Penn State
Current State Of Penn State Basketball As Program Seeks First Transfer Portal Committment
Penn State Great Valley MBA, Penn State Berks Undergrad, Eagle Scout and Vigil Honor, IT Service Manager. I joined Sports Talk Philly in 2017 and root for all the Philly teams (as well as their minor league counter parts).
All posts by Paul BowmanPublished14 Apr 2025
Penn State basketball has floundered in the portal, striking out on every single prospect they reached out to for nearly a month.
On March 24th, the transfer portal opened and the team lost Miles Goodman (Oregon), Jahvin Carter (Memphis), and Hudson Ward into the portal. Not to mention Joe Sedora (West Chester).
They were already losing Ace Baldwin, Nick Kern, Zack Hicks, Puff Johnson, and D’Marco Dunn to eligibility.
Then Yanic Konan Niederhauser announced he might be heading to the draft.
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The biggest news in the past three months for the program was that they were bringing back a program great in Taylor Battle (and also losing Jimmy Martelli).
That should get the hype train going.
Meanwhile, the program currently has just four players slated to return.
Freddie Dilione V is the “top” guy at this point. He is far and away the most experienced of that group with 761 minutes last season (24.5 minutes per game) as the only player with more than a few spot starts. He averaged 9.4 points and 2.8 rebounds per game. Behind him is Kachi Nzeh, last year’s backup big. The Upper Darby native averaged 11.25 minutes across 29 games and averaged 2.6 points and 2.2 rebounds per game but often found himself in foul trouble rather quickly.
Joining that duo is Penn State’s only remaining member of their 2024 recruiting class, Dominick Stewart, who appeared in 24 games and averaged 2.8 points and 1.1 rebounds in 8.13 minutes per game (he was active on defense with 12 steals) and Eli Rice, who transferred in from Nebraska last year and averaged 4.2 points and 1.6 rebounds in 2023-24 but appeared in just a single game for the Nittany Lions last year where he missed all the shots he took and managed two defensive rebounds.
The reinforcements for now are the program’s top rated recruit ever, Kayden Mingo, the program’s 11th best recruit ever, Mason Blackwood, and three-star prospect Justin Houser. As the roster stands right now, they’ll all see significant minutes as the program will have just seven players on scholarship to rotate through.
One of the biggest players left on the Penn State radar in the transfer portal is Braden Pierce, an unknown. He played in parts of five games for Maryland and is 7-foot tall, which is about as much as any program knows about him at this point.
Most recently, the team has lost out on the commitments of Delaware’s Izaiah Pasha (Virginia Tech) and Indiana State’s Jaden Daughtry (Richmond).
Hudson Ward is the team’s only player left in the portal still uncommitted.
Konan Niederhauser’s return may be the next addition for Mike Rhoades if he doesn’t get any commitments soon. The portal closes on April 22, so there is just a week left.
