After a couple weeks of silence to open portal season, the Razorbacks struck quickly this week, landing Nick Pringle and Malique Ewin to the 2025-26 roster.
The pair will replace the departing Jonas Aidoo and Zvonimir Ivisic as the centers for next year’s team. The big question is whether this is an upgrade.
Meet Nick Pringle
Pringle is a familiar name, as he spent two seasons at Alabama and one season at South Carolina. He originally transferred from VCU. He’s a 6’10, 220-pound center from South Carolina. He was a role player on Alabama’s 2024 Final Four team, averaging 6.8 points and 5.1 rebounds per game for the Tide and making 16 starts. Seeking a bigger role, he transferred to the flagship program in his home state last year, and averaged 9.5 points and 6.3 rebounds, starting all 32 games for the Gamecocks.
There’s a lot to like here. He’s an SEC veteran who has improved steadily over the course of his career. In that sense, he’s similar to Aidoo, who he will be replacing. Arkansas is hoping to get a physical interior defender and rebounder who is low-usage but efficient on offense.
Here’s a quick comparison of high-level advanced stats:
Some quick explanations, for the uninitiated:
- On-Off is the simplest stat here. It’s simply how much better worse the team is when that player is on the floor versus when he’s on the bench. So if Arkansas has a net efficiency of +6 with Aidoo on the floor and +4 with Aidoo on the bench, then Aidoo gets +2. This stat is highly context-dependent since every team has to add up to zero, so good players on great teams will have bad On-Off numbers even though they are good players. Both players are negative, which reflects worse on Pringle, since he was on a bad team.
- Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) is a much more complicated version of the same thing. It’s the output of a ridge regression run over every single possession of the entire season, taking all 10 players on the floor into consideration, aiming to determine the plus-minus contribution of each individual player.
- Box Plus-Minus (BPM) is a model that attempts to approximate RAPM using only box score inputs. It tends to have some predictive value and it’s easier to calculate, but it has major weaknesses when trying to evaluate the non-statistical contributions of players. That’s a challenge here, as we want to know how good these are at things like interior defense.
- Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is the “bring it all together” stat. While the other three stats are on a per-100-possessions basis, WAR looks at how much each player actually contributed to winning. It uses RAPM and team on-floor efficiency as inputs to guess how many wins over a full season each player would create if they were added to a perfectly average team.
The numbers here are mixed. Aidoo had slightly better box score stats. We’ll look at the numbers in detail, but a lower turnover rate and a lot more blocked shots likely drove that. Pringle had slightly better On-Off numbers, but he was on a worse team, so a negative number doesn’t reflect well on him.
However, RAPM says Pringle was a net-positive contributor for the Gamecocks, and he ends up with the better WAR.
Offense
Neither of these guys were offensive juggernauts this year, and both had negative O-On/Off numbers. Pringle’s are especially bad, and that probably has to do with his fit in South Carolina’s offensive scheme. Both are relatively low-usage (20% is average), but Pringle’s 19% is a bit higher than Aidoo’s 16%. Both shot north of 60% true shooting, which is very good. For both, most shots happen right at the rim, hence the efficiency.
Pringle stands out with his high free throw rate. He attempted 0.84 free throws per 2-point field goal, which suggests a physicality around the rim that Aidoo (0.59) didn’t show. Arkansas could have used a physical scorer around the rim after Adou Thiero was injured, and Pringle might offer that.
Defense
Arkansas wanted Aidoo to offer elite defense, but the Hogs were 4.7 points per 100 possessions worse on defense this year with Aidoo on the floor versus on the bench. Part of that is Aidoo’s limited minutes against weak non-conference competition, but even if you just look at team efficiencies, Aidoo just wasn’t an elite interior defender.
Pringle was a net-positive defender for South Carolina (minus-1.7, where negative is better) and his numbers are close to Aidoo’s. We see almost identical defensive rebound rates. It’s notable that Pringle is not a shot-blocker at all (just 1.1 blocks per 100 possessions). Also notable is that stock-to-foul ratio. Stocks are steals or blocks. Pringle gets just 0.34 of those per personal foul, which suggests that he’s a physical defender who is often overly physical. Aidoo rarely struggled with foul trouble, but Pringle will often find himself in foul trouble.
Is this an upgrade?
Honestly, there were better options in the portal. Morez Johnson, who ended up at Michigan, was a head-and-shoulders better pickup for the role Arkansas is wanting here. However, the numbers do suggest that 2025 Nick Pringle was slightly better than 2025 Jonas Aidoo. That’s not saying a ton, since (despite his strong finish) Aidoo was a fairly significant disappointment this year.
The upside to Pringle is that he’s improved every season and has three years of SEC experience. He’s probably a high-floor, low-ceiling pickup: unlikely to be a total bust, but also unlikely to be a breakout star. If he can improve just slightly over his 2025 numbers, then he’s offering Arkansas the upgrade they need.
Meet Malique Ewin
Ewin is an explosive, 6’11 stretch-5 who will offer Arkansas a major offensive upgrade. He started his career at Ole Miss, barely playing during the 2022-23 season. He then transferred to South Florida where he didn’t play at all before ending up at Florida State last year. He averaged 14.2 points and 7.6 rebounds per game, shooting 60% from the floor.
Arkansas needs him to replace Big Z, whose unique skillset didn’t actually help Arkansas all that much on offense outside of a fun four-game stretch in the middle of SEC play.
Let’s compare the two.
Big Z suffers from the Connor Vanover problem where his advanced stats look incredible because 1) box score stats favor big men, since they can accumulate blocks and rebounds, and 2) the matchup threat he poses to opponents mean that he plays long stretches against weaker competition, but often won’t see the floor at all in games where the coaches know he’d struggle. Still, Big Z’s overall numbers were solid. Ewin’s numbers are decent overall. We’ll look at the negative WAR and RAPM in a second, but +4.3 BPM is good, and his +6.6 On-Off is incredible, showing that he was clearly the best player on a bad Florida State team.
Offense
Role-wise, the big ask of Ewin is to be much better than Z was on offense, and as you can see, Ewin is a clear upgrade. Despite high usage (24%) was an extremely efficient scorer (62% true shooting, only 14% turnover rate). He’s a pretty good passer for a 5 (10% assist rate) and he’s a very good offensive rebounder (6.6 per 100 possessions).
As Ewin’s high assist rate suggests, he can run the floor. His ability to play off the dribble and either attack the rim or make a good pass is really impressive for a 6’11 guy. Here just aren’t many centers who can do this:
A center who can pass is a game-changer, as it opens up so much offensively. Because of that, I think this is a really good pickup.
Defense
Unfortunately, they do make you play defense, and that isn’t Ewin’s strong suit. He’s a solid defensive rebounder, but he’s not a shot blocker and his D-On/Off suggest that he’s a very bad defender on a bad defensive team.
We’ve discussed this before back in 2023 when Eric Musselman was retooling his roster, but it’s easier to coach up defense than it is to coach up offense. If you assemble a roster of bad shooters, even a great coach isn’t going to make that team shoot well. But a roster of players who were bad defenders at previous may could be coached up into at least decent defenders. Muss and staff did that with several guys: Jalen Tate, Stanley Umude, and Au’Diese Toney were all much better on defense at Arkansas than in years prior with other schools.
Ewin’s defensive numbers are going to have to be better than these, but there’s reason to hope that’s possible.
Is this a good pickup?
I like this pickup a lot. Ewin is an offensive weapon who will hard for defenses to contain while they’re also trying to stay in front of Darius Acuff, Maleek Thomas, Karter Knox, and possibly DJ Wagner at the guard position. If he can become anything other than an awful defender, he’s going to offer a ton to this team.
What’s left for the Hogs?
Arkansas still needs a 4 to replace Adou Thiero. If Trevon Brazile comes back, that might be it, otherwise they’d need a couple of forwards.
I definitely think Arkansas needs a 3-point shooter to offer more depth at guard. He doesn’t have to a superstar, but a Lamar Wilkerson or a Jaron Pierre would have been nice. Alas, both went to schools that actually want them to be the star. Arkansas needs a guy with that sort of skillset to be willing to be a role player, coming off the bench. That’s going to be hard to find in this era of college basketball, but as of right now, I do have some concerns about Arkansas’ ability to make jump shots next year.
Either way, Arkansas isn’t done. Expect more news to come soon as the 2025-26 roster comes together.
Very good https://is.gd/tpjNyL
Good https://is.gd/tpjNyL