Even with frontcourt needs, Chris Mack believes he has "plenty of capable players"

While Louisville men's basketball head coach Chris Mack got off to a relatively slow start in the 2020 grad transfer market, he made up for it by landing a pair of targets that immediately satisfied the Cardinals' biggest offseason need. After losing a combined 58 backcourt starts to graduation & the transfer portal, the commitments of both Radford's Carlik Jones & San Francisco's Charles Minlend, Jr. turned his thin backcourt into one of the more competitive units in the ACC seemingly overnight.

Now eyes are shifting to the frontcourt. Before Jay Scrubb confirmed that he was staying in the draft process and opened up a need for a guard to help out David Johnson & Josh Nickelberry, Mack was planning on using the final available 2020-21 scholarship on a frontcourt player and specifically a center.

With Jones & Minlend now officially on the roster, the grad transfer recruiting efforts are now fixating back on finding a suitable backup for Malik Williams and/or Aidan Igiehon. However, Mack doesn't want to add a player simply because they would fill a roster spot. He acknowledges a need at the position, but also believes that he has "plenty of capable players" that he's not afraid to play differently if he has to.

"[Frontcourt] would be the first area of need, but we're not going to fill the scholarship just to get a warm body in there," Mack said in a teleconference with reporters on Thursday. "If we feel like there's no one who can help our team, we feel like we have a good enough roster right now to be one of the better teams in the league and compete for a title like we did this past year.

With Louisville losing out on both LMU's Mattias Markusson and Purdue's Matt Haarms, there's not a clear target next in line for the Cardinals to pursue. But that doesn't meant there won't be one down the line. Dozens of players across the nation are entering the transfer portal every day, and a future Cardinal could very well still be with their old team.

"The transfer portal changes every day; it's always fluid, and it's our job as coaches to continue to monitor that and figure out who would best fit our team if and when that person shows up in the portal," Mack said. "So we'll determine the best course of action as days develop and will continue to try to get the best player for our roster."

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