Kim English enters Year 3 with the Friars in need of a turnaround from how the last season and a half has gone for his team.
Team: Providence Friars
2024-25 Record: 12-20, 6-14 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Tied for eighth with Butler, two games behind Georgetown and two games in front of 10th place DePaul. The Friars picked up the #8 seed in the conference tournament by way of a season split with Villanova.
Final Computer Rankings
NET: #100
KenPom.com: #96
BartTorvik.com: #105
Postseason? Just their 75-69 loss to Butler in the first round of the Big East conference tournament.
Key Departures: The Friars are losing either their top two or top three scorers depending on how you look at it, but they’re definitely losing four of their top five scorers from the rotation that we saw for most of the season.
Bensley Joseph was your season long leading scorer for Providence, putting in 13.2 points per game to go with 4.1 rebounds and tying for the team high in assists at 3.2 per game. He was always only in Friartown for one season, so it’s not a shock that he’s gone. Same goes for Wesley Cardet, who ended up at 8.4 points and 3.1 rebounds on average. That’s a little misleading, as he struggled to get on the court from mid-January onwards, and has a few single digit outings that tanked his averages down from 10.2 and 3.8.
Jayden Pierre was the only other every game rotation player averaging in double digits, putting up 12.3 points and tying with Joseph for that assists lead. This was his third season with Providence and second straight as a starter, but the New Jersey product elected to leave for TCU for his final year of eligibility.
There’s three guys who are gone now who had a mixed bag of impact on the 2024-25 Providence team. Christ Essandoko got off to a decent start, finding himself in the starting 5 more often than not and averaging 4.9 points and 4.7 rebounds in just under 18 minutes a game before injuries sapped him of regular playing time for the rest of the season. After moving from St. Joseph’s to PC for his sophomore year, he’s at South Carolina now. Jabri Abdur-Rahim suffered a meniscus tear midway through his final season of college eligibility, and ended up averaging 7.2 points and 2.6 rebounds for the Friars while not playing after February 1st.
The third and final guy in the mixed bag list is Bryce Hopkins. He blew out his knee in early January 2024 and missed the rest of that season, and thus was at least slightly questionable to start the season. It was no surprise he missed Providence’s first eight games, but then he averaged 17.0 points, 7.7 rebounds, 3.0 assists, and a steal…… in the next three games and then shut it down for the year, after either A) not feeling 100% right about his knee or B) straining his knee to the point where he needed to stop playing. Not really sure which one it is/was, but the point is that Hopkins, a Big East Player of the Year type of play back in November 2023, will never play for Providence ever again……. but he will play against Providence, as he has transferred to St. John’s.
Key Returners: It’s hard to figure out how to sort out the utility of the guys who are returning. Part of that is because only one of the four returning rotation guys played in every single game last year and none of them started in more than 24 of PC’s 32 games. Part of that is because even when these four guys played, only one of them averaged more than 21 minutes per game.
Corey Floyd is Providence’s top returning scorer at 9.2 points per game. He was a starter for most of the season and only missed a handful of games in mid-February. He also grabbed 4.8 rebounds and at 2.0 per game, he ends up as the Friars’ top returning assist man. Oswin Erhunmwunse is the leading returning rebounder at 5.6 per contest. The big man from Nigeria is the lone returning Friar that appeared in every game this past season, although he didn’t lock down his starting spot until right around the first day of January. He’s mostly a traditional big, as he didn’t attempt a three-pointer as a freshman last year.
Ryan Mela and Rich Barron round out the notable returning Friars. Mela nearly averaged 20 minutes a game, adding in 6.4 points and a pretty solid 5.2 rebounds per game. You might remember him from getting hit with a technical foul for shoving Marquette walk-on Casey O’Malley to the ground in the closing seconds of an 82-52 Marquette victory. Barron started nine times in his 27 appearances last season, same number of starts as Mela, although Barron played in two fewer games. He averaged 5.2 points and 2.3 rebounds, and that’s probably ultimately a disappointing season after what he did as a freshman the year before.
Key Additions: Say what you want to say about the direction of Providence basketball since Ed Cooley skipped town, but you can’t knock what the Friars are doing on the high school recruiting trails. Jamier Jones (6’6”, 218 lb. forward) is a top 50 prospect according to the 247 Sports Composite rankings, while Jaylen Harrell (6’5”, 210 lb. guard/forward) comes in at #108. Depending on what happens with the rotation at UConn, you’d have to figure that Jones is at least a dark horse candidate for Big East Freshman of the Year and at least a favorite for All-Freshman Team based on recruiting ranking alone.
Those two are the only American freshmen on the roster this season. Providence has also added two Europeans since the start of April. First Stefan Vaaks (6’6”, 190 lb. guard) back on April 4, and then more recently, PC announced Peteris Pinnis (7’1”, 235 lb. forward) as part of the Class of 2025 on June 4th. Generally speaking, I don’t hold out a lot of hope as an immediate impact player for “European player signed in the spring,” especially when the head coach says “we came across film of him about a month ago” like is the case with Vaaks. Still, with just four rotation guys returning, Providence is short on any impact players so who knows what will happen with these guys?
Yes, of course, there’s also transfers to consider. Four of the five new transfers appear to be on their final years of eligibility, which does seem to indicate that Providence is just going to be right back here next year trying to make sure they can run a practice with guys they get out of the portal. The guy who obviously has eligibility left after this season is Daquan Davis (6’1”, 185 lb. guard), who started 20 times in 31 appearances for Florida State as a freshman last season. It seems like he had a pretty good season, averaging 8.8 points, 2.3 rebounds, and 2.5 assists per game, but he was doing for a Seminoles team that went 8-12 in a very not good ACC. There’s also the shooting to consider, as Davis hit less than 28% of his 86 three-point attempts last season, which seems not ideal for a small guard.
It’s possible that Jason Edwards (6’1”, 180 lb. guard) has eligibility left after this coming season even though Providence lists him as a redshirt senior. He started his collegiate career off in the junior college ranks, spending time at two different places but only playing basketball at one of them. He then landed at North Texas and did pretty well (19.1 points, 2.4 rebounds) before parlaying that into a roster spot at Vanderbilt last season. He was pretty good for the Commodores as well, going for 17.0 points and 2.0 rebounds. On average, about half of his Division 1 career shooting attempts have been threes, and he’s hit 35% of them. I’m not sure how the Diego Pavia “JuCo years don’t count” court decision really works, so that’s why I’m not sure if Edwards has more than this coming season remaining.
Everybody else coming in through the portal is on their last year of eligibility. Cole Hargrove (6’8”, 245 lb. forward) had a deep bench role for his first two seasons at Drexel before breaking out to average nearly 10 points and 7.5 rebounds as a starter this past season. He started taking threes this past year, but at 6-for-29 (20.7%), he’s not scaring anyone back there. Duncan Powell (6’8”, 240 lb. forward) is eligible to play after playing in just one game in his first year at North Carolina A&T. After a decent sophomore year, he moved on to Sacramento State where had an even better year, and that landed him at Georgia Tech this past season. Powell put up 12.2 points and 5.4 rebounds for the Yellow Jackets.
Hopefully Jaylin Sellers (6’5”, 205 lb. guard) is healthy enough to play this winter. He’s coming off two years at Ball State and two years at UCF, but only played in three mid-season games last year. His first year at BSU was nothing to highlight, but his two middle years of college basketball were pretty good: 13.5 points and 3.7 rebounds for Ball State, then 15.9 points, 3.6 rebounds, and a bit more than an assist per game for UCF. It was a back injury that put him out for the year in early January last season, and there’s a wide spectrum of possible back injuries that could complicate his return to playing form this year.
Coach: Kim English, entering his third season at Providence and fifth as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 33-34 with the Friars and 67-63 overall.
Outlook: Things are going in the wrong direction for Kim English in Friartown.
Year 1 saw his Providence team beat one KenPom top 80 team in non-conference play, lose Big East Player of the Year Candidate Bryce Hopkins after a 2-0 start in Big East play, go 8-10 the rest of the way in league action and then miss the NCAA tournament because they didn’t have anything resembling a resume worth putting them in. The good news was that they were legitimately great on the defensive end, finishing #18 in the country according to KenPom.com’s defensive efficiency metrics.
The bad news is what happened in Year 2. Actual Big East Player of the Year Devin Carter bolted for the NBA Draft with a year of eligibility remaining (picked #13, can’t knock the choice) and Hopkins played in just three mid-season games before shutting things back down because of the knee injury situation. The Friars were 5-3 after squeaking out wins against Central Connecticut and Hampton to start the season and losing all three games at the Battle 4 Atlantis, then went 2-1 with Hopkins, but the loss was on the road against in-state rival Rhode Island. After Hopkins elected to spend the rest of the year on the bench, it was pretty much curtains for PC, as they went 5-16 the rest of the way, and a big reason why is that vaunted defense from a year earlier went completely up in smoke. They finished at #134 in KenPom’s rankings there, and so having an offense in the 80s — a marked improvement from English’s first campaign — didn’t do much for them.
After Year 1, English’s Friars were good enough to get to the NIT, even if they did lose to Boston College with Carter sitting out for “NBA Draft Prospect” reasons. This past season? They couldn’t even get into The Crown, Fox Sports’ slightly silly self-operated postseason event….. although I presume that they declined to play, seeing as DePaul got themselves into the field of 16.
It’s clear things are going the wrong way, but a generous reading of the situation is that Providence was sure that Bryce Hopkins was going to be healthy and ready to go. When he wasn’t, a roster that maaaaaybe was built to support him was left with nothing to support, and then mix in only three guys playing in every game. Now you’ve got a roster dealing with the “who’s available today?” question all season long, and nothing ever gets off the ground in a positive direction.
Coming from that perspective, a reset of the deck isn’t the worst thing for Providence, and maybe that’s what we get this season. Maybe both of the nicely ranked freshmen work out pretty well, maybe the transfers all live up to the best versions of themselves/all fit together the right way, and maybe Kim English has a stew going.
Or maybe the mounting frustration that we saw over and over again last year from Kim English as he racked up technical fouls on the regular is a sign that he doesn’t know what levers to pull. There’s no one here that you look at and immediately say “ah, yes, all-Big East Team guy right there.” Balancing the mental edges of a bunch of guys who are/might be on their final year of college hoops — Corey Floyd is as well, by the way — while trying to fold them into your returning rotation guys and trying to find developmental time for freshmen that need to be given the time to show if they can contribute…… sheeesh, that’s a lot, and doing it all while you were showing signs of fraying at the edges last year sounds like it might be a lot to ask from Kim English in his third year in charge.
Unless English figures out how to titrate his roster exactly right this winter, it certainly feels like Providence is pointing more towards the kind of program that they were before Ed Cooley lifted them up as opposed to the perennial NCAA tourney team that the Friar faithful got used to with Cooley in charge. And if that’s the case…… how many more years is English going to get without an NCAA bid on his resume? Remember: PC hired him after two years at George Mason without a spot in the dance. He doesn’t have a track record of building a winner.
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