Practice starts with revamped roster

The college basketball season is officially underway with regular season practice starting for teams across the country last week.

Green Bay’s roster is complete and all of the Phoenix players are finally on-campus after several international newcomers were not able to join the squad until school officially started in September.

The Phoenix roster totals 18 players, by far the most in recent history, and of those 18 only 5 return from a season ago – Preston Ruedinger, Foster Wonders, Marcus Hall, Ryan Wade, and Mac Wrecke. 

Wade is a graduate senior walk-on while Wrecke is coming off a redshirt season.  Three key returning players in Ruedinger, Wonders, and Hall meanwhile are expected to be important contributors again this season. 

“I would be surprised if Marcus Hall isn’t All-League this year,” new head coach Doug Gottlieb told the Horizone Roundtable podcast last month. “Jack of all trades.  Super skilled, very smart, unassuming.” 

 “Foster is a stud, he can really, really shoot the basketball,” Gottlieb said. “And the way we want to play he fits it to a tee.”

Ruedinger, meanwhile, “checks all the boxes” of a point guard and a team leader that a new coach could ask for. 

Of the nine scholarship newcomers to the roster, two come to Green Bay via the NCAA transfer portal (Donavan Santoro – Providence, and Isaiah Miranda – Oklahoma State), two come from non-Division I college basketball (Anthony Roy – NAIA, Mouhamadou Cisse – JUCO), and five are true freshman that will be playing their first season of college basketball. 

Gottlieb, who was announced as the new Phoenix head coach on May 14^th, had an abbreviated window to assemble his first Division I roster but was able to lean on his industry knowledge and his personal network as well as the networks of his new coaching staff.  

“Because I’ve been a college basketball analyst, I know a lot of these players, I know all the coaches, and we try to be really thorough about it and only go after guys that we knew, that we had touched before, that we knew what they were doing,” Gottlieb recently said during an interview with Portal Report on X. “And then we just kind of try to slowly piece by piece put together a roster.”

“If you look at our roster, they’re all through connections and people we knew, especially when we were the latest hire in all of college basketball this year.”

“There’s players out there, you’ve just got to go find them.”

High praise for Ben Tweedy

One of those late arriving newcomers is true freshman Ben Tweedy, a 6’2” point guard from Queensland, Australia. 

He was unable to participate in the team’s summer workouts but Gottlieb believes he may have found a diamond in the rough and a player with an extremely bright future.

“My goal for Ben Tweedy….I think Ben will lead the country in assists and I hope he breaks every record I have by the time he’s done playing at GB,” the coach said in an interview with The Wake Up Call with KB and Andy at Horizon League Media Day.  “Just an unbelievable basketball IQ and we think we got a steal.”

Gottlieb knows a thing or two about point guard play. He led the country in assists while playing at Oklahoma State in 1999 and is in the top 20 in the NCAA record book for single season assists, career assists, assists per game, and assist-to-turnover ratio.

“We think we got a kid that should be playing at Saint Mary’s and they just were full up on kids.”

Tweedy is most likely the point guard of the future given the current depth the Phoenix have at the position this season with Ruedinger as the team’s captain and leader likely to be the starter with incoming 4-star recruit Jeremiah Johnson, another true freshman, likely to handle the ball as well. 

Gottlieb cautioned he didn’t know how good Tweedy will be this year but the program made a conscious decision to bring in the freshman instead of additional older players via the transfer portal. 

“We had a chance at some older guys in the portal, especially guards late,” Gottlieb said in the interview with Portal Report.  “But I decided to take [ Tweedy] instead of maybe older point guards because I feel like the guys that we’ve brought in, most of them we have a good understanding for how many years we think they’re going to stay here.”

“Not every guy you’re going to bring do you bring in thinking we’re going to get four or five years out of them, some guys you think one year, some guys two years, whatever.  So we just felt like, instead of bringing in a veteran in some spots, we want to really build it in a sustainable model.”

“Because if you look at our roster and you go forward to next year, you’ll have much better balance with seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshman, and I think that gives us a much better chance to succeed.”

Isaiah Miranda has surgery

One of the most intriguing and exciting pieces of the roster this season could unfortunately be on the sideline for the next few weeks.

Isaiah Miranda, the highly touted 7’1” big man transfer from Oklahoma State, underwent a “successful procedure” back on September 20^th according to the player’s Instagram account. 

The timeline for his return to the court is unknown.

Miranda, a four-star recruit and a top-50 national prospect coming out of high school, initially committed to NC State and was at Oklahoma State last season. 

 “If you’ve seen Zay you know he’s a spectacular talent, he does not lack talent,” Gottlieb told The Portal Report.  “I think if we can get him out there and get him consistent, talent-wise there hasn’t been a player like him in the Horizon League ever.”

“Seven-foot one, 215 pounds, fastest player on the team, and he can shoot the three.  He’s steadily really progressed for us this summer.” 

“He’s a guy who knows he’s got to do some work and show that he can be consistent in order to prove some people wrong and we think he can do it here.”

Hopefully Miranda will be back in time for Green Bay’s season opener, which just happens to be against his former team – Oklahoma State – on November 4^th in Stillwater.  

Green Bay hit with APR penalty, though no postseason ban

The dreadful Will Ryan era continues to rear its ugly head in Green Bay. 

According to the NCAA Academic Progress Rate database, the program has been hit with a Level One Penalty due to having a rolling 4-year APR score below the required 930. 

At a score of 926, this would normally come with a postseason ban but the NCAA has suspended postseason bans one last time as the effects from the COVID-19 pandemic are still being felt in the 4-year rolling averages.

While the team will still be eligible for postseason play this season, they will have less practice time than other teams in the conference and across the country.  According to the NCAA website, “the first penalty level limits teams to 16 hours of athletics activities per week over five days (as opposed to 20 over six days), with the lost four hours to be replaced with academic activities.”

The most recent available data is from the 2023 season, the last in the Will Ryan era, where the team scored an APR of 881.  In 2022 the team scored 959 but was again below the 930 threshold after the 2021 season when they scored an 889.  Data for the 2020 season is not available. 

The maximum APR score is 1000 and only scholarship players count towards a program’s score. 

According to the NCAA, each scholarship player “earns one point for staying in school and one point for being academically eligible. A team’s total points are divided by points possible and then multiplied by 1,000 to equal the team’s Academic Progress Rate.”

The APR “holds institutions accountable for the academic progress of their student-athletes through a team-based metric that accounts for the eligibility and retention of each student-athlete for each academic term.”

The retention piece in particular has been extremely difficult for Green Bay over the past 5 or so seasons as coaching changes and mass transfers have resulted in incredible amounts of roster turnover, with players not always ending up staying in school. 

For its part, Green Bay’s mens basketball program posted its best ever semester GPA this past spring, though team GPA does not directly factor into the APR.

IUPUI and Northern Kentucky currently hold the top APR score in the Horizon League at a 989 multi-year rate followed by Purdue Fort Wayne and Wright State. 

At a multi-year rate of 926, the Phoenix are the only program with a sub-930 score in the conference, though Milwaukee is at exactly 930 while Detroit Mercy’s rate is at 935. 

Photo via gbphoenixmbb / Instagram