The 2024-25 Virginia Tech Men's Basketball roster is mostly together at this point after transfer portal departure chaos pushed the Hokies into a situation where they had to reload and revamp the roster through the portal. With that said, here's my dive into my projected starting five and a look at the entirety of the roster.
PG: Hysier Miller
Let's start at the point where Tech suffered a major loss when All-ACC PG Sean Pedulla chose to enter the transfer portal, eventually landing at Ole Miss. Insert Temple transfer Hysier Miller, a multi-year starter who provides a valuable veteran presence for what is a very young backcourt otherwise.
Miller had the best season of his career this past season averaging 15.9 points, 4.0 assists, 3.6 rebounds, and 1.8 steals in 36.4 minutes per game.
Defensively, Miller is definitely an upgrade over Pedulla as someone who has shown a knack for not only forcing turnover. His strong defensive play also goes beyond the steals as he earned 1.4 defensive win shares this past season and had a 0.6 defensive box plus/minus after having a 1.3 defensive box plus/minus as a sophomore.
Offensively, Miller is a quality facilitator who had 4.0 assists compared to only 2.1 turnovers plus a turnover rate of 10.7% that is quite impressive for someone who was as ball-dominant as Miller was. That should largely translate up but it’s fair to wonder how much that will given the step up in competition from the AAC to the ACC.
The concern is the scoring ability of Miller who shot 35.7% from the field over his three years at Temple including 30.7% from three-point range. That included shooting 35.3% from the field including 29.4% from three-point range this past season.
This is where the disparity between Miller and Sean Pedulla starts to show as Pedulla, against significantly tougher competition, shot 42.1% from the field including 35.5% from three-point range over the course of his three seasons. Yes, Pedulla was in some better situations, but there’s also a clear scoring gap that the Hokies will miss given what Tech has and doesn’t have on this roster.
Now what will help Miller is the fact that he has more options to carry some of the scoring load than he did at Temple. However, Miller is the only player on this roster to average 12+ points per game in a collegiate season and may have to be a lead-scorer type rather than facilitator-heavy point guard. This is where not having Jordan Ivy-Curry hurts for the Hokies given the role that Miller could have slid into as a facilitator-first.
I think Miller is a solid player and likely a defensive upgrade at the point, but it’s impossible to not see the change from Pedulla to Miller as a downgrade overall given the offensive side of things. There’s a reason why Tech didn’t give up on trying to retain Pedulla even after he entered the transfer portal.
