City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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(Ed. Note: This article is part of our 2022-23 season coverage, which will run for the six weeks preceding the first official games of the year on Nov. 9. To access all of our high school and college preview content for this season click here)

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2022-23 La Salle Explorers
Coach: Fran Dunphy, 1st season (0-0, .---)
Last Year: 11-19 (5-13 Atlantic 10); lost in A-10 Second Round (Saint Louis, 71-51)

The four-year tenure of Ashley Howard came to an end after last season, after the former Villanova assistant was unable to make substantial progress with the once-proud Explorers program, which aside from one magical Sweet 16 run in 2012-13 has struggled to stay relevant for the last three decades. Now it’s up to Dunphy, as the  74-year-old former Explorers standout and assistant coach becomes the first man to ever coach three Big 5 squads, following a successful run at Penn (1989-2006) and mostly-successful run at Temple (2006-19, between which he’s made 12 NCAA Tournament appearances. The cupboard isn’t totally bare at 20th and Olney, but Dunphy has his work cut out for him at a school that doesn’t have too many built-in advantages.

Key Departures: F Clifton Moore (12.9 ppg, 6.1 rpg), SG Jack Clark (12.0 ppg, 5.8 rpg), SF Christian Ray (5.0 ppg, 6.9 rpg)

This could have been a lot worse: almost the entire Explorer roster entered the transfer portal following Howard’s firing, but Dunphy and his staff — he kept two of Howard’s assistant coaches, Donnie Carr and John Cox IV — were able to coax quite a bit of the core into coming back to La Salle and giving them a shot. But there’s no denying the three above, all local products would have been nice to keep around the Big 5. Moore, a 6-11 forward from Hatboro-Horsham, finally put it together for his best collegiate season last year, and is now at Providence; Clark, a 6-7 guard out of Cheltenham, also had his best statistical season and is now at North Carolina State; Ray, a versatile 6-5 wing guard and one of the team’s emotional leaders, is now at Delaware. 

New Faces: F Ryan Zan (Fr. | Rutgers Prep, N.J.), G Jorge Sanchez-Ramos (Fr. | Torrelodones, Spain), G/F Lucas Mercandino (Fr | Cordoba, Argentina), F Rokas Jocius (Fr. | Kaunas, Lithuania), F Hassan Drame (Sr. | Saint Peter’s), F Fousseyni Drame (Sr. | Saint Peter’s)

Dunphy and his staff went international to fill out their ranks this year, getting players from four continents and five different countries when you include the Drame twins, who are from Mali. Add in 6-5 redshirt freshman Andres Marrero, who didn’t play a minute last season, and it’s a lot of new faces and a few different languages on the floor. (When asked at a recent event about all the different cultures and dialects coming together, Dunphy replied “no es un problema”). The upside of the recruiting class is that a few of them have professional experience against men double their age, and won’t flinch going against Division I upperclassmen. The Drame twins are the most notable additions, the two playing major roles as Saint Peter’s made it to the Elite 8 in Marchs, but buzz is strong about the 6-10 Jocius as well.

Projected Starters: PG Jhamir Brickus (8.9 ppg, 3.3 apg), G Khalil Brantley (8.0 ppg), SG Josh Nickelberry (11.2 ppg, 2.8 rpg), F Hassan Drame (6.0 ppg, 5.3 rpg @ Saint Peter’s), F Rokas Jocius (DNP)

There’s plenty of ways this lineup could go, as Dunphy isn’t necessarily going to be tied to his predecessor’s rotations, but we can make some educated guesses. Brickus, a junior from Coatesville is one of their most experienced players, with 46 starts (53 games) under his belt, playing nearly 1,500 minutes thus far, with three years of eligibility remaining thanks to the COVID season. Brantley might be their most individually skilled player (more on that below), and Nickelberry gives them good wing size at 6-6,  though the Louisville transfer vacillated between games of high-impact (nine games with 17+ points) and minimal (nine games with five or fewer). Up front, one of the Drame twins will start, and the two 6-7 forwards are just about equally productive when they’re on the court, while Jocius gives them the ability to have a stretch-big and some rim protecting size at 6-10.

Key Reserves: G Anwar Gill (4.4 ppg), F/C Mamadou Doucoure (1.9 ppg, 2.7 rpg), F Fousseyni Drame (7.0 ppg, 4.5 rpg @ Saint Peter’s), SF Daeshon Shepherd (2.1 ppg)

Gill is another potential starter, as he started 12 of the 28 games he played in last year, and the 6-4 guard was a high-level prospect coming out of Montverde Academy (Fl.), even if he hasn’t quite reached that potential yet. Doucoure will back up Jocius at the ‘5’, though the former Rutgers center won’t be expected to produce much more than he has; Drame will spell his brother at the ‘4’, and Shepherd can play the ‘2’ and ‘3’ as long as the bouncy 6-5 Archbishop Wood product can reliably hit from downtown. With all the unknowns and newcomers, don’t be surprised if we see the freshmen enter the mix at some point as well.

By the Numbers

(7): Both the number of new faces on the Explorers and their consecutive seasons without a winning record. La Salle’s only had four winning seasons in the last quarter-century, fewer than the number of seasons they’ve had 10-or-fewer wins (6).

(580): Career wins for Fran Dunphy, which is 49th on the all-time Division I list, and 14th amongst active Division I coaches. Dunphy won 310 games at Penn and then 270 at Temple, and now becomes the first person to coach at three different Big 5 institutions. He needs 62 more wins to surpass Jay Wright as the winningest coach in Big 5 history, and considering both Dunphy’s age (74) and La Salle’s recent history on the court, his getting to that bar would mean something’s going right in North Philly.

(.251): The Explorers’ free-throw rate, or the number of foul shots they took for every field goal; in this case, they went to the line about one time for every four shots taken, which put them 314th in the country, according to KenPom. Free-throw rate wasn’t something Dunphy’s Temple squads excelled at either — they were in the bottom 20 in in the country four of his final six seasons at TU — but he’s got a couple aggressive attacking guards in Brantley and Brickus, and the Drame twins did a good job of getting to the line at Saint Peter’s.

Keep an eye on…

Khalil Brantley: The 6-1 sophomore from Brooklyn flashed some serious talent last year, a highly-skilled, highly-athletic combo guard who can be a big-time scorer at the Division I level with some refinement. Brantley reached double figures 12 times as a freshman but shot just 35.4% from the floor and 26.7% (16-of-60) from 3-point range. An eight-assist effort against St. Bonaventure is sign that he can be more of a distributor, and he did finish with an assist-to-turnover ratio greater than 1:1, so there are building blocks. If Dunphy can mold Brantley into one of the lead guards he developed at Temple, the Explorers would really benefit.

Turnovers: If there’s one thing Dunphy’s teams are always good at, it’s taking care of the ball. Every single one of his Temple teams were in the top 78 in offensive turnover percentage, and seven of them were in the top 25; typically his teams turned it over less than 16% of the time, while half the college basketball world coughed it up 20% of their possessions or more. The Explorers turned it over nearly 19% of the time last year, which was the best mark of the Howard era, but it still leaves room for improvement. Until La Salle shows it has more efficient scorers, Dunphy will need to do all he can to help them increase possessions, and this has been an area where he’s been proven to be effective.