1. The winding road to landing a point guard could come down to Michael O’Connell of Stanford, who is visiting today and Saturday, and then might officially visit Notre Dame next weekend. He has already seen Wichita State.
The 6-foot-2, 195-pounder plays hard, isn’t afraid of contact in the lane, has a good-looking jumper, though the percentages are not great with a career average of 30.1 percent. Another nice by-product is that O’Connell won’t have a hefty NIL price tag either, which is good because NC State has concentrated on raising money mostly for football and it’s long-term goal of raising $2,125,000 for 85 football players. Basketball took center stage last year at this time, resulting in Terquavion Smith’s return. This spring, it’s been about the football program in many ways. Will NC State reach the point to have enough money to go around for both football and men’s basketball (plus other sports) remains to be seen. One SEC school apparently has a budget of $12.5 million for football, $2.5 million for men’s basketball and a little under a million for women’s basketball.
O’Connell has been compared to former Notre Dame point guard Matt Farrell, but Farrell put up numbers his last two years of college after a nondescript first two years with the Fighting Irish.
Rivals.com had him a three-star prospect in the class of 2020, and he picked Stanford over offers from Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Lafayette, Marist, Maryland-Baltimore County, Niagara and UC-Santa Barbara.
Coach Jerod Haase gave him the ball from day one at Stanford, and he averaged 6.7 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.8 assists in 26.6 minutes per game in 2020-21. The problem is that O’Connell never made a jump in his three years with the Cardinal. He averaged 5.2 points and 3.1 assists in 25.7 minutes per game this past season, while splitting minutes with Isa Silva, who has transferred to Long Beach State.
One West Coast source said O’Connell lost his confidence with his offense and Silva simply couldn’t shoot (6 of 24 on 3-pointers).
The style of play for Stanford is slower than NC State and the Cardinal have a much bigger lineup. The offense was centered around forwards Spencer Jones, Harrison Ingram and Brandon Angel, all similar sized guys. Ingram has since transferred to North Carolina.
Stanford was more about grinding out games and going for singles and doubles to borrow a baseball analogy. Stanford reached 80 points in seven games, going 6-1. Cardinal averaged 70.3 points per game en route to a tough 14-19 record.
O’Connell comes from a hard-core sports family and he had the option of playing lacrosse in college. His brother Thomas O’Connell helped Maryland win the 2017 national title in lacrosse, and then he finished up at St. John’s where he played basketball for his fifth year of school, going scoreless in seven games.
O’Connell’s dad went to St. John’s as a student and his mother was a standout at SJU in softball. Two uncles and an aunt played college basketball.
O’Connell went to Mineola (N.Y.) Chaminade High on Long Island, and then he spent a year at traditional power Blair Academy in Blairstown, N.J., where he averaged 18 points, five rebounds and five assists per game.
2. What kind of player is O’Connell when it comes to the eye-ball test?
O’Connell’s name was floated to me about a week ago. For instance, NC State also looked into North Florida senior guard Jarius Hicklen. As is normally the case, the decision came down to what coach Kevin Keatts wanted. When it comes to the portal, the assistants can make their case for or against a transfer, but it ultimately comes down to Keatts. At a much lower level, Hicklen averaged 12.5 points and 3.2 assists per game, and he’s a career 38.1 percent three-point shooter on the Division I level.
With O’Connell, assistant coach Joel Justus was on the opposing bench for one of his better games. O’Connell went for 16 points, three assists and three steals in a 79-76 home win over Arizona State and D.J. Horne on Jan. 22, 2022.
I decided to watch that game to also get another viewing of Horne. The other game I picked was a 85-75 loss at USC on Feb. 18, 2023. O’Connell didn’t go bonkers in that game, but he had seven assists, and I knew he’d be playing an athletic, tall Trojans’ group, who were led by former Duke guard Boogie Ellis.
O’Connell had nine points, seven assists, one rebound and went 2 of 3 on three-pointers. One of his values is that you don’t have to put training wheels on O’Connell. He’s played against the likes of Arizona, UCLA, USC, Baylor, Wisconsin, San Diego State and Texas. The road crowd won’t affect him much.
He’s also sharp and is trying to finish off his 22-credit quarter to get his degree in economics, so he can graduate following Father’s Day. Sometimes he turns it over from trying to do too much, but he had 103 assists vs. 52 turnovers.
He’s definitely different than Jarkel Joiner and Markell Johnson were at point guard for NC State. In a perfect world, he’d average 8-9 points a game, dish out five assists and hit enough three-pointers to keep a defense honest. What the bare minimum goal always has been to land someone who will play heavier minutes than rising sophomore guard L.J. Thomas, and is an improvement over some of the other point guard candidates, like Raleigh’s Jalen Benjamin, who is transferring from Mount St. Mary’s to Santa Clara.
Horne basically played a little bit on the ball and off, but mostly off against Stanford in 2022 game.
Arizona State went 23-13 that season and what was a little bit crazy about that squad is that Horne and former Boston College transfer Jay Heath were really the only three-point threats on the roster. Toledo transfer Marreon Jackson was the point guard and he plays fast and is athletic, but he only shot 27.7 percent on three-pointers.
Horne went for 18 points and four rebounds and had five turnovers, three of them just being careless. He didn’t have any assists, but he makes the basic passes, but his job was to spot up and fire. He went 6 of 13 overall and 4 of 9 on three-pointers. Horne was also a pest on defense, guarding O’Connell at certain stretches. He’s quick enough to guard smaller guards like himself. If he were to play in the backcourt with O’Connell, Horne could end up guarding the point guard and O’Connell a wing.
Horne missed a good chunk of the game due to foul trouble, so he only played 22 minutes in the loss. That was the middle of a tough stretch for ASU, where they went 2-9 from Dec. 19-Feb. 10.
There might have been flashier point guard or combo guards that NC State passed over weeks ago, hoping to get something better, but seeing O’Connell and Horne, they’ll play off of D.J. Burns very well next year. NC State will have to re-invent the offense and that will be the challenge. Ball movement and spacing will be emphasized in ways it wasn’t due to Terquavion Smith. Offensively, there is no reason four players can’t be averaging in double figures next year, and two more in the 8-9-point range. It will be more share the wealth style, which happened to a certain extent in 2014-15 after T.J. Warren entered the NBA Draft.
Notre Dame will have its appeal to O’Connell, and not many can say they have a degree from Stanford and then worked on post-graduate honors at ND. On the court though, the Fighting Irish could have one of the worst teams in ACC history and O’Connell and the Wolfpack should be top 35 kind of team and likely make the NCAA Tournament, which he’s never played in. The Cardinal went 44-48 during his three years.
