Cassidy Awards: Standouts from the college hoops season
The 2022-23 college basketball season came to an end when the buzzer sounded on Monday night’s national title game, so there’s no better time to take a quick look back on the season in the form of awards.
Today, Rivals recruiting director Rob Cassidy dishes out some hypothetical hardware as he looks back on the year that was.
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FRESHMAN OF THE YEAR: Brandon Miller (Alabama)
A five-star prospect coming out of high school last year, Brandon Miller somehow outplayed his lofty rankings by miles as a freshman at Alabama this season. The best player on one of the best teams in the country, Miller averaged an SEC-best 18.8 points per game and broke the 30-point barrier on three occasions.
He’s likely to be the first college player selected in this year’s NBA Draft and could be drafted as high as No. 3 overall. Miller was chosen as National Association of Basketball Coaches Freshman of the Year for good reason, as making a case for anyone is difficult, to say the least.
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PLAYER OF THE YEAR – Zach Edey (Purdue)
Two decades from now, this year’s Purdue team will be best remembered for its first-round loss to 16-seeded Fairleigh Dickinson. But headline 1B will forever be the dominance of Edey, who impacted the season in a fashion that no other player could come close to matching.
The First-Team All American averaged 22.3 points, nearly 13 rebounds and two blocks per contest in what was one of the most impressive seasons of the modern era. The 7-foot-4 monster was as efficient as he was dominant, shooting 62% from the floor as he led the Boilermakers to a Big Ten regular-season title.
In the age of debate, over-analysis and endless discourse, Edey being named player of the year stands as a rare obvious choice on which almost everyone can agree.
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IMPACT TRANSFER OF THE YEAR: Keyontae Johnson (Kansas State)
All due respect to Memphis’ Kendric Davis, who certainly has a case, but K-State’s Elite Eight run would have been over before it started without Johnson, who arrived in Manhattan prior to the season and acted as the anchor for a built-from-scratch roster. One of 10 transfers on a Wildcat roster that won 26 games and went deep into the NCAA Tournament, Johnson led a team that was picked to finish dead last in the Big 12 by the league’s coaches to the forefront of the national spotlight by averaging 17 points and six rebounds per game.
Johnson’s story, of course, underscores his legacy, as the Big 12 Newcomer of the year collapsed on the court while playing for Florida in December of 2020 before transferring to K-State and making the most of his second life as a star on one of the season’s most surprising teams. Were there more productive transfers this year? A few, but it’s hard to imagine one more important to his team’s success.
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THE CASSIDY AWARD (MOST ENTERTAINING CHARACTER): Hunter Dickenson (Michigan)
The 18 points and nine rebounds per contest Dickenson averaged this season are impressive and all, but his numbers aren’t why we’re here. Instead, his grasp on this fake-but-prestigious award stems solely from his disposition.
The 7-footer started his 2022-23 hijinks last April, when he took to Twitter to tag now-fired Texas Tech coach Mark Adams in a post that straightforwardly called him “a coward” over what Dickenson deemed as transfer portable manipulation.
He called Wisconsin players "scumbags" on video back in February in fitting with a career spent trolling players and fans at rival schools, and he even took one particularly random shot at Arizona State that ended up blowing up in his face.
Dickenson’s bad-guy wrestler disposition speaks to the deepest parts of my soul. The fact that he finished his Michigan career with a sudden heel turn on his own fan base in the form of an unapologetic transfer announcement puts the perfect bow on his decorated and boisterous three-year run in Ann Arbor.
I don’t have a rooting interest in college basketball. I don’t care who wins and who loses. The one thing I ask of the sport is that it keeps me entertained, and nobody did that as well as Dickenson this past year.
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COACH OF THE YEAR – Dusty May (FAU)
It’s one thing to lead a mid-major to the Final Four. It’s quite another to take a school with little to no basketball history, lead it to 35 victories and come within two wins of a national title. Alas, that’s exactly what the 46-year-old May did.
The Owls' record for wins in a season was 19 until this year’s squad pulled off its dominant run, which included not only a Final Four berth but also Conference USA regular-season and tournament championships. The season May orchestrated in Boca Raton is historic in a way that few others in recent history have been, and there’s reason to believe he’ll have things cooking for the long haul, as runs like this one seem to have lasting effects on recruiting..
K-State’s Jerome Tang, Marquette's Shaka Smart and others would also be fine choices for this slot, but these are my awards and nobody else gets a vote.
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HIRE OF THE YEAR: Rick Pitino
Few people believed Rick Pitino when he repeatedly said he intended to retire at Iona, and I’m not altogether sure he expected anyone to when he said it. Whatever the case, everyone was able to stop pretending on March 20, when the legendary coach left the Gales for St. John’s.
As the ancient proverb goes, “any time you get the chance to hire a slightly disgraced version of one the greatest basketball coaches in history you have to make that call," and Red Storm athletic director Mike Cragg did just that.
On top of the obvious appeal of the hire comes what feels like a tailor-made fit, as there are few coaches better suited to promote St. John’s link to New York City and the mystique of playing on Madison Square Garden than the Italian-suit wearing, Manhattan-born Pitino.
Add in the fact that the hire seems to have reengaged billionaire booster Mike Repole in the era of NIL, and you have a recipe for high-level success at a proud program that has seen little of it in recent years.