Team: DePaul Blue Demons
2024-25 Record: 14-20, 4-16 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: 10th, two games behind a Providence/Butler tie for eighth, and two games in front of Seton Hall.
Final Computer Rankings
NET: #125
KenPom.com: #122
BartTorvik.com: #113
Postseason? DePaul upset Georgetown in the first round of the Big East tournament and damn near did the same to Creighton in the quarterfinals, leading 62-51 with two minutes left before eventually losing in double overtime. The Blue Demons were allowed
to participate in the College Basketball Crown even while sitting five games under .500 at the time because Fox Sports needed teams for their event, and they took an 83-61 and largely non-competitive loss to Cincinnati in the opening round.
Key Departures: There was just one guy on the Blue Demons roster last season that played in all 34 games, and he’s gone now. Isaiah Rivera was on his bonus year of eligibility anyway as he averaged 10.8 points and 4.1 rebounds per game, so losing him comes as no surprise to anyone. Rivera was also DePaul’s most dangerous three-point threat, attempting five triples a game and connecting on a team high 41%. You might remember him from that time he nailed a four-pack of three-pointers in the final 62 seconds of overtime as #7 Marquette outlasted DePaul, 85-83, last season. Literally 6% of his makes for the entire season right there, and cardiologists across the country benefited.
DePaul had three more rotation guys who were on their last year of eligibility alongside Rivera. Troy D’Amico started 29 times in 32 appearances, chipping in 6.1 points and 2.7 rebounds while shooting 38% on threes. JJ Traynor was more of a bench guy, starting 10 times in 32 games, but 5.6 points and 3.3 rebounds in 17.5 minutes a night is pretty good. David Skogman’s health never quite let him live up to his 2023-24 season at Davidson, but he still added 6.4 points and 5.1 rebounds while appearing 20 times for DePaul last year.
There are also three guys departing by way of the transfer portal, two of which had much bigger roles than the third. When he was healthy, Conor Enright was playing 30 minutes a night for DePaul. He led the team in assists at 6.2 per game, and after that, adding 7.5 points and 3.3 rebounds is icing on the cake. He was also laughably awful at keeping track of the ball, up to the point of Stevie Mitchell freaking him out into an over and back violation in that Rivera game I mentioned earlier for one of his seven turnovers in that game. In any case, he needed shoulder surgery not long after that contest and thus only played in 23 games before transferring to Indiana.
The other big loss to the portal is Jacob Meyer, who played nearly 20 minutes a night and started 16 times in 33 games last year. 8.9 points and 2.6 rebounds, plus a 33% three-point shooting rate made him a guy that you had to keep track of when he was on the court, or even just whether or not he was on the court, I suppose. He has two years of eligibility left, and he’s going to spend at least one of them at UAB. The last transfer out is David Thomas, who also has two years remaining as he heads to Richmond. He averaged 15 minutes a game for the Blue Demons, starting twice in 27 appearances. His minutes jumped way up after Enright was done for the year, but that wasn’t enough to keep the Georgia native in Chicago.
Key Returners: That last section makes it sound like this DePaul roster got gutted a bit in the offseason, and yeah, they’re losing a lot of their rotation. However, they return three of their top four scorers, and one of those guys was the top rebounder on the squad this past year.
Let’s start with that rebounding guy, and that’s NJ Benson. 9.0 points and 6.2 rebounds is pretty good, and he landed just short of a block and a half per game, too. Benson was really better than his stats tell you, as he averaged just 21.9 minutes per game. After he moved into the starting lineup right around the first of the year because Skogman was injured, Benson averaged 10.9 points, 7.8 rebounds, and 1.6 blocks in nearly 27 minutes a game.
CJ Gunn led DePaul in scoring last season at 12.9 points per game, and you’d have to figure that he was disappointed in shooting just 30% from behind the arc after connecting on 34% the year before at Indiana. Once he grabbed a starting spot away from Isaiah Rivera, Gunn averaged 14.4 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 1.5 steals per game. His shooting got worse, hitting just 29% on six long range attempts per game, so it’s not all good news.
The third and final guy in that trio of top scorers returning is Layden Blocker. He helped out across the board at 9.5 points, 2.9 rebounds, 3.1 assists, and 1.1 steals. He also shot 34% behind the arc as he went in and out of the starting lineup all season.
Key Additions: Let’s start with the fact that one of DePaul’s three freshmen is just barely outside the 247 Sports Composite top 100. Isaiah Medina (7’1”, 200 lb. center, per 247) comes in at #106, and I usually consider anyone in the top 150 to at least have a chance to crack the rotation in their first year. With just three rotation guys returning, I think that’s the case for Medina here, but with six transfers also coming through the door, I’m not 100% convinced.
With that said, two of the transfers played less than 300 minutes in their freshman seasons at their previous locations, so I’m also not running up and down the street yelling about how great those guys are going to be for DePaul. In particular, I’m very curious to see if Khaman Maker makes any impact after playing just three minutes all of last year for St. John’s. FUN FACT: All three minutes were in one game against ..... wait for it...... DePaul!
Anyway, Kaleb Banks (6’7”, 215 lb. forward) comes in with the best resume in terms of what they’ve done in their previous stops. There’s not much to say about his two seasons at Indiana, but at Tulane last year, he averaged 14.7 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 1.3 blocks per game. I’d imagine that the blocks aren’t going to hold together given that he’s listed at just 6’7”, but the fact that he could do that at any level of Division 1 at his height is pretty good.
If Brandon Maclin’s (6’5”, 215 lb. guard) one year at Radford projects to the Big East, then he’ll be a rotation guy at least. He averaged 10.0 points, 4.3 rebounds, 2.2 assists, and 1.2 steals in his first year in Division 1 after two campaigns in the JuCo ranks. DePaul lists him as a senior, but given the Diego Pavia “Junior College Years Don’t Count” exception, maybe we’ll see him past this year?
I think averaging 6.2 points and 2.5 rebounds as a part time starter as a sophomore at Colorado is good news for whether or not RJ Smith (6’4”, 175 lb. guard) can earn playing time with the Blue Demons. I’m not going to say he’s going to be a starter or anything, but that’s a guy who can do some stuff. Jeremy Lorenz (6’8”, 220 lb. forward) had pretty consistent minutes at Wofford, no matter if he was only coming off the bench as a freshman or a sometimes starter as a freshman. 7.5 points and 4.0 rebounds per game is better than I could do in two seasons of Division 1 basketball, and we should note that it’s rare to see a DePaul player who has put up 12 points, 4 rebounds, and 3 assists in an NCAA tournament game like he did this past spring against Tennessee.
Coach: Chris Holtmann, entering his second season with DePaul and 15th as a Division 1 head coach. Obviously, he has a record of 14-20 with the Blue Demons, but he is 265-191 overall.
Outlook: No one is ever going to confuse DePaul’s 14-20 record for a good season. In fact, it was actually worse than the record tells you because the Blue Demons started off the year 7-0 and tacked on wins in their last two regular season games as well as the W against Georgetown in the Big East tournament. In the middle of those bursts of wins, DePaul went 4-18, including starting off Big East play with a record of 2-16.
But we can say two things.
The first is that because of various injuries as the season went along, Chris Holtmann used 12 different starting lineups in his first year in charge of the Blue Demons. Scraping together 14 wins was hard just on a purely “who’s available for us today? level. I mentioned it earlier and I’ll repeat it here: DePaul had one guy play in all 34 games this season. No one started more than the 29 games that Troy D’Amico racked up. Things were in flux all season long for them, and that has to go a long way towards explaining why things did not go well.
The other thing is that DePaul was merely run of the mill bad. The final ranking of #122 in KenPom is just the fifth time in the last 17 years where the Blue Demons were in the top 125 of the rankings when everything came to a stop. #113 in Torvik is the sixth time in the same timeframe where they’ve been in the top 125 at the end of the year.
To be clear: This is bad! Last year, no one in the SEC was outside the top 90 in KenPom. The worst team in the Big Ten was at #104. Oklahoma State was dragging up the back end of the Big 12 at #97.
But it’s not as bad as DePaul has been for most of the past two decades. Chris Holtmann put together a “better than usual for DePaul” season, sometimes with packing tape, chicken wire, and chewing gum. Step #1 for Holtmann’s tenure as head coach of the Blue Demons had to be “don’t be a national joke again,” and he did that in 2024-25.
There is a difference between “don’t be a national joke again” and “stop being a national joke,” however. DePaul hasn’t quite pushed themselves across that line, and losing seven rotation players is definitely making it harder, not easier. We’re not even talking about being competitive, we’re just talking about making it into the top 100 of the rankings and maybe flirting with finishing .500 in the Big East. That’s something they haven’t done since going 9-7 in 2007, their second year in the league. DePaul hasn’t had back-to-back overall winning seasons since their last two years in Conference USA. There are very easily accomplishable goals for Holtmann and his team going forward, and merely being run of the mill bad this past year was the first thing they needed to do to get there.
They took the first step forward? Can they follow it up with another step forward? It’s kind of a low bar, to be honest, but even with just three rotation guys returning, I think they can do it. It might not look like a fun year again, but as long as you can make a case it’s progress, that’s good enough for DePaul these days.
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