Many of my deep dive articles start with me being wrong or off-base about something, and this one is no different.

Xavier's addition of Mike Nwoko on April 8 was one of the very first Power Conference adds of the transfer portal cycle, and my initial reaction was far from kind. It had long been anticipated that the big man market was going to explode after a college basketball season that was carried by big, physical, rim-heavy teams. But the first notable add being Nwoko for a reported $3 million did not sit right with me.

The debates about Nwoko's on-court effectiveness are not the focus of this article. He's certainly a floor-raiser at Xavier and an excellent two-way rebounder with real touch. LSU losing Dedan Thomas mid-way through last season killed his efficiency.

But what I was really wrong about was the price tag. The reported $3 million shocked me off the bat, but I suppose I just wasn't prepared for the giant NIL numbers floating around the big man market in the two months to follow.

I also didn't anticipate Xavier spending as much money as they did following Nwoko. He is their highest-paid player, but he is taking up just around 20% of their reported spending. A potential starting lineup of Chance Westry, Tru Washington, Ruben Dominguez, Jovan Milicevic, and Nwoko is probably NCAA Tournament-worthy.

This situation highlights, by far, the biggest hurdle we face when evaluating a team's transfer adds, the overall offseason, and the general roster build. Unlike the NBA or other major professional sports, we largely don't know how much players are getting paid, we don't know how much an entire roster costs, and we don't even have a level playing field for how much money each program gets to spend to begin with.

As someone whose main offseason project is my transfer portal grades, this part of the work becomes a true guessing game. While my primary objective is to analyze the player and the fit, the third piece of money is undoubtedly important. Nwoko making 20% of the cap versus Nwoko making 35% of the cap is an entirely different grade.

So, with official NIL numbers impossible to come by and the money side of player acquisition largely a guessing game, I went ahead and asked some very smart people about the secretive, but uber-important element of roster construction to try and pull some key takeaways.

Placing a premium on retention

As Basket Under Review's fearless leader, Trilly Donovan loves to say:

A common thread amongst coaches I spoke with was that the first goal of NIL spending is to retain the team's best available players.

It's abundantly clear that, in today's day and age, keeping a roster nucleus and building around it is key. 11 of the top 12 teams in KenPom last year were in the Top 125 in minutes continuity, with only Duke not bringing back at least 30% of its minutes from the year prior.

Because of that, the greatest advantage a program can have in roster building is knowing early on which players it can retain. Some coaches disclosed predetermined deals to retain some of their key players while last season was still ongoing, in order to put themselves in the best possible position once the portal opened.

"We had to find the money that we needed for them to come back, like there was no other scenario in the world," one coach told me. "If they want to come back, we've got to find a way for them to be here."

That particular program was lucky that the players they were hoping to retain didn't end up testing the transfer portal or the NBA Draft. The timing of everything can lead to very sticky situations, both roster-wise and most importantly, financially.

Take Florida, for example. The Gators spent all offseason going all-in on retention. Adding only "Marfo" transfer Denzel Aberdeen, who isn't even guaranteed to be eligible next season, Florida instead threw nearly all its money in an effort to retain its three-headed frontcourt of Thomas Haugh, Alex Condon, and Rueben Chinyelu.

Haugh and Condon returned very early in the offseason, but Chinyelu went through the NBA draft process. If the Gators had been impatient and added a proven big man as a contingency plan, they might have lost Chinyelu or not have had enough money to retain him. If they waited for him and he left for the draft, they would have had no clear option at the 5 by the time he made a decision, given how weak the transfer portal was for big men. Inevitably, Florida's persistence paid off, and now the Gators are the clear No. 1 team in the country going into next season.

And of course, there's always the other side of the coin, like famously when Baylor lost projected starting point guard Rob Wright to BYU at the last minute, leaving them without a true playmaker just as it was too late to add a replacement. The outcome was only bench guard Isaac Williams posting an assist rate over 15%, and the Bears stumbling to their fewest wins since 2006-07.

But the reality is, many of these retention vs. portal decisions are far more nuanced and harder to fit into specific buckets. With virtually no portal restrictions, serious money at stake, and many different interests in each player and program's camp, the whole idea of retention in the NIL era is more of a rollercoaster than anything.

New Mexico head coach Eric Olen was in an extremely fascinating spot just over a month ago. Fresh off an overachieving first campaign in Albuquerque that nearly led to an NCAA Tournament bid despite zero returning minutes within the program, the Lobos had a wild offseason.

Soon after the portal opened, New Mexico lost its starting big man, Tomislav Buljan (Maryland), and its backup big man, JT Rock (Kansas State). While a tough blow, this is life as an upper-tier mid-major program in a transfer market where bigs were getting paid well over market value.

But then, leading scorer and Mountain West Freshman of the Year Jake Hall entered the portal, and Olen had a choice to make. Use his available funds to build a roster without Hall, or use them toward convincing him to return, while he was receiving interest from Duke, North Carolina, UConn, and others.

Olen told me a story from a couple of years back when he was still coaching at UC San Diego. In its fourth and final season of Division I transition back in 2023-24, the Tritons overachieved, finishing 15-5 in the Big West. Olen lost two starters to bigger programs and a third to graduation, but still had three key rotation players he wanted to retain.

UC San Diego had yet to start an NIL fund. The program was less than half a decade removed from being in Division II. The three main players Olen was trying to keep - Aniwaniwa Tait-Jones, Hayden Gray, and Tyler McGhie - were all Division-II transfers themselves. The entire situation feels impossible now, just two years later.

"I just went to them and was like, I don't know what I can get you, but I'm going to spend all offseason trying to get you some money," said Olen, "They're like, cool, we're in. They didn't even know the number; they just said: Yeah."

We know the rest of the story. Those three combined wound up making less than what a power conference bench player goes for these days, but they were the three best players on a team that went 30-5 and was three points away from taking down a Michigan squad with two NBA bigs and four eventual national champions in the rotation during March Madness. Olen subsequently moved on to New Mexico.

So, naturally, when Olen faced his Jake Hall dilemma, he focused on doing whatever he could to keep his star. While the Lobos weren't inactive during the crucial period when Hall was in limbo, they ensured they had enough money in the budget to retain him.

Six days later, Hall came back. The roster doesn't have a true big man like Buljan or Rock, which shows the price tag of that position and the financial priority the staff placed on Hall, but it is still ranked second in the Mountain West in Bart Torvik's preseason projections.

I can't imagine this offseason did much to improve the New Mexico staff's overall stress levels, but sometimes that's what it takes in the name of retention when serious money is on the line in the transfer portal. And inevitably, programs that were able to bring back a significant and valuable portion of their roster in this crazy day and age will reap the benefits next season.

Varying price points by position

An SEC staffer told me: "I think you're going to put the majority of your money in a big guy, and then the point guard, and then you're going to figure out who you can get at the best value that's the best player as a 2, 3, or 4."

Anecdotally, that makes sense. Let's take a look at the primary position of the Top 25 players in EvanMiya.com's 2025-26 player rankings.

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For those counting at home, that's 11 point guards, seven true bigs, five 4-men, one small forward (Lendeborg would have played the 4 on basically every other team in the country), and one non-playmaking guard in Brayden Burries.

It was Evan who put out my favorite read of the offseason, breaking down NIL market trends. In that article, he outlined a fascinating dataset. He explained that when it comes to an average player worth $1 million in his rankings, if that player were a big man, his market would be approximately $1.3 million, or 30% above expected, and a point guard of equal ability's market would be approximately $800,000. Also, the market value of a player decreases across all five positions. This is probably not a coincidence.

"My theory is that just based on listed height alone, that players that happen to be two inches taller will get more money this off season, purely based on their height and not at all based on their actual basketball ability," said Miyakawa, "I think that has been more accentuated this off season than ever, because of the way that we saw the best teams in the sport build their rosters with the length that they had."

"If you were an equally skilled, talented, productive 6-foot-1 player, you got less money this offseason than if you were the same level of all those things, and at 6-foot-4," Miyakawa added.

While I certainly agree that this college basketball season, and basketball in general, has highlighted the need for positional size, I would just like to draw attention back to the 11 point guards on the aforementioned Top 25 players list.

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Not exactly giants! Even Michigan, boasting one of the biggest frontlines in college basketball history, rostered Elliot Cadeau at point, and the Final Four's Most Valuable Player stands just 6-foot-1.

That fact alone embodies a point Evan drove home in his excellent article: size might be most important right now, but skill comes at a lower price point in 2026.

But another interesting scenario with positions and NIL values is what happens when a team's top returners are wings. In that particular case, a team is paying a premium in the name of retention, and still has to fill its roster with the highest-priced positions of big man and point guard, as that SEC staffer pointed out.

Iowa is bringing back five key rotation pieces from its Elite Eight roster, but four of them are off-ball guards, wings, or forwards. The Hawkeyes used their entire transfer portal budget on two players: point guard Tyreek Coleman and big man Andrew McKeever.

Nebraska may be in an even more unique situation. One of the oldest teams in D-I last year, the Cornhuskers spent significant resources to retain two of their three best players with remaining eligibility - Pryce Sandfort and Braden Frager. However, that left the team without any returners who posted an assist rate above 12% or a rebounding rate over 10%.

Given how unique Nebraska's point guard and big man duo of Sam Hoiberg and Rienk Mast was, it created a fascinating offseason for the Cornhuskers. Their main strategy was knowing exactly what they were looking for.

"Basketball IQ is extremely important for our bigs, and if you cannot shoot the ball, you cannot play for Fred Hoiberg, or we're not going to be really good," said Nebraska's general manager, Luca Virgilio. "Of course, the bigs are already very expensive. And if they can shoot the ball, they're even more expensive."

One of Nebraska's discount frontcourt additions was Sam Orme from Belmont, more of a 4-man who hit a sparkling 40.7% of his 113 threes while posting strong defensive, rebounding, and passing numbers for his position. He's someone I've already listed as one of my favorite portal fits of the offseason.

At the 5, the Cornhuskers bought low on Boden Kapke, a 6-foot-11 big man who hit 29 threes last season, but his lack of defensive counting stats and playing on an 11-20 Boston College team lowered his value. But in 2024-25, Kapke was sixth amongst all players his height or taller in assist-to-turnover ratio. And in 2025-26, he was one of nine players his height or taller with at least 29 threes on 33% shooting. Sounds like a big man Hoiberg can work with!

But perhaps the player I was most interested in is point guard Trevan Leonhardt, who's coming over from Utah Valley. There were only three players in the transfer portal that matched the younger Hoiberg's assist, steal, and 3-point totals, and Leonhardt was one of them.

"From a combination of money, style of play, and fit, I think (Leonhardt) was the one that we liked the most," said Virgilio, "There are kids with more marketing that are getting paid maybe 10 times more than him, but I think he's gonna be really good for what we need him to be."

On paper, additions of Leonhardt, Orme, and Kapke to the starting lineup might seem a bit underwhelming for a Sweet Sixteen team, but Hoiberg is an interesting coach who plays an interesting style, and Nebraska was in a very challenging position with its roster build.

If anything, Nebraska's offseason shows that, despite paying a premium to retain core pieces and needing to fill holes in expensive areas, a focus on roster fit and the right analytics can make up for a lack of financial resources.

How do teams allocate their money?

Moving past retention and positional value, the last main question I had when diving into the concept of money in roster building is how teams divided up their NIL across their roster.

In the NBA, the salary cap and max contracts make this exercise pretty easy. A mid-career max contract player takes up around 30% of the cap, has two superstars, and you're left with 40% of your money for the rest of the roster.

However, in college basketball, most of that doesn't apply. Basically, every coach I spoke with gave a different answer about how they approached their money when it came to roster building. One of the most unique responses I got was from UT Martin head coach Jeremy Shulman.

"We go with a tiered system, so there's not a whole lot of negotiating," said Shulman, "We have incoming guards and wings at a certain spot, we have a tier for all-conference level guys, and then for some players, especially bigs, we have a kind of middle tier, even if they're not quite all-conference."

"It's really just three tiers, and you know, and if guys don't like it, just move on to the next."

Rather than moving a dollar amount around to fit a player, Shulman and his staff are fitting a player to a set dollar amount. This strategy seems especially wise in a league like the OVC, where programs have to navigate an even larger pool of players that includes D-I, D-II, JUCO, NAIA, and international. To try to come up with individual prices for every player they're recruiting feels like an impossible task.

But even for teams in the upper-tier conferences that can be a bit more picky with their recruiting, allocating budget by role makes a lot of sense. Even though college basketball doesn't have max contracts right now, the need for superstars and the requirement for significant compensation remain the same.

It is undoubtedly hard to procure a superstar, but it isn't necessarily hard to identify one on the court. Turn on the NBA playoffs right now, and it's clear that Jalen Brunson is the Knicks' best player, Victor Wembanyama is the Spurs' best player, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the Thunder's best player.

As it pertains to college, with the bulk of NIL money going to top-end talent that is somewhat easier to spot and grade, the real prize falls to those who can nail their portal additions within the margins, something Miyakawa thinks analytics plays a huge part in accomplishing.

"The skillset of role players is a lot less of the stuff that people typically care about," said Miyakawa, "You're not asking a role player to score in spades, you're asking them to do all the other off-ball, secondary stuff. Be a plus defender and get rebounds and have impact beyond the box score."

"That stuff is a bit harder to gauge just by watching a quick highlight film or having played against them in one game, and so I think that's probably where the analytics can help you gain an edge," he added.

That response immediately made me think of Vanderbilt's AK Okereke, who EvanMiya.com had ranked as the No. 19 transfer in the entire cycle last offseason. Okereke didn't have the media hype of Duke Miles, Frankie Collins, or even Tyler Harris and Jalen Washington in the Commodores' transfer portal class, but ended up being one of the most important role players in the country with a reported NIL paycheck of under $1 million.

Okereke was the only forward in the country last season to shoot 40% from 3-point range on a 40% rate while ending at least 18% of his possessions via an assist. Tyler Tanner, Tyler Nickel, and Okereke were Vanderbilt's most-used 3-man lineup last season. It outscored opponents by 19.1 points per 100 possessions.

Vanderbilt ended up missing on Frankie Collins, a guy with 76 power conference starts at point guard, and Tyler Harris, the sport's No. 1 3-point shooter in 2024-25. But it didn't matter nearly as much because of how well the role-playing Okereke fit alongside the guys the Commodores already had.

As I return to the Nwoko situation after diving deep into the world of roster building and NIL payments, a revisionist history points to all the contextual clues that had yet to transpire when I originally critiqued the move.

We learned how valuable retention is in the NIL era, and how coaches put a premium on paying players already on the roster. Xavier had only two players who played more than 20% of available minutes last year, and retained the best of them, a 6-foot-10 sharpshooter in Milicevic.

At the end of May, we also now know how inflated the finances were for starting-quality big men in the portal. There were only 14 true big men who started more than 20 games on a power conference squad that switched teams this offseason, and Xavier added one of them in Nwoko, who was fifth in WARP amongst those guys.

And when it comes to properly allocating budget on a roster, we now know that Xavier did an excellent job of divvying up the pot. They added one of the 10 best passers in the portal with 6-foot-6 Chance Westry from UAB. They added one of only four power conference players in the portal to make 40% of his threes on 100+ attempts with Ruben Dominguez from Texas A&M. And they added a top 25 steal rate player in the portal and former Pitino guard Tru Washington from Miami.

The result is a lineup that has the positional size everyone is looking for, the starting-caliber big man that everyone is looking for, the shooting that everyone is looking for, and the off-ball role players that everyone is looking for.

Compare that with a roster from a team two hours down the road in Bloomington. Indiana reportedly spent at least $4 million on its star big man, Aiden Sherrell, and if he had committed at the same time as Nwoko with practically no one else on either roster, I probably would have applauded the move.

"Indiana immediately fixes its glaring hole at the 5 with a proven SEC starter with real spacing ability and two-way rebounding prowess, while also being able to protect the rim at a high level for one of the sport's best teams. Great start to the offseason for the Hoosiers," is probably along the lines of what I could have tweeted. Sherrell is undoubtedly better than Nwoko in a direct comparison.

Instead, the Hoosiers doubled down on bigs by paying 7-foot-2 Samet Yigitoglu a pretty penny. Both bigs played over 96% of their minutes at the 5-spot according to Hoop-Explorer, and neither has shown the ability to guard in space in their college career.

Add in an undersized, yet skilled backcourt of Markus Burton and Bryce Lindsay, plus a couple of flyers on the wing with Jaeden Mustaf and Darren Harris, given much of the budget was spent on the jumbo frontcourt, and Indiana, like Xavier, created a new starting five largely from scratch, with nearly double the budget and half of the versatility and emphasis on roster building.

All this to say, in a day and age where money builds rosters just as much as coaches do, judging each move in a vacuum and without a holistic perspective significantly diminishes the value of the analysis.

And, in parallel, for coaches and programs, making each move in a vacuum and without a holistic perspective on the roster and budget significantly diminishes the value of building a new team each and every season.