Ohio State basketball: How have transfers done after leaving?

With the 2022-23 college basketball season ending tonight, transfer portal season is really about to heat up. The Ohio State basketball team has already seen Eugene Brown decide to enter the portal. Chris Holtmann will likely look to the portal to at least consider bringing some guys in.

Holtmann has used the portal a lot to replenish his roster. This year had three new grad transfers in with Ice Likekele, Sean McNeil, and Tanner Holden all coming in. Holden might come back next year, but the other two just stopped in for a year to try and win.

Holtmann has lost a decent amount of transfers since taking over the program as well. Not all of it is his fault. That’s the culture that college basketball has created now with the transfer portal. Kids come and go at a much higher rate than they used to with the creation of that tool.

How have some of these transfers done since leaving the Ohio State basketball program though? We know that one such transfer, Jaedon LeDee, is playing for a national championship tonight with San Diego State. That’s obviously a scenario in which a player found greener pastures.

Not everyone has had the same sort of success though. For the purpose of this article, we will stick to recent transfers in the Holtmann era. Everyone you are about to see are guys that have left the program under Holtmann to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

The first guy we’ll talk about is the highest-rated recruit that Holtmann was able to get.

1. D.J. Carton

D.J. Carton was a prized recruit in the 2019 recruiting class. He was a four-star point guard that was expected to help the Buckeyes contend for a Big Ten title. When he did play for the Buckeyes, he showed flashes of his potential and how good he could be.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last long. He played just 20 games for Ohio State before leaving the program to deal with “mental health issues” and then proceeded to claim the Buckeyes “ain’t got room for me“. He finished his Buckeye career averaging 10.4 points, 3 assists, and 2.3 rebounds a game while shooting 47.7% from the field.

Carton transferred back closer to home to Marquette where he actually improved his stats when he got the opportunity to start. He ended up averaging 13 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 3.4 assists there. After that, he declared for the NBA Draft.

That’s where his story gets less happy, I’m afraid. Carton went undrafted and has been in the G-League for the past two seasons, although he played well this season. Playing for the Iowa Wolves, he averaged 16.2 points per game on 53% shooting and 37% from three. He also had 5.7 assists a game.

Carton is good enough to be a fringe NBA player. It will be interesting to see if he’s able to ultimately reach that goal. The next player on this list was a teammate with him at Ohio State.