The Athletic put Virginia in the losers category - With college basketball’s transfer portal now closed, who are the biggest winners and losers?
Again: There are programs that lost more net-net. But for sheer symbolic defeat, it is hard to look past Virginia’s loss of Isaac Traudt. For years, Tony Bennett’s Virginia program has been built on long-term player development. Often, that has meant redshirting potentially capable young players, putting them in the lab for a year, and then unveiling them when they are more fully formed, armed with a better understanding of Virginia’s stylistic demands — particularly on the defensive end. This has generally worked really well for UVa’s players and for its coaches; Virginia’s success since Bennett’s arrival has been predicated on the constant regeneration of highly honed veterans.
The problem? In an era in which it is (rightly!) very easy to up and leave, what if your guys don’t stay patient? Or what if, as in Traudt’s case, they get homesick and want to move back closer to family and familiarity? This spring, that meant losing a highly sought-after player with plenty of other top-end high-major offers from a strong recruiting class that spent a year on Virginia’s books, trained under its tutelage, and then left in anger before ever playing a minute. That would hit hard for any program, but especially at a place where the whole idea is a long-term mutual investment, a you-get-what-we-all-put-in-over-time ethos.
There is also the matter of veteran big man Kadin Shedrick’s departure to Texas. Shedrick did the long-term development process, became a very effective true center by his sophomore year, entered last season as the clear starter and then was benched in favor of Ben Vander Plas midway through the campaign. He was one of the more highly sought-after bigs in the portal when the Longhorns’ staff lured him to Austin. Virginia has four players arriving via the portal, as well as two top-70ish freshman talents arriving, and there are solid pieces already in the program. But losing Shedrick is a blow, and the loss of Traudt hurts for different reasons — reasons that go beyond the difficulty of unexpected turnover.
