Georgia Tech Should Shoot It's Shot With Michigan Transfer Hunter Dickinson

Georgia Tech could use a player like Dickinson to quickly rebuild

Jackson Caudell | Mar 31, 2023

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Huge college basketball news dropped this afternoon when Michigan big man Hunter Dickinson announced that he was leaving Ann Arbor and hitting the transfer portal.

Michigan’s Hunter Dickinson has hit the transfer portal, he told @stadium.

HUGE NEWS!!!
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) March 31, 2023

Dickinson has been one of the best players in the Big Ten for the past two seasons and was named All-Big Ten Second Team this season after averaging 18.5 PPG, 9.0 RPG, and 1.5 APG. Dickinson also averaged 1.8 blocks per game this season. During the 2021-2022 season, Dickinson averaged 18.6 PPG, 8.6 RPG, 2.3 APG, and 1.5 blocks per game.

Here are just some of the career highlights for Dickinson (Courtesy of mgoblue.com)

All-America, consensus (2021)

• Associated Press, NABC, Sporting News, USA Today and USBWA

• All-Big Ten, first team (2021, '23; M)

• All-Big Ten, second team (2021, '22, '23; C & 2022; M)

• Big Ten Freshman of the Year (2021; C & M)

• Big Ten All-Freshman Team (2021)

• 3x, Big Ten Player of the Week (co- Jan. 24, 2022; Nov. 14, 2022; Jan. 2, 2023)

• 7x, Big Ten Freshman of the Week (Dec. 7, 14 & 28, Jan. 4 & 11, Feb. 15, 22

• Tied U-M single-season record (Trey Burke, 2011-12)

• Academic All-Big Ten (2022)

• CoSIDA Academic All-District, first team (2022)

• 2x, NABC All-District 7, second team (2021, '22)

• 2x, USBWA All-District V Team (2021, '22)

• NCAA Tournament All-East Region Team (2021)

• Associated Press Big Ten Newcomer of the Year (2021)

• Finalist: USBWA's Wayman Tisdale National Freshman Player of the Year (2021)

• Finalist: Kyle Macy Award for National Freshman of the Year (2021)

His entry into the transfer portal is surprising because it is not often you see established players of this caliber enter the portal. Every team in the country is going to be vying for Dickinson to be a part of their program next season and one of them should be Georgia Tech and new head coach Damon Stoudamire.

Yes, it is a long shot, but this would accelerate the rebuild that Stoudamire is tasked with executing in Atlanta. Georgia Tech is in need of a big man and Dickinson is the best big man as well as the best player in the portal. Whichever school he goes to is going to instantly be a potential tournament team and it can vault the right teams into national championship conversations.

Georgia Tech should do what it takes to land Michigan transfer Hunter Dickinson :: Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK

Stoudamire has been active in the portal in terms of who he has an interest in. Pitt transfer John Hugley, Jordan Minor, and Kowacie Reeves are some of the names being pursued by Georgia Tech as of today. Hugley and Minor are both centers and that shows that Stoudamire is exploring his options when it comes to that position and while those guys are good players, Dickinson is the more talented player due to his playmaking ability on offense.

Going back to his introductory press conference, here is what Stoudamire said about how he would be approaching the transfer portal and recruiting:

"When I say time, I don't mean time to win, I want to win right now but you gotta cipher through these players. There are a lot of guys in the transfer portal but you gotta understand there are a lot of guys in the transfer portal for a reason so you gotta do your homework. Again, I think I am a bit different. Change for me is not unknown, it is the known. With a professional background, you can overhaul every year, but I am not worried about the roster or overhauling every year, I am worried about the people I bring in every year because if you bring the wrong guys and then things can go the wrong way so my time is invested in changing the roster only if it is the right student-athlete that is trying to do what we are trying to do and that's how I have always been and that is how I have always approached the transfer portal and its been good to me in the past and I expect it to be good to me now."

Dickinson qualifies as the right kind of student-athlete that he should want to bring in. Stoudamire also mentioned the vision and plan that he and athletic director J Batt have for the future of the program:

"You know, it is a commitment and it is a shared vision in order to get a program going in a right direction. In our meetings, I felt like a I got that. One of the things when I had my prior job at Pacific and you are building from the ground up and you don't really have a budget and you are just trying to do the best you can. When you have an opportunity like this for me, totally different so the shared vision, the collective vision of what we see moving forward, I heard all of that in our conversations and that made me more than comfortable moving forward."

It would be a resounding statement of what kind of program Georgia Tech is looking to be if they can be a serious contender to land Dickinson and they should do whatever it takes to make it happen, even though I still think it is unlikely he would choose the Yellow Jackets over the number of programs that are going to be pursuing him.

Stay tuned for more transfer portal news for Georgia Tech as spring goes on.

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