ASU Basketball: Who will emerge as the team’s leaders?
By Trevor Booth
Following the graduations of the “Guard U” trio, there are a few candidates that have emerged as leaders for next year’s ASU basketball team.
Bobby Hurley is in the midst of a predicament. To this date, he still might not have an answer for it.
For the first time during his tenure at Arizona State, the former two-time NCAA champion will be confronted with mastering a roster with no holdovers from the Herb Sendek era. That means no Tra Holder, no Kodi Justice and perhaps most importantly, no Shannon Evans II, who followed Hurley from Buffalo to assist the hoops program in Tempe.
Not only will Hurley be losing his top three scorers from a team that rose as high as No. 3 in the country and secured the school’s first NCAA Tournament berth in four seasons, he’ll be losing his leaders both in and out of the locker room.
“Yeah, I think my players — Tra, Shannon, and Kodi — they never had the silver spoon,” Hurley said. “Those guys were always the underdog and they always overachieved. And along the way, they’ve passed a bunch of guys who were rated ahead of them and what not. They’ve had great careers and I think teams will realize how competitive those guys are, how good they are off-the-dribble, creating. All three of those guys can do that. I think they will all have a chance to help an NBA team at a certain point. They’re going to fight for it because they did for me every time we played and they’ve been hungry in working hard, preparing for the next step and they’re going to be very successful.”
The losses have indeed been huge for ASU, but with those losses, there are several pieces ready to reassemble the puzzle.
The Sun Devils will add one of the top recruiting classes in program history to this year’s roster, led by five-star forward Taeshon Cherry, Canadian combo guard Luguentz Dort and 7-footer Uros Plavsic. The incoming rookies will be met by the high-profile transfers in Zylan Cheatham and Rob Edwards, who are both looking to contribute after sitting out last season due to transfer rules.
Perhaps what’s even more encouraging for this team are the returning faces– six rotation players, to be exact–that are willing and able to keep the team hungry for further progression.
The talent alone has given Hurley his best roster since he took the reins of the program in 2015. But there’s not one player, at least at the moment, that can provide the same level of leadership that Holder, Justice and Evans brought last season.
There are still four months remaining to figure out who will step in to the leadership role, but until then, let’s take a look at some of the top candidates.