Nevada head coach Steve Alford shouts to his team during the quarterfinals of the Mountain West Conference tournament against Boise State on March 10, 2022, in Las Vegas.
Rick Bowmer/AP
The Nevada Wolf Pack men’s basketball team now looks like your grocery store’s toilet paper shelf during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost empty, barren and desolate with little shreds of silver and blue paper strewn about.
If the Wolf Pack isn’t careful that could be the way we also describe Lawlor Events Center in the 2022-23 basketball season.
The Wolf Pack, a team already thin and fragile, is in severe danger of losing two of its top three players in the coming weeks. Desmond Cambridge, the Pack’s best two-way player, and Warren Washington, one of the best centers in the Mountain West, announced the last two weeks that they have entered the dreaded transfer portal. Cambridge was second on the team in scoring (16.2 points a game) last year and led the team in steals (51), blocks (34), rebounds (154) and 3-pointers (87-of-235). Washington averaged 10.5 points and a team-best 6.6 rebounds a game and also led the team in offensive rebounds (51) and was second in blocks (27). He also shot 61 percent (90-of-148) from the floor.
The potential loss of Cambridge and Washington (they have yet to announce their next stop) doesn’t signal the end of the Wolf Pack basketball world. But it does signal the start of yet again another tedious rebuild.
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Who is going to score points for the Pack next season? At times we didn’t know who would score this year. Grant Sherfield is still on the roster and that is a good place to start. With nobody to pass to next year, Sherfield could average 25-plus points a game.
But where will the other 50 points a game come from that the Pack needs to be competitive in the Mountain West? The rest of the roster, based on last year’s performances, contains a pair of streaky shooters (Will Baker, Kenan Blackshear) and a lot of guys (Tre Coleman, K.J. Hymes, Daniel Foster, DeAndre Henry, Jalen Weaver) who break out in a cold sweat (as coach Steve Alford covers his eyes) if they take more than four shots a game.
The Pack right now is one of the three worst teams in the Mountain West along with perennial bottom feeders Air Force and San Jose State. Get ready for an empty, barren and desolate Lawlor Events Center.
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Why would Cambridge and Washington want to leave Nevada? Only Cambridge and Washington and possibly Alford knows that answer and, well, we all know how often coaches and players tell the truth.
Where is Cambridge going to find a better role than the one he had the past two years at Nevada, where he was the Robin to Sherfield’s Batman? If he finds a place where he is going to be Batman, well, that team likely won’t be in your NCAA Tournament bracket next year. Odds are Cambridge, who has just one year of eligibility to offer, will want to play his final season with his brother Devan. Devan, who played at Auburn last year, is also currently in the transfer portal so the two might be a package deal (the Pack has plenty of uniforms available, by the way).
Washington is 7-feet tall and will likely have a robust collection of suitors this spring. Washington’s decision to enter the portal might have something to do with Alford only playing him as many as 30 minutes in a game once in his 48-game Pack career. Washington started 46 of those 48 games but averaged just 22.6 minutes a game. Call him the 7-foot Daniel Foster. Give the 7-footer 30-plus minutes a game and he’ll no doubt average a double-double.
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The good news for the Pack is that we are now in an era of rotating rosters in college basketball. You can get players as easily as you lose them. The NCAA has basically become an AAU summer team in the fall and winter. The players introduce themselves to each other in the locker room before the first practice and after the last game write down each other’s e-mail addresses and phone numbers as they part ways. There is no be-true-to-your-school loyalty anymore with players. It’s only a be-true-to-you mentality. The coaches taught them that.
Players change teams more often now than they change classes. So don’t worry Pack fans, the Wolf Pack will have a full roster come next November.
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This isn’t all Alford’s fault. Alford, since he took over the program in the spring of 2019, has had a revolving door roster. But that’s just the state of college basketball these days. When Alford came to Nevada the roster was almost literally bare as players with eligibility jumped with both feet into the transfer portal after coach Eric Musselman bolted for Arkansas.
Alford did a great job by convincing Musselman holdovers Lindsey Drew, Jalen Harris, Nisre Zouzoua, K.J. Hymes and Jazz Johnson to stay in Reno. He also signed recruits Cambridge, Washington, Kane Milling, Zane Meeks, Robby Robinson and JohnCarlos Reyes. But since then Alford has struggled to keep players, ranging from important starters like Cambridge and Washington, to valuable role players like Kane Milling, Robby Robinson and Zane Meeks, and also fringe players who really didn’t even belong on a Division I roster in the first place. Jalen Harris even chose to leave Alford and the Pack early for the riches of professional basketball.
The reason the Pack hired Alford to a seemingly lifetime (10 years) deal was because they were looking for another Musselman (good luck with that) and players supposedly would flock to Reno to play for him. Well, they have flocked here but so far, for the most part, they have simply taken what they want from the nest and quickly have moved on.
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Alford has his work cut out for him. So does Sherfield, who is now looking for a new Robin and maybe a new Alfred, Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara, too. The Pack, after all, couldn’t hold off all the Jokers, Riddlers and Penguins in the Mountain West right now.
Alford was going to have a pivotal off-season this spring and summer anyway before Washington and Cambridge bid everyone in Northern Nevada farewell. He had to instill a toughness, confidence and, yes, grit to a team that constantly wilted under the pressure last year. It was a team that pouted after every missed jumper and played with almost no confidence when things got tough.
We have no doubt Alford, a guy who spent four years with Bobby Knight, would instill toughness and grit to his basketball team this coming season. But now he has to implant those qualities in new players, as well as find another Cambridge 3-point shot and cockiness and a Washington defensive presence in the paint.
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Mike Krzyzewski is the greatest coach in college basketball history.
Bobby Knight, John Wooden, Dean Smith, Roy Williams, Adolph Rupp, Jim Calhoun were or are all great. And there are another dozen or so that are in the conversation. But the choice here is Coach K.
Krzyzewski has won the most regular season and NCAA Tournament games in history. He’s been to the most Final Fours. Only John Wooden has won more NCAA Tournament titles. Wooden, though, didn’t have to deal with half the things Coach K has had to deal with in his career, namely the transfer portal, one-and-done players, grueling schedules, a 64-team tournament and Name Image Likeness deals for players. For most of Wooden’s title years players couldn’t even dunk. You could argue that Coach K’s five (or six) titles are more impressive than Wooden’s 10.
If you love college basketball and you didn’t attend Kansas, Villanova and North Carolina, you should want Duke to win another title for coach K on Monday night.
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Coach K is the only true feel-good story left in this NCAA Tournament. All four schools have won a ton of titles already. North Carolina has won six, Duke has won five while Kansas and Villanova have each won three. There is no Cinderella story this weekend.
The school in this year’s Final Four with the longest title drought is Kansas, who last won in 2008. Some of us are still wearing the same shoes and talking on the same cell phones we had in 2008. You kind of want all four teams this weekend to find a way to lose. But if someone has to win, it might as well be Coach K who should end his career with a national title.
John Wooden, by the way, also ended his career, with a national title in 1975.
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How long will Eric Musselman be content at Arkansas to fall short of the Final Four? Musselman’s Razorbacks have gotten to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament the last two years, losing to eventual champion Baylor in 2021 and to Duke last weekend. Musselman isn’t the type of coach to be satisfied with merely reaching the level he’s already attained. He’s not a guy, as Wolf Pack fans know, who enjoys staying in the same place for long.
Another thing Musselman probably doesn’t enjoy is playing his home games on Arkansas’ Nolan Richardson Court at Bud Walton Arena. Musselman, after all, wants you to believe the sport of basketball was invented at your school the moment he showed up. That’s not the same in Arkansas. Richardson, after all, won a national title in 1994, a fact that Musselman and his look-what-I-just-did philosophy on life likely can’t enjoy.
So give Muss another two or three years in the land of Woo Pig Sooie if he never at least gets to a Final Four. Hey, UCLA, Indiana, the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks and, yes, maybe even UNLV, might want to finally recapture some past glory with some Muss Mania.
