Pretty much everyone you remember from last year’s Bulldogs roster is gone. Will that stop a sixth straight losing record in Big East play?
Team: Butler Bulldogs
2024-25 Record: 15-20, 6-14 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Tied for eighth with Providence, two games behind Georgetown and two games in front of DePaul. Butler lost the tiebreaker by way of a 0-2 record against Villanova and ended up as the #9 seed in the conference tournament.
Final Computer Rankings
NET: #81
KenPom.com: #75
BartTorvik.com: #77
Postseason? After beating Providence in the 8/9 game and losing to St. John’s by 21 in the Big East tournament quarterfinals, Butler was part of the inaugural College Basketball Crown event that Fox Sports invented out of thin air. They snuck past Utah in the opening round by two points before losing to Boise State, 100-93, in the quarterfinals.
Key Departures: Butler is working on replacing three guys who started every game for them last season and another pair of guys who split up starting 25 of their 35 games. To put in another way: After failing to win 10 games in Big East play for the seventh time in the last eight seasons, Butler is replacing four-fifths of their starting lineup.
Let’s start with the seniors, because those were known departures that the Bulldogs were always going to have to reckon with this offseason. Jahmyl Telfort wrapped up his two seasons at Butler by leading the team in scoring and assists at 16.0 points and 3.4 assists, and also chipping in 4.7 rebounds, which was third best on the squad. Telfort was joined in double-digit scoring town by Pierre Brooks at 15.2 per game and Patrick McCaffery at 11.2. Both are gone now — and Brooks was second on the team in rebounding, too — and McCaffery’s addition a year ago was always going to be for just his bonus season of eligibility.
Andre Screen’s Butler stats were right on pace with his per-40 minutes numbers from his time at Bucknell, but he never really got the minutes to match the per game numbers. He exits Indianapolis after leading BU in rebounding this past season with 5.9 per game even though he started just nine times in 35 appearances.
That sends us along to the three obvious departing transfers as well as one not-so-obvious transfer. The big one is probably Boden Kapke, as he was Butler’s starting center for most of Big East play and had two years of eligibility remaining. Even when he was starting, he averaged less than 18 minutes per game, and left for Boston College after averaging 4.1 points and 2.8 rebounds overall this past year.
Kolby King started four times in 34 appearances this season, averaging less than 19 minutes a game. Landon Moore was just over 16 minutes a contest while playing in all 35 games. King leaves for Utah State, his fourth school in four years, while Moore heads to Illinois State for his final season of eligibility, presumably in search of his freshman year success at St. Francis in the NEC.
The not-so-obvious transfer is Augusto Cassia, who started in eight of Butler’s first 10 games of the season as a sophomore last year before suffering a knee injury that wasn’t supposed to be season ending. The 6’8” forward never returned to the court for the Bulldogs, and by early February, it was already public that he would not return to the team at all. He’s at Ole Miss now.
Key Returners: Finley Bizjack, and that’s it.
No, really. He’s the lone returning starter, and they don’t return any rotation guys at all. There’s three other guys coming back, but one of them didn’t play at all and one played just seven minutes across five games. Although, in fairness, the guy who didn’t play is Jamie Kaiser, who is a former top 50 prospect who sat out on injury rehab last season.
Anyway, Bizjack started 30 times in 34 appearances during his sophomore year, averaging 10.3 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per game. If he can replicate his nearly 43% three-point shooting from 2024-25, he might be the kind of guy that Butler can build their offense around. If he’s more like the 27% shooter from freshman year…. well, it’s a good thing that they have five transfers coming in, huh?
Key Additions: 247 Sports lists four of Butler’s five incoming freshmen inside the Composite’s top 140. They’re led by Azavier Robinson, who is officially listed on BU’s roster page with his nickname, “Stink.” He’s the #90 prospect in the class, with Efeosa Oliogu-Elabor, Jackson Keith, and Jack McCaffery coming somewhere between #118 and #132. The one they don’t list at all? Bryson Cardinal, the son of 12 year NBA veteran Brian Cardinal. With just one rotation guy returning from last year’s roster and just five incoming transfers, the math of it says that at least one of these guys is going to have to at least be a rotation guy for Butler this coming season. McCaffery is the tallest of the group of five at 6’9”, with Big Guy being a notable hole on the roster, so it seems like BU is going to have to rely on their transfer class to get that part of basketball squared away.
Luckily, they bring in two guys who might fit the bill. Drayton Jones and Yohan Traore are both listed at 6’11” on the roster, and they were listed at 245 and 235 pounds at their previous stops respectively. The catch, of course, is that neither one has ever been a major contributor at the high major level. James had a pretty good two years at South Carolina State, and averaged 13.0 points and 5.5 rebounds a game last year. He was a top 300 rebounder per KenPom.com, and top 45 in block rate, too. Again though: At South Carolina State in the MEAC. Traore started his collegiate career at Auburn but didn’t do much, and then popped big time after transferring to UC Santa Barbara, averaging 14.5 points and 5.1 rebounds in 2023-24. He was great at drawing fouls and at 70% at the charity stripe, pretty effective in making opponents pay for it. He moved on from the Gauchos to SMU for his third year of college hoops. He started out well enough — starting and averaging 8.3 points and 4.7 rebounds — but then lost his starting job in early January and then an early February hip injury limited him the rest of the season.
Butler has two more transfers who appear to still be in college because of the Diego Pavia “junior college doesn’t count for eligibility” ruling. Michael Ajayi (forward, 6’7”, 220 lb.) is on his fifth year of post-high school basketball, but the first two were at Pierce College in Washington state. He had a great Year 3 at Pepperdine, averaging just barely short of a double-double while playing just under 35 minutes a game, but he was under 19 a night after transferring inside the WCC to Gonzaga. 6.5 points and 5.4 rebounds a night is decent contribution on an NCAA tournament team, so we’ll see how he fits in to Butler’s rotation. The other Former JuCo Guy is Yame Butler (guard, 6’5”, 190 lb.), who went from Fordham to State Fair Community College in Missouri to Drexel, which is where he spent the last three years. He was pretty good this past season, averaging 13.6 points and 4.6 rebounds while hitting over 36% of his threes.
And speaking of “guys who are probably only at Butler for one season,” we’ll wrap this part up with Jalen Jackson (guard, 6’2”, 200 lb.), who has gone from UIC to Purdue Fort Wayne for the past two years. He led the Horizon League in scoring last season, and in his two years at PFW, he averaged 14.2 points, 4.4 rebounds, 3.1 assists, and 1.6 steals per game while starting every night.
Coach: Thad Matta, going into his fourth season of his second stint as Butler head coach and 21st as a Division 1 head coach. He is 47-53 this time around with the Bulldogs and 486-207 overall.
Outlook: Hey, Butler fans! Got a question for you.
Are you tired of the Bulldogs crashing and burning as the season goes along with Thad Matta at the controls yet?
Year 1: 8-3 start with three roughly understandable losses, 6-15 the rest of the way, including a very terrible 68-62 home loss to Georgetown.
Year 2: 10-2 start, 1-5 in Big East games right after that, brief flurry of positivity, then a five game losing streak and a home loss in the NIT.
Year 3: 7-1 start, but with the one loss coming at home against Austin Peay to activate the Check Engine light on the season, then nine straight losses that contributes to a 2-9 start to Big East play, and just when there’s signs of life — because you beat Seton Hall, Providence, Georgetown, and DePaul — four straight losses to end the regular season.
Is it better or worse when the crashout comes earlier in the season? Feels like Year 3’s crashout started earlier than the first two, but after watching the first two, it was probably the more annoying of the three? Watching Butler completely forget how to defend (#169 in the country per KenPom) after two not-terrible seasons on that end (#55 and #76) was probably pretty painful too, especially since the Bulldogs had a top 40 offense.
The good news relative to “these are the problems with Butler from 2024-25” is that essentially no one who was causing any of those problems returns for this coming winter. The bad news is “there is absolutely zero continuity or growth from that team” because Finley Bizjack has literally zero familiarity playing with any of his teammates who will be on the court in 2025-26.
The worse news is that it looks like Butler is set up for another gigantic roster emptying next spring, too. It looks like at least three of the incoming transfers are only going to be at BU for one year of eligibility, and it might be four depending on what the official ruling on Ajayi is. This raises an interesting question: If Butler’s probably not going to be super great next year, what’s the downside of leaning towards playing the top 125-ish freshmen and trying to set down some cornerstones for the next few years? What, the transfers with one year of eligibility get frustrated at not playing a lot in their last year of eligibility and aren’t allowed to return anyway?
What if Thad Matta, in an effort to make sure he keeps his job — he has to finish the regular season eight games over .500 in order to guarantee he ends this season with a winning record in this run at Butler, remember — decides to trust the older guys more, and then they leave because they have to….. and these top 125 freshmen get annoyed at him for not playing them and they leave, too?
If you’re going to miss the NCAA tournament one way or another, would you at least like to miss it in a way that builds optimism for 2026-27 as opposed to just creating more frustration about the direction of the team?
And what happens if Butler starts off well again this year and then bombs out in Big East play again for the fourth straight time under Matta’s direction? Should he even be allowed back for a fifth year at that point?
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