2026-27 Big East Men’s Basketball Summer Vibe Check: DePaul Blue Demons
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Team: DePaul Blue Demons
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2025-26 Record: 16-16, 8-12 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: Sixth, one game behind Creighton and one game ahead of a Marquette/Butler/Providence tie for seventh.
Final 2025-26 Computer Rankings
NET: #101
KenPom.com: #99
BartTorvik.com: #97
Postseason: The Blue Demons called it a day after taking a 64-56 loss to Georgetown in the 6/11 game in the first round of the Big East tournament.
Notable Departures: Here’s some great news for DePaul! Four of the five rotation guys that they’ve lost were at the end of their four years of eligibility anyway. Sure, two of them — CJ Gunn and NJ Benson — were DePaul’s top two scorers last season, and Brandon Maclin came in fourth on the stat sheet. All three guys averaged over 10 points a game, led by 13.1 from Gunn. Losing them all is not great even if you knew it was coming, and that’s before I point out that Benson, Maclin, and Gunn were, in that order, DePaul’s top rebounders, too. Maclin was second on the team in assists per game as well, so yes, knowing you’re going to lose those guys because it’s their time is better than seeing them transfer out…. but having to replace that much production is a problem.
Kaleb Banks is the fourth guy out of eligibility that’s leaving, and he was a perfectly dependable rotation guy, stats-wise. 5.6 points per game, 2.5 rebounds, 36% three-point shooting in 16.2 minutes on average…. although his minutes were drifting more towards the single digits in the back half of the season.
The last guy that DePaul is losing had a bigger role than Banks. RJ Smith is one of four guys — Benson and Gunn are two more — to appear in all 32 games last season, and he started 23 times as well, picking up the starting job in December and never letting it go. He ended up averaging 6.6 points, 2.4 rebounds, and 2.4 assists, which is really solid stuff. He’s off to UC Santa Barbara for his final year of eligibility.
Notable Returners: The definition of notable starts getting real shaky once get past this first guy. Remember when I said they’re losing three of their top four scorers? Layden Blocker is the guy who’s sticking around after ending up third on the team at 11.1 per game. Blocker was also the assists leader last season at 3.5 per game, and depending on how his role on the squad evolves going into next year, he’s going to have to find a way to fix his 32% three-point shooting on 3.4 attempts per game.
After that? There’s guys, and they had rotation roles, but I keep thinking “okay but” when looking at their stat lines/playing time. Kruz McClure has the best minutes average at 18.6 per game, but he only played in 28 games and only started four of those. Five points, bit over a rebound and an assist, under 30% long range shooting. Theo Pierre-Justin started 22 times in 30 appearances, with 13 of the starts coming in the closing stretch of Big East play. He averaged 4.0 points and 2.6 rebounds in under 16 minutes a game. I had to puzzle around in the game logs for Fabian Flores to figure out if he deserved to be mentioned in here with 10.6 minutes per game in 28 appearances. It’s kind of iffy, with seven single digit minutes outings in DePaul’s final nine games…. and the other two were at exactly 10 minutes. That means his per game minutes average was drifting down as the season went along, which isn’t a great sign for him having a notable role in 2026-27.
Key Additions: DePaul has three freshmen coming in as the coaching staff tries to build some kind of long term stability here, but for the most part, these guys are lottery tickets in hoping they turn into Big East caliber contributors. Depending on how everything else fits together, maaaaaybe Noah Smith (6’8”, 210 lb. freshman guard, Plainfield, Illinois) finds a role right away. I say that because #150 in the 247 Sports Composite is my cutoff on “freshman you should be aware of right away,” and Smith is right at #150 exactly.
That moves us along to the six transfers that the Blue Demons have arriving this coming season. The #1 thing that jumped out at me is that they added two big guys to go with the big guy freshman and the two returning big guys. There are FIVE guys on DePaul’s roster at 6’10” or taller! In terms of impact from either of the transferring big guys, I’m a little hesitant because neither one is immediately obvious as a difference maker right away. I think I would lean towards Magoon Gwath (7’0”, 210 lb redshirt junior forward, Euless, Texas) as the more likely guy, just because he’s had two seasons of playing for San Diego State in addition to a redshirt season before that. However, he’s averaging 8.7 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 2.1 blocks per game in 51 games with the Aztecs…. but he lost his starting job as last season went along, so that’s not a great sign for how things will go in the Big East for him. Wilson Jacques (7’0”, 273 lb. senior center, Metz, France) was given two years of eligibility when he started at Fresno State last season, and it’s a really big deal that he was averaging 8.8 rebounds per game while starting 32 times. Less experience there, but perhaps more of a higher ceiling than Gwath?
Koree Cotton (6’6”, 225 lb. senior guard, Miami, Florida) gets the nod for “most interesting path to DePaul” as he’s now on his fourth school in four years. Cotton has bounced from VMI to Jacksonville State to UT-Rio Grande Valley before getting to Chicago. He’s mostly been a starter at all three places, although his production took a dip when he was at Jax State. He went for 13.9 points, 5.3 rebounds, and 2.5 assists while shooting 40% on threes last season. Noah Meeusen (6’5”, 198 lb. junior guard, Zandvliet, Belgium) isn’t short on an interesting story as he got issued three years of eligibility by the NCAA and then went to Arizona State for a year before Bobby Hurley got canned and he transferred. He did work his way into the starting lineup late in the year, but his stats (5.9 points, 3.2 rebounds, 2.6 assists) were mostly the same whether he was off the bench or starting. Ade Popoola (6’5”, 204 lb. senior guard, Saint Louis, Missouri) has been on a ride as well, going from two years in junior college to one at Tulsa before opting to transfer to DePaul. He was pretty good as a starter for the Golden Hurricane with 10.8 points and 4.2 rebounds per game, and he knocked down 41% of his triples, too.
Finally, there’s Kahmare Holmes (6’3”, 210 lb. junior guard, Charlotte, North Carolina), who just went to Wofford for two years and then elected to transfer, like some sort of normal guy or something. He started all 26 appearances for the Terriers last season, and ended up leading the SoCon in steals at 2.0 per game. He also added 19.5 points, 5.7 rebounds, and 2.7 assists per game, so he’s clearly a lot more than a defensive specialist.
Coach: Chris Holtmann, entering his third season with DePaul and 16th as a Division 1 head coach. He is now 30-36 with the Blue Demons and 281-207 overall.
Outlook: For a brief moment at the start of the 2025-26 season, it looked like DePaul was starting to affect Chris Holtmann, not the other way around. After ripping off a 30-5 run to start the game, the Blue Demons found themselves trailing Stonehill 50-49 with eight minutes left. They figured it out for a 72-64 win, but that left DePaul with a hangover for their next game. They gave up an early 23-3 run to Buffalo, used a 12-1 second half run to get back into the game, then lost by 13.
That wasn’t their low point.
The low point was barely scraping past Arkansas Pine Bluff, because that came in the wake of losing to an LSU team that got head coach Matt McMahon fired with a 3-15 record in the SEC. The combination of all of that dropped DePaul to #137 in the KenPom rankings and it sure looked like the Chris Holtmann Revival Tour was taking a beating.
So, when you say that DePaul started the season at #78 in KenPom’s rankings but finished at #99, you can’t really say it was all bad. Going from #137 on December 9th to #99 at season’s end is a good thing! You just don’t want to have to go from #78 to #137 in order to have that rebound, that’s all. At the end of the day, it goes in the books as Holtmann improving from Year 1 to Year 2. Year 1 was #122 in KenPom with a record of 14-20, and a 4-16 mark in the Big East. 16-16 and 8-12 with a #99 ranking is improvement, and it comes with the added bonus of DePaul got better as the season went along.
That means it’s time to tell you something about DePaul last season.
Are you aware that they had a top 35 defense?
Yep. #32 in the country per KenPom by the time everything stopped turning in April. In conference play, they had the fifth best defensive efficiency in the league, nearly two points per 100 possessions better than Marquette. Why did they only finish 8-12? Worst offense in the league.
So here’s the question as I see it for Chris Holtmann and the Blue Demons going into next season: Are the new guys they’re bringing in going to generate more efficient offense for them? Defense is the end of the floor that’s a little bit more replicable from year to year and from roster to roster. Same guy thinking up the defensive coverages, no matter who the players are, and you end up in roughly the same place, and so on. Is replacing CJ Gunn (32%) and Brandon Maclin (31%) and RJ Smith (31%) with shooters like Koree Cotton and Kahmare Holmes and Ade Popoola automatically going to make DePaul a better offensive team and thus a bigger threat across the board?
If that’s the case, and the Blue Demons can avoid landmine type losses in the non-conference schedule, and they can squeeze a few extra wins out of Big East play….. is .500 in the conference good enough to have them in NCAA tournament consideration?
Are you prepared for “Can DePaul make the tournament?” conversations in January? It feels like that could be a thing that’s on the table if things go right for Holtmann for the first eight weeks of the season.
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