I am going to spend most of the off season comparing grad transfer candidates and obsessing over next year's roster, so I figured I'd share this tracker document in case anyone else is interested in something other than Dan Hurley.
Grad Transfers 2018
There's obviously a lot of debate here and elsewhere on the value or lack of value of graduate transfers. Having strong recruiting classes and developing players through the program is probably the best way to build a team, but even in the best case scenarios, teams need graduate transfers to fill roster spots and holes.
The benefit of graduate transfers is that they have a track record that can provide reasonable expectations or projections.
Last year, we took David Onuorah and Antwoine Anderson in the graduate transfer market after losing four players to transfers and decommits. Neither player worked on this years team. Anderson might have been an appropriate player if he hadn't been asked to play 1000 minutes, but looking at his stats at Fordham, his performance shouldn't have been a surprise. Onuorah was not successful in the Ivy League and he wasn't successful at UCONN. The issue wasn't necessarily that they were graduate transfers, it was that they were not the right players at the right level and their stats at their previous schools should have made that obvious.
For example, Anderson had a PER of 12.4 at Fordham, a school that had a significant worse Strength of Schedule than UCONN. He averaged .070 Win Shares per 40 mins and shot 411/344/694. He performed about what you could expect at UCONN with regressions in all of those numbers except FTs. Onuorah performed at about the same level of decline taking in his Cornell stats.
On the other end, Egor Koulechov and Cam Johnson were two of the statistically strongest graduate transfers, and their stats followed their past performance and their moves to their new teams. It's not clear that UCONN was ever in play for them, but there are other less touted players that would have been much better fits especially for Onuorah's spot like Karem Kanter, Akoy Agau, Deontae Hawkins, or Ahmed Hamdy Mohamed.
This is a long rant but basically, if we're going to lose players to transfer/injury/draft/whatever, and we have to take graduate transfers, there's no excuse to take players who can't perform for UCONN because all of their statistics are readily available. Of all of the things that Coach Ollie did in the last two years, this to me is the most glaring because its not clear that anyone paid attention at all to the abundance of information when they were making decisions on grad transfers.
/rant