Gophers men’s basketball head coach Ben Johnson expects significant improvement from his team this season as they return to practice.
With only five players returning from last season, Johnson prioritized the transfer portal over high school recruitment. He felt that, in order to compete, he could not replace juniors and seniors with freshmen and sophomores.
In the portal, Johnson recruited eight upperclassmen, seven of them seniors.
“If you can’t pluck another NBA-type talent, the next best thing that wins in college basketball now is experience,” Johnson said. “My thought was, ‘If we are going to be old, let’s be old with urgency.’”
Johnson is hoping his seniors will understand they have less than a year left of collegiate basketball, and he wants them to give his program everything they have left.
With so many seniors on the roster comes experienced depth. Johnson said he feels comfortable playing nearly the whole team in the closing moments of the game.
“There’s groups of guys that you could put together all the way to 11 or 12,” Johnson said. “You won’t see them out there and think, ‘Oh my God.’”
Johnson expects the Gophers to improve upon last season’s 19-15 overall record and he said it starts with senior forward Dawson Garcia.
Johnson said Garcia is the guy they can run the offense through.
Garcia averaged 17.6 points per game (PPG) last season and is the highest PPG returning Big Ten player.
This season, Garcia is looking to be the first Gopher to reach All-American status since Bobby Jackson in 1997.
“I have All-American aspirations, Big Ten Player of the Year aspirations, I’m not coming back to just play around,” Garcia said in an interview on June 17.
Garcia said he wants to be a better playmaker and improve his ability to attack the rim this season.
The Gophers retained their third-leading scorer, senior guard Mike Mitchell Jr. He averaged 10.2 points per game in his first year with the Maroon and Gold.
Mitchell Jr., alongside senior guard Lu’Cye Patterson, is expected to take on more of a ball-handling role after senior Elijah Hawkins transferred to Texas Tech.
“I think we will switch on and off, play off of each other,” Mitchell Jr. said on June 17.
With all the experience the Gophers have, Johnson is hoping his team can win double-digit conference games, an improvement from the team’s nine conference wins last season.
The Gophers have only had two seasons with double-digit conference wins since the 1997-98 season.
“The standard is to build off nine league wins,” Johnson said. “We were one win away from doing that last year. Everything we’re doing, it isn’t building anymore. We’re trying to add on to what we have done.”
Six Big Ten teams made the NCAA Tournament last year and the conference continues to get more competitive with the addition of the University of Oregon, who also made the tournament last year.
Alongside Oregon, the University of Washington, UCLA and the University of Southern California also became regular additions to the Gophers conference schedule.
The Gophers open the season with exhibition games against Bemidji State University and Hamline University before starting the regular season at home against Oral Roberts on Nov. 6.
Fans can watch the Gophers play in 10 of their first 11 matchups at Williams Arena. Conference play begins on Dec. 4 against Michigan State in Minneapolis.