COLUMBIA, Mo. — Take a look up and down the men's college basketball AP Top 25 or the latest NCAA Tournament projections and you'll find plenty of teams filled with transfers.
Of course, Missouri (10-15, 4-8 SEC) isn't one of them. It won't make the cut for the NIT either.
Coming into the season, the Tigers only returned two players who had played consistent minutes — Kobe Brown and Javon Pickett — and brought in four transfers. But similar things can be said for schools like Texas Tech, Marquette, TCU and Iowa State. Though they were expected to be good this season all along, programs like Kentucky, Auburn and Texas are stacked with talent that started their careers elsewhere too.
So why has the transfer portal been so beneficial to some programs across the country but not Missouri?
Well, the simple answer is that Mizzou struck out on the portal, unable to find the impact pieces it was hoping for. If you look deeper though, it all lies in the defensive ability of the players Cuonzo Martin brought in and the group's struggle to mesh as one unit on that side of the floor.
"The better we become as a defense, the better we'll become as a team," Martin said on Jan. 18. "This is probably my first time in coaching where I've had a team that really didn't have a defensive DNA — because there's so many new guys, so understanding we have to do this in order for us to be successful."
Martin has never had this many transfers playing this much during his tenure in Columbia. Jarron "Boogie" Coleman (Ball State), Amari Davis (Green Bay), DaJuan Gordon (Kansas State) and Ronnie DeGray III (UMass) combine for slightly more than half of the team's minutes per game at 107.1 minutes.
Martin, a defensive-minded coach who relies on toughness as one of his main points of emphasis, has also never had this bad of a defensive team during his time at Mizzou. The Tigers currently have a defensive efficiency of 102.0, which ranks 159th in the country, according to KenPom. A Martin-led team in Columbia has never finished with a defensive efficiency worse than 97.2 and 71st in the country.
For context, all of the schools mentioned at the start of this article are led by defenses that rank 40th in the country or better in the same metric.
Though Martin has shown a tendency to rely on high school talent over the portal in the past, this certainly isn't the first time that Martin has brought transfers into his program and played them significant minutes. Kassius Robertson (2017-18), Mark Smith (2018-21) and Dru Smith (2019-21) are the three he relied on the most over his first four seasons leading the program.
Those three players did contribute their fair share offensively, but the real difference is that each was much better on the defensive end of the floor than any of the transfers Martin added this offseason.
Robertson and Mark Smith earned an "excellent" defensive rating from the Synergy analytics system in their first season playing for him, while Dru Smith was rated "very good." Each of the trio was among or better than 81% of players nationally defensively, none giving up more than .739 points per possession. None allowed opposing players to shoot an adjusted field goal percentage higher than 39.2% against them either — the best was 33.3%.
For comparison, none of the four MU transfers this season rank better than the 45th percentile of players or give up fewer than .854 points per possession. The best adjusted field goal percentage allowed by any of them is 44.6% — the worst is 54.6%. They range from being pegged as "average" defenders to "poor" by Synergy's system.
