College basketball’s offseason has a free agency feel. Here’s how Villanova is navigating the new world.

Alabama reached the men’s basketball Final Four and had 11 players in the transfer portal as of Friday afternoon. Duke reached the Elite Eight and then watched seven players submit their names to leave the program. Rutgers may have the best incoming recruiting class in its hoops history, but the Scarlet Knights are likely saying goodbye to at least eight players in the portal.

Locally in men’s basketball, the top five scorers at La Salle went into the portal. Temple’s top three scorers and Drexel’s top two, too. St. Joseph’s has seen players exit and arrive. And Penn lost two to an Ivy League rule that doesn’t allow graduate students to play, and another, freshman Tyler Perkins, who left for Villanova after a standout freshman year in part because the Ivy League doesn’t have the name, image, and likeness capabilities to keep him around.

Show those two paragraphs to a college hoops fan just five or 10 years ago and wait for the puzzling look heading back your way. Show it to a Villanova season-ticket holder in the euphoric prime of Jay Wright’s 21 seasons leading the Wildcats, and wait for the laugh and the retort. Never gonna happen here. Can’t. Won’t.

Yep, it has happened here. It has happened everywhere. The 45 days after the college basketball regular season wraps up have become a free agency frenzy with the existence of the portal and NIL. It’s fantasy basketball with a salary cap, except every school and NIL collective has a different salary cap number. It is the Wild West. Anything goes.

For Villanova, the last two years have been full of change, first Wright’s retirement leading to the hiring of Kyle Neptune. The coaching change came as the game was changing rapidly. And athletic director Mark Jackson reacted by bringing in old friend Baker Dunleavy to serve as general manager for the men’s and women’s basketball programs. All the while, Friends of Nova, the NIL collective that supports Villanova athletics, has built what executive director Randy Foye likes to call a “war chest” of resources to keep Villanova in the top tier of college hoops.

The result has been less than stellar. Neptune’s Wildcats are 35-33 over the last two seasons, and the team’s four-player transfer portal haul from last offseason didn’t leave supporters feeling confident in Villanova’s ability to attract the right type of talent to be successful in the ever-changing landscape.

The Villanova Way of the past is gone, and a new world is here.

“First and foremost, we’re not happy with where we are the last couple years,” Neptune said. “Me, our staff, we know what this place stands for and what the tradition has been.

“College basketball has become very transient. You look at successful teams, teams that have gone far in the tournament, they have multiple guys leaving. I don’t know how we can look at ourselves and say we’re above that. It just hasn’t happened in the past here at Villanova and I understand that it’s new for this place. But some teams have entire rosters in the portal and it’s just kind of the new day of college basketball and it’s on us to navigate that — my job is to navigate that.”

He has no other choice. Villanova is losing four players to expiring eligibility, another four to the transfer portal, and two more to either the NBA draft or the portal. A roster overhaul is underway, and what happens over the next four to five weeks will go a long way in determining the immediate future of the program.

Is it a crossroads? In some ways, yes. In other ways, every year could represent a crossroads of sorts.

» READ MORE: ‘We have the right guy in place’: Villanova is committed to coach Kyle Neptune

Alignment over retention

This part of the calendar used to be a bit of a reset for coaches. There was time to run workouts with your returning players, start recruiting the next high school class, and spend some time with family.

Now? “It’s an extra month-and-a-half of the season,” Neptune said.

The way it started for the Wildcats is probably similar to how it started elsewhere. Villanova’s season ended with Neptune getting booed off the Finneran Pavilion floor following a second consecutive first-round exit in the National Invitation Tournament, and the staff immediately began evaluating its own roster.

Who was going to leave? Who was going to stay? The reasons vary from player to player, so the staff met with everyone. Villanova’s first two portal entries, Trey Patterson and Lance Ware, were on one side of the postseason evaluation: players who were unlikely to help Villanova turn things around in 2024-25 and who would find more playing time elsewhere. Patterson, whose injuries never allowed him a chance to get healthy and play at Villanova, will graduate in May and head to Rice. Ware, who was part of the four-player portal haul last offseason, has not yet committed. It seemed like a win-win for both sides.

On the other side of the coin were Brendan Hausen and TJ Bamba, and maybe Mark Armstrong, if he goes through the draft process and then decides between now and May 1 (when the portal closes) to enter the portal. What roles did they want to have? How much money did they want? How did those things line up with what Villanova was looking to do?

All of this leads to a word that’s a new favorite on Ithan Avenue. It used to be all about retention. Now, it’s alignment.

“Retention is great, but what’s more important, I think, is alignment, with players and their families,” said Dunleavy, whose role with the program is almost exclusively on the business side of things, including facilitating the relationship between players and their families and Foye’s Friends of Nova. Dunleavy oversees both the men’s and women’s programs, and he’s dealing with a similar situation on the women’s team, which has seen three starters and six total players enter the portal.

“If you can retain a player that’s aligned with you, that’s a home run,” Dunleavy said. “But if you can’t get on the same page, then the portal is open and you have the ability to move on … both sides. That is not always due to NIL. In fact, a lot of the times it’s more to do with basketball first. Kids are still motivated to become the best player and become a pro and then NIL is second for most kids, at least the ones that we’ve dealt with.”

The departures of Bamba and Hausen were looked at as another “sky is falling” moment for Villanova fans who have been disenchanted with the two-year Neptune era. But the reactions seemed a bit hypocritical in the moment. How could the departures of two key players on an 18-16 basketball team be deemed a failure if those players greatly impacted a 2023-24 season that many have determined to be a failure? And how could Villanova commit roles and dollars to those players while also trying to get better?

There’s a caveat to this line of thinking: Villanova has to be able to recruit over those players, and that hasn’t happened yet.

The state of the roster

Dunleavy and Neptune both said that the current state of Villanova’s roster — three incoming freshmen, three to four returning players — was one of the scenarios they considered when they initially evaluated where the roster was heading when the season ended.

More than 1,700 players were in the transfer portal as of Monday and around 400 of them had committed to new schools, meaning the player pool is still pretty large for Neptune and his staff, which has been scheduling visits and actively recruiting transfer targets. The portal closes May 1, but graduate students have an extended period, and players have plenty of time after the portal closes to commit. Villanova’s roster last year wasn’t finalized until the end of May.

To date, just one player, Perkins, has committed to Villanova. Perkins, a guard, has three years of eligibility remaining after scoring 13.7 points while grabbing 5.3 rebounds per game at Penn. He will be in the mix for a starting role, but his upside lies with the remaining eligibility.

» READ MORE: Does Tyler Perkins’ transfer from Penn represent a new Villanova way?

Villanova needs several ballhandlers. One of its biggest downfalls in 2023-24 was not having enough strong decision makers. Bamba excelled at times on offense, but he did not excel in the ways Villanova’s read-and-react system requires, and running it back with Bamba as the focal point of the offense was not going to help Villanova climb in a crowded Big East Conference. Hausen, meanwhile, has been a strong shooter who hasn’t been able to create his own shot enough and has struggled on the defensive end.

The Wildcats also need a starting center, though they appear to be letting the chips fall before making a splash. Drexel’s Amari Williams, an elite defender with a still-developing offensive game, ended up at Kentucky. Big men are at a premium right now.

Villanova is in the mix with power forward Andrew Carr, a West Chester native who started at Delaware and then played two seasons at Wake Forest. He is a 6-foot-10 player with the ability to stretch the floor (he averaged 13.7 points and shot 37.1% from three-point range). The Wildcats are involved with plenty of others. They haven’t been linked publicly with some of the top players, but Neptune and Foye both alluded to Villanova’s style of operating in the shadows.

Asked about how he goes about identifying talent in the portal, Neptune said, “It’s all-encompassing.

“You try to get as much data as you possibly can, from statistics to analytics to watching games and talking to people to get a read on a person. It’s trying to find as many possible data points as you can get to help make a decision.”

Every year is different, Neptune said. For example, recruiting a player like Perkins with multiple years of eligibility isn’t necessarily the model for the future. Some years, like even this one, will require getting more experienced players in the portal. Others might not.

“The only thing constant is change,” Neptune said. “We’re learning the psyche of how it is now and I think we’re in a really good spot to build a competitive roster.”

» READ MORE: Big backing and even bigger bucks have turned Villanova basketball into a professional team

No bidding wars?

Time will tell if building a competitive roster happens. There are plenty of players available who could make Villanova competitive again, but the portal market is still coming together.

As far as funding goes, Foye said Villanova’s NIL war chest wasn’t any less robust than it was last year even with diminishing returns. But Foye did acknowledge that others around the sport have caught up. And in the Wild West that is this sport right now, money is swinging the pendulum in a lot of ways. For players like Drexel’s Williams, and even guys like Bamba and Hausen, this time period offers what could be a chance at their biggest payday playing professionally — yeah, this isn’t amateur hoops anymore — in North America.

Everyone is asking for the maximum, and many of them have agents letting numbers fly left and right to drive prices up. On that front, Foye recently said on his former teammate Allan Ray’s podcast that Villanova wasn’t going to get into bidding wars.

Asked what he meant, Foye pointed to what Villanova can offer beyond NIL.

“Obviously we’re not naïve, and we understand that [money] is a component of this business,” Foye said. “But we want to do things in a way where we want you to be a part of our community and we want you to respect everything around our community. We want you to understand that Villanova is here for you now, and Villanova is going to help you become a really good student-athlete, you’re going to be compensated because we have one of the best collectives in the country, but we’re not going to go back and forth with someone’s representation. We have Villanova values and we abide by those and we believe in those and we know that it changes lives.”

It’s that line of thinking, however, that has some of this Villanova regime’s biggest critics wondering if the program is set up properly for the future.

“I don’t think we’re falling behind,” Foye said. “I don’t think the way we do things is out of style or old-fashioned.”

What “the future” of this all looks like is still being determined. It’s tied up in courts in some places, like Virginia, which have made recent rulings that impact the way NIL is doled out. This isn’t the college basketball Neptune and Dunleavy signed up for when they got into this business, but it’s the one they’re living in now.

“I do my best not to think that way, because you could get hit with every emotion, the nostalgia of the good old days … when it was pure,” Dunleavy said, sort of tongue-in-cheek. “How is this any different than professional sports?

“You start to formulate opinions on should it be this way or a different way. We need to spend less time asking do we like the system and more time answering the questions that involve: How can we be super effective in this current system?”

Like many other programs, Villanova is still finding its way there. One thing is clear, though: The pressure is on.

“Whether it’s pressure, or responsibility, or importance, we know what’s at stake,” Dunleavy said. “There are so many things that we have to get right.”