The same day after we published an article fretting about Cal’s potentially thin guard rotation, Mark Fox successfully secured the services of Ryan Betley, a grad transfer from Penn.
What will Betley bring to Cal? Well, I can start by quoting myself:
If he came, he’d be following in the increasingly long line of Ivy League grad transfers to Cal, and there’s a solid chance that his game would be pretty similar to Grant Mullins and Dwight Tarwater, in that Betley would be a 3-and-D wing. That’s not far from what Betley did at Penn, with 60% of his shots coming from three and a correspondingly low rate of drawing fouls. And, as noted above, he’s a solid rebounder for his size (methinks that Mark Fox likes guys who can pull down a board).
Now that he’s Berkeley-bound, it’s worth going into a bit more detail. Here’s his shooting splits from last season at Penn in the Ivy League:
What you see are the kinds of splits you would expect from an Ivy League guard - he didn’t take a ton of shots at the rim, but when he did he made them count, and the majority of his shots were assisted threes. I somewhat lazily compared him to Grant Mullins above, in that they are both grad transfer shooting guards from an Ivy League school, and there’s something to the comparison. Mullins was a touch better as a shooter and a passer and played a little point guard, but Betley is more efficient at the rim and a better rebounder.
As is always the case for mid-major grad transfers, there are questions about how his game will translate to a power conference. But if he can bring to Cal something approximating what he brought to Penn - good shooting, low turnover play on offense, and solid defensive rebounding - then he’ll be a valuable player.
Cal still has two open scholarships to (presumably) fill and I’m sure they’re going hard for a point guard, but filling one open slot with a solid player at a position of need will cause Cal fans everywhere to let out a huge sigh of relief.
Welcome to Cal Ryan!
Good...we still need a point & a big...
Good.