Jamir Harris to Transfer from Minnesota

Jamir Harris is leaving Richard Pitino’s program.

The 6’2” guard played in 28 games for Minnesota this past season, with his best performance being a 16-point outburst in an overtime road win at Penn State. (I suppose there’s a plausible case to be made that Harris kept the Nittany Lions from reaching the NCAA tournament. If Penn State wins that Minnesota game, there’s a decent chance they’re in the field.)

The Daily Gopher speculates that Harris may end up at UCONN, since he is from the east coast (Milltown, NJ) and was recruited to Minneapolis by an assistant coach—Kimani Young—who just took a job on Dan Hurley’s staff in Stoors.

The three known quantities at guard for the Gophers for next season are Amir Coffey, Dupree McBrayer, and Isaiah Washington, all of whom would have been in front of Harris on the depth chart.

When a lesser-known player transfers, I always try to find an analogous player on a team I’m more familiar with. KenPom provides some player analogues for Harris:

• Chris Prescott (2009 St. Joe)
• Mike Felt (2011 North Dakota State)
• Graham Woodward (2014 Penn State)
• Myles Davis (2014 Xavier)
• Jalen Crawford (2012 Bradley)

At least there’s one Big Ten guy on there. And Woodward ended up transferring after his freshman year, too, heading off to Drake where he just completed his senior year this past year.

But the player analogue feature is less useful when you have no context for who any of those guys are (and I—and 99% of our readers—don’t). So I looked through the KemPom pages for all fourteen Big Ten teams, seeing if I couldn’t find someone similar to Harris from this past season. There’s only one player who’s a good match: Thomas Allen of Nebraska.

Allen is also a short freshman guard. Below is a side-by-side comparison of some of Harris’ numbers (listed first) and Allen’s.

• Height: 6’2” / 6’1”
• Weight: 190 / 180
• % of minutes: 30.4% / 24.0%
• Offensive rating: 95.6 / 97.0
• % of shots taken: 18.0% / 18.8%
• Effective field goal percentage: 48.1% / 49.4%
• Offensive rebounding percentage: 1.3% / 1.8%
• Defensive rebounding percentage: 5.5% / 8.6%
• Assist rate: 7.7% / 10.4%
• Turnover rate: 14.6% / 20.9%
• Defensive steal rate: 1.0% / 1.3%
• Free throws attempted: 12 / 20
• Three point percentage: 34.6% / 35.4%

So for Minnesota fans who want to know what might have been next season, you don’t have to wait two years to see what Harris does at UCONN (or wherever); you can see how Thomas Allen does for Nebraska.