The Stretch 4: A new-look Auburn basketball team takes shape

Here's the latest on the Tigers' summer, including Tahaad Pettiford's return to practice, Filip Jović's move and excitement on defense.

(Auburn Basketball/Twitter)

LAKE MARTIN — Like many others, the players and coaches of Auburn men’s basketball are taking a break during this holiday week.

But, even though they won’t hit the hardwood for games that count for another four months, the Tigers have been hard at work during a red-hot summer of change in and around the program.

Auburn had to replace almost every single one of its players from last season’s best-ever team. It had to wait out the NBA Draft decision of a star player. The Tigers saw a longtime assistant coach step down to take a new opportunity and saw a tenured program mainstay get promoted in his place. They’re also now living in a revenue-sharing world in college athletics.

Oh, and when they return to the court next week for practice, they’ll be wearing Nike gear for the very first time as a team.

In a season of so much newness, Auburn men’s basketball went with something different Wednesday night as part of the athletic department’s annual Ambush tour of alumni club meetings: Assistant coach Steven Pearl representing the program instead of his head coach father, Bruce Pearl.

Along with football’s Hugh Freeze, baseball’s Butch Thompson, women’s basketball’s Larry Vickers and athletic director John Cohen, the younger Pearl sat down with several media members before talking at the Lake Martin Auburn Club’s annual meeting at Willow Point Country Club.

We’ll have more on what the others said in Friday’s mailbag, along with several upcoming Observer newsletters and podcasts.

But, before that, let’s dig into all the insight that Pearl gave into the men’s basketball team’s offseason in a special summer edition of The Stretch 4 — starting with the ever-popular subject of one Tahaad Pettiford.

(Zach Bland/Auburn Tigers)

You can tell Tahaad Pettiford is back

There wasn’t a bigger possible offseason win for Auburn basketball than the one it got a little more than a month ago, when Pettiford announced he would pull out of the 2025 NBA Draft and return to school for his sophomore campaign.

Pearl said Wednesday evening that, although Pettiford and his inner circle “were very transparent and honest throughout the whole process,” the final days before the point guard’s decision got somewhat nervy.

“Going into the combine and the NBA Draft process, we felt like it was an 80/20 situation, where we felt like he was gonna come back,” Pearl said. “To his credit, he goes to the combine and does what we know he’s capable of doing from playing on some of the biggest stages against the best players — show out.

“And then it turned into like a 50/50 situation. So we were sweating a little bit, because we knew that there was a real chance that Tahaad could have snuck into the end of that first round.”

After going through all the work of the pre-draft process, Pettiford took some time off and wasn’t on campus for the early stages of Auburn’s summer work.