, Miller made sure to introduce himself. “I’ve been in love with the game my entire life, so that was a big moment,” Miller told me. Then he quipped, “I’m pretty sure Oscar wouldn’t remember me.”

Well, I’m pretty sure Robertson knows who Miller is now because he is revitalizing the program that the Big O put on the map, leading the Bearcats to three straight Final Fours from 1958-60. Cincinnati went on to win the NCAA Tournament in 1961 and ’62 and returned to the Final Four under Bob Huggins in 1992. Recent history hasn’t been so kind, however, as Cincinnati has missed out on March Madness for the last five years, including the last three under Miller. Now, however, the Bearcats are 5-0 and have entered the AP Top 25 for the first time since 2019.

He’s not the Big O, but Dillon Michell and the Bearcats have their fans dreaming big again.
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Cincinnati almost broke its NCAA Tourney skid last year but ended up going 9-12 in its first season in the Big 12 (22-15 overall) and finished No. 37 in the NET. The Bearcats returned five of their top six players and added one of the top transfers in the portal in Dillon Mitchell, a 6-foot-8 junior forward from Texas who had 14 points and 11 rebounds in Saturday’s 81-58 win at Georgia Tech. The Bearcats have yet to face a top 100 KenPom team so no one is planning any parades just yet, but for a program with a proud past and a recent history of stagnation, any sign of progress is welcome.

“This has been a cumulative effect of being able to retain not just good players but our staff as well,” Miller told me. “And we’ve added some really nice pieces. We could lay an egg next week and we’ll have some bad nights, but if we’re fortunate to stay healthy, we’re going to be a really good team because the things we’re doing are real and sustainable.”

Cincinnati is one of several programs with rich histories that are experiencing a resurgence in the early going. The others include:

  • DePaul. Yes, the Blue Demons have played six teams ranked 232 or below on KenPom and four below 300. And yes, they needed overtime to beat Southern Indiana at home in the opener. But given how gawdawful this program has been this century (one NCAA tourney since 2000 and none since 2004), any ray of hope will do..

    The promising start has validated the school’s decision to hire Chris Holtmann, who was let go by Ohio State in mid-February. Holtmann had to bring in 13 new players and has his guys playing a modernized up-tempo, three-happy offense. “Our schedule has not been super challenging, but we’ve made some progress,” Holtmann told me. “I think we’ve established how we want to play and we have a group of guys who are committed to it. They’ve been really enjoyable to coach, but we’ll know more in about a month as to how good we really are.”
  • Pittsburgh couldn’t quite pull off the upset over Wisconsin on Sunday in West Virginia, losing 81-75 after leading for most of the game, but heading into that game Jeff Capel had the Panthers off to a 6-0 start with wins over West Virginia (home) and LSU (neutral). Capel has taken the Panthers to just one NCAA Tournament in the last six years (they played in the First Four in 2023 but won two games) and they were one of the first teams out last year. Capel lost his top two scorers but returned 6-foot-3 sophomore guard Jaland Lowe, who had a triple double (11 points, 10 rebounds, 10 assists) in a Nov. 18 win over VMI and went for 22 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists in Saturday’s 74-63 win over LSU. Sunday’s loss to the Badgers aside, this looks very much like an NCAA Tournament team.
  • Maryland, which has been to just one Sweet Sixteen since 2003, is showing signs of life in Kevin Willard’s third season. The Terps are 4-1 and have one of the elite freshmen – scratch that, elite players – in the country in 6-foot-10 center Derik Queen, who had 22 points, 11 rebounds and 5 assists in Sunday’s 76-75 win over Villanova.
  • Sister Jean’s school, Loyola Chicago, hasn’t had an easy time since Porter Moser left for Oklahoma and the school moved into the Atlantic 10, but now the Ramblers are 6-0 and ranked No. 82 in KenPom. Drew Valentine seems to have found his footing in his fourth season as head coach. The Ramblers will face their first top 100 team on Dec. 15 against San Francisco in Milwaukee, but they have established themselves as one of the favorites in the A-10 this season.

Other Hoop Thoughts

  • If you’re looking for the feel good story of the early season, look no further than Drake, which beat Miami, FAU and Vanderbilt to capture the Charleston Classic. The Bulldogs are led by first-year coach Ben McCollum, who not only came from a Division II school, Northwest Missouri State, where he won four national championships, but brought four of his starters as well. I hope Drake keeps winning if only so it will convince more Division I schools to hire coaches from the lower ranks. I seem to recall that Bo Ryan fella having a pretty decent run after he won four national titles at Division III Wisconsin-Platteville.
  • On the flip side, Drake’s win over Miami was one of three losses the Hurricanes suffered in Charleston. The other were to Oklahoma State and VCU. It was only two years ago that Jim Larranaga had the Hurricanes in the Final Four, but they went 6-15 in the ACC last season and look to be headed for another cold winter in Coral Gables. When a coach who is 75 years old has a couple of seasons like that, you can expect the questions to persist as to how long he can hang on. The same could happen with another septuagenarian coach in the Sunshine State, 76-year-old Leonard Hamilton, whose Florida State Seminoles have missed out on the last three NCAA Tournaments. FSU is 6-1 but it lost to the only top 100 team it faced (Florida).
  • Ohio State has been ridiculously hot from three-point range this season, but the Buckeyes need to have strong inside play in order to survive the cold shooting nights that are doubtlessly on the way. So it’s troublesome that they are currently without their two best frontcort players. Sean Stewart, a 6-foot-9 sophomore transfer from Duke, missed Friday’s 104-60 win over Campbell with a concussion. There’s no word yet on when he will be back, but concussions can be tricky. Things are a lot more concerning with respect to 7-foot-1 Kentucky transfer Aaron Bradshow, who is not participating in any team activities. The school is not disclosing the reason for Bradshaw’s absence, citing privacy laws. Again, these are not major problems as long as the Buckeyes are making three-point shots against weak opponents, but the competition is about to get a lot stiffer in the coming weeks. The Buckeyes need all the big bodies they can muster.
  • Can you even get over these Wisconsin Badgers? Gone is the slow, plodding and (let’s be honest) borderline unwatchable style of the past. With their 81-75 win over Pittsburgh on Sunday, these Badgers have scored 79 or more points in their first seven games for the first time in program history. As I wrote last week in Hoop Thoughts, we are in the midst of the best offensive season of college hoops in at least the last 30 years. When Wisconsin is averaging 87.7 points per game, you know we are officially through the looking glass. And I am here for every bit of it.
  • Tough to see Caleb Love struggle so badly at Arizona, but the Wildats need him to rediscover his shooting touch as soon as possible. After shooting 3 of 13 (1 for 9 from three) and scoring just eight points in the Wildcats’ loss at home to Duke Friday night, Love is now averaging 10.3 points on 21.4 perent three-point shooting. Both numbers are the lowest of his career. Tommy Lloyd acknowledged the obvious after the loss, saying that Love is struggling and needs to turn things around. This happens sometimes when seniors press themsleves too hard in an effort to show they can play in the NBA. Love is too good to play this poorly so I’m guessing he will pick things up soon, but still – it’s a big-time concern for a team that has lost big to the only two good teams it has played this season.
  • On the flip side, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better coach-player marriage than the one between Mark Pope and Koby Brea at Kentucky. The Wildcats apparently can never shoot enough threes to make their new coach happy. They are launching an average of 29.8 treys per game (27th in the country) and are sinking 42.3 percent (12th). Brea, a 6-foot-6 super senior guard, shot 49.8 percent from three at Dayton last season, which was the third-highest in the country. So far this season he is shooting a ridiculous 74.1 percent (20 of 27). That number will go down, obviously, but that is still a pretty healthy sample size. There is clearly not a better pure shooter in America and he will have no shortage of attempts in the coming months.
  • This week’s best player you never heard of is Stanford forward Maxime Raynaud. The 7-foot-1 senior forward from France is averaging 22.8 points, 12.8 rebounds and 2.2 assists for the Cardinal while sinking 45.8 percent from three-point range. That’s right – a 7-foot-1 forward is making almost half of his three-point attempts. Stanford, which you will recall is a member of the ACC, is 6-0 under first-year coach Kyle Smith and has a sneaky tough game against Grand Canyon on Tuesday in Palm Desert, Calif.