Men’s Basketball Transfer Portal: Kentucky’s High-Priced Roster, Final Things to Watch
The portal closes Tuesday, and some schools may try to exploit loopholes in order to fill out their final spots for the 2025–26 season.
Kentucky Wildcats head coach Mark Pope talks with guard Otega Oweh during the second half against the South Carolina Gamecocks at Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.
Kentucky Wildcats head coach Mark Pope talks with guard Otega Oweh during the second half against the South Carolina Gamecocks at Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center. / Jordan
The transfer portal in men’s college basketball closes at the end of the day Tuesday. There may be a slow trickle of names that enter in the days following, as rules indicate that a player must only express his intention to transfer before the window closes to allow for delays by compliance departments. Still, the pool of players that will be available this spring is close to complete.
What should you know about what’s happening in the portal right now and what to look for when the portal closes? Here’s a rundown of the latest happenings and intel.
Kentucky rounds out high-priced roster
Kentucky likely rounded out its roster Monday by adding Florida transfer Denzel Aberdeen, who played a key role off the bench for the national champion Gators.
While it’d be foolish to ever say a team is truly “done” recruiting in this day and age, the Wildcats have reportedly ended all other portal pursuits. Save a late NBA draft defection by star wing Otega Oweh, the Kentucky roster looks all but set for 2025–26.
In total, Mark Pope and staff added five transfers, two prep freshmen and one international freshman to go with their five expected returners. Kentucky’s total expenditures to piece that roster together are expected to be, according to Sports Illustrated sources, well north of $10 million.
There’s a real chance the Wildcats end up with the highest-paid roster in college basketball next season, though a late swing by BYU or another program with a top budget could push Kentucky’s final figure.
The biggest fish from the portal class is Arizona State transfer Jayden Quaintance, a projected top-10 pick in the 2026 draft and one of the best rim protectors in college basketball.
Quaintance is coming off a torn ACL suffered in March, and while he and his camp have projected optimism that he could be ready to go by the start of the season in November, it seems likely they won’t take too many chances rushing him back given his bright future. That made him a risky investment for most programs but more palatable for the Wildcats given Kentucky’s strong financial standing and stable of bigs behind him in Brandon Garrison and Malachi Moreno.
If he’s healthy, he’s a game-changing defensive player who could single-handedly help the Wildcats defense make huge strides. Add in Alabama transfer Mouhamed Dioubate at power forward and Kentucky should have significantly more athleticism and physicality up front and on the glass compared to Pope’s first season.
The collection of backcourt talent is a fascinating and potentially high-variance one. Pope bet big on Pitt transfer Jaland Lowe, who had a fairly disappointing sophomore year on a Pittsburgh team that really struggled in ACC play.
Lowe shot just 38% from the field and 27% from three this season, and Pittsburgh was better in his minutes off the floor, per Hoop-Explorer. At his best though, he’s the type of speedy shot creator who could thrive in Pope’s offensive system.
You’d expect to see him starting at point guard next to either Aberdeen, a steady veteran capable of playing on or off the ball, or Jasper Johnson, a high-scoring freshman. Oweh profiles as a potential All-American on the wing, though his limited three-point shooting may be insulated less in certain lineups than it was in 2024–25.
After going to the Sweet 16 in Pope’s first season, Kentucky armed Pope with remarkable resources to build a roster capable of winning the SEC and competing for a national title in his second year on the job. Quaintance’s health could play a significant part in whether those aspirations are realized. But if Pope’s big backcourt investments pay off and the Wildcats have a healthy Quaintance up front, this roster could be quite dangerous.
Explaining the rush of ineligible portal entrants
The vast majority of portal entrants in the final days leading into the entry deadline Tuesday have been players without any eligibility remaining as things currently stand.
There are well over 100 players currently in the portal who’ve exhausted their eligibility and are now hoping either for a waiver, rule change or some sort of legal action that’d give them another chance to play college basketball.
Some of these waiver-seekers may have more hope than others. A number of them spent at least one season at a Division II school and are closely monitoring a federal lawsuit filed by College of Charleston forward Ante Brzovic, who is challenging NCAA bylaws that count years spent in Division II the same as Division I, among other things. The suit stems in part from a similar case in football surrounding Wisconsin defensive back Nyzier Fourqurean, who asserted that his time in Division II shouldn’t count the same as Division I eligibility.
The judge in the Fourqurean suit granted a preliminary injunction that will allow him to play in the 2025 season, but the ruling was more narrow than the one that granted Diego Pavia and eventually almost all former junior-college athletes additional eligibility.
Also being monitored by potential transfers is a lawsuit by Rutgers defensive back Jett Elad that challenges the NCAA’s five-year eligibility clock. A win in court by Elad wouldn’t significantly impact most players in the portal, as most have also exhausted their four seasons of competition unlike Elad. A handful of players could gain eligibility through that case though, and it could add to the onslaught of legal challenges to NCAA eligibility rules.
That said, many if not most of these exhausted-eligibility players would need a larger dismantling of NCAA rules in court to have a path to playing in 2025–26. That, of course, begs the question: If the NCAA’s ability to limit players to four seasons of competition vanishes, does anyone really believe that not entering the portal by the NCAA’s arbitrary deadline would stand up in court?
Either way, given players don’t have to have eligibility remaining in order to ask their compliance department to enter their name into the portal, many are simply putting their names in just in case. And it’s causing an abundance of headaches for coaches across the sport who are scouring the portal for options that could be available this late in the process.
“It’s an insane epidemic right now,” one high-major assistant texted.
What to watch: Tampering and commitment “flips”
As we wrote in last week’s portal update, options in the portal (at least with eligibility remaining) are dwindling. And with few high-level players remaining, the going rate for those that are still out there has exploded.
In the final days of the portal being open, that led to a few players who had initially committed to return to their respective schools getting offers they couldn’t refuse.
That runs the gambit from mid-major rosters getting poached from like Akron, which lost star guards Nate Johnson and Tavari Johnson to the portal, to national champion Florida, which saw a projected starter in Aberdeen tampered into the portal before eventually signing with Kentucky.
But once the portal closes Tuesday, a primary avenue to add transfer talent becomes flipping the commitments of players who entered the portal prior to the deadline and already picked a new school. It’s not necessarily easy to pull this off, especially now that players in many cases are signing contracts directly with schools that sometimes include buyouts.
Still, according to several sources, many programs are actively working to make pitches to players who have already committed to other schools to make them reconsider, often dangling significant raises from the deals they agreed to just a few weeks before.
“‘Committed’ is a loose term,” one staffer joked.
There’s far less latitude to move around once players officially enroll in classes at their new campuses this summer. At least one program SI spoke to had changed their summer report date from previous years in order to shrink the window of time that their portal commits could be tampered with.
But until players enroll, they technically remain in the portal even if they’ve made commitments or even signed financial agreements with new schools. Expect talent-hungry schools to exploit as many loopholes as possible to create advantages.
