Auburn's new twin towers are already making their presence felt
If summer work is any indication, Narcisse Ngoy and Bukky Oboye will completely change the way the Tigers play on both ends of the floor.
TAMPA, Fla. — There might not have been a program in college basketball that loved the recent changes to the recruiting calendar more than Auburn.
Rewind to about 16 months ago, when the best team in Auburn basketball history was on a run to its second-ever Final Four. The portal opened while the Tigers were still playing, making things difficult on a staff whose top priority was on the hardwood.
“We didn’t know what was coming back,” Steven Pearl said last week before an AMBUSH event in Tampa, Fla. “We didn’t know if Tahaad (Pettiford) was coming back. We didn’t know if Chad (Baker-Mazara) was coming back. So there was a lot of uncertainty. For us, it was really, at that point, what can we get?
“We missed out on some of the best bigs in the portal because, at the time, we were playing and trying to win a national championship. The schools that we had beaten were out there recruiting these guys. We were at a bit of a disadvantage.”
The most obvious example of Auburn missing out in the portal process while still playing postseason basketball was Yaxel Lendeborg, a do-it-all star big man at UAB. Auburn recruited him, but he ultimately decided to play at Michigan — the program it had beaten in the Sweet 16 in Atlanta just days earlier.
Lendeborg went on to become the Big Ten Player of the Year and a consensus All-American for a massive and dominant Michigan team that won the national title. While there probably was more to do with Lendeborg’s decision than pure timing — Bruce Pearl even said during a broadcast at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas that Auburn’s $1 million offer “wasn’t enough to warm him up” — it certainly didn’t help.
When Auburn’s run ended in San Antonio and its undivided attention could be turned to the transfer portal, plenty of the best available bigs had already made up their minds. The Tigers had to scramble somewhat in their push to replace the likes of Johni Broome and Dylan Cardwell, who had been a two-headed monster at center.
Auburn landed Alabama native and Mississippi State veteran KeShawn Murphy, but it was telling that his best work with the Bulldogs came as a plus-sized 6-foot-10 power forward next to a traditional center. The Tigers also signed European import Filip Jović, although he wasn’t as large as originally expected as a 6-foot-8 big man.
And although Auburn got a true 7-footer to add to the mix in JUCO transfer Emeka Opurum, the defense-first project was only limited to just six early-season games before an undisclosed health issue sidelined him for the rest of the campaign.
“We ended up having to get two 4-men to play our 5 position last year,” Pearl said.
While Auburn didn’t make the NCAA Tournament after a brutally disappointing slide to end the first regular season under the younger Pearl, the Tigers played all the way until the final weekend of the season thanks to their run to the NIT championship.
This time, though, Auburn didn’t have to be of two minds as a staff, actively recruiting and actively coaching at the same time. The portal didn’t open until after the national championship game, and the Tigers got a dedicated general manager in place in the weeks leading up to it by hiring Brian Kloman from Louisville.
“So I thought one of the biggest things was, with the portal opening after the season, I thought our staff was very organized,” Pearl said. “And I thought we were did good job of identifying a lot of the things we didn’t have previously.”
It didn’t take too long to figure out what Auburn’s top priority was in the roster renovation. Auburn signed French international 7-footer Narcisse Ngoy during the NIT run, since he wasn’t part of the portal process.
Then the Tigers’ first official transfer signing of the portal class was 7-foot-1 Santa Clara center Bukky Oboye, fresh off what should have been an upset of Kentucky in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Auburn went from having zero healthy true centers last season to landing two of them quickly. In fact, the program only had two 7-footers on any roster — Opurum and new $130 million Los Angeles Lakers addition Walker Kessler — over its last 11 seasons.
Ngoy and Oboye will be the first 7-footers to be on the same roster for Auburn since the 2013-14 season, when Asauhn Dixon-Tatum and Benas Griciunas played for the Tigers. Griciunas only featured in 12 games for Auburn before suffering an injury.
Simply put, what Auburn now has roaming the floor inside Neville Arena this summer as the Tigers look to have a bounce-back Year 2 under Pearl is rare. And it has the potential to be special, judging by the early returns.
“You’re not going to play against really two better 7-footers,” shooting guard Kevin Overton said earlier this month. “Their characteristics, and their pros and cons — the way they complement each other is crazy.”