Jalen Warley is hitting the transfer portal again, after spending the summer and most of the preseason with the UVA Basketball program.
If you read my earlier reports on Warley, a 6’7”, 205-pound combo guard, you could tell that I wasn’t sure of his fit with this roster.
Warley, a three-year rotation guy at Florida State, was rated a below-average defender by Synergy Sports – opponents averaged 0.958 points per possession and shot 43.0 percent against him last season.
On offense, Warley averaged 2.8 assists per game for FSU in 2023-2024, but he wasn’t much of a threat from the perimeter, and that’s being charitable (23.8 percent on jumpers, only attempted two three-point shots in 2023-2024).
On the offensive end, Warley gets the bulk of his shots at the rim (68-of-145, 46.9 percent) and off runners (14-of-30, 46.7 percent).
His 23.8 percent mark on jumpers was his five makes divided by his 21 attempts.
This was my assessment in our May 4 report on his commitment to UVA off the portal:
Offensively, he’s Reece Beekman without a jumpshot, but with four extra inches.
Jalen Warley isn’t a difference-maker, but he’ll be a good hand in the 2024-2025 Virginia rotation.
And this was before the program picked up Dai Dai Ames, the 6’1” up-tempo point guard from Kansas State, who ultimately pushed Warley down the rotation ladder.
Ames is going to start at the point, and we know the leading returning scorer from 2023-2024, 6’4” perimeter threat Isaac McKneely, is starting at the off-guard spot.
The list of guys competing for the other starting guard spot includes 6’5” senior Taine Murray, 6’6” junior Andrew Rohde, who started most of last season, 6’4” redshirt freshman Christian Bliss, and 6’4” true freshman Ishan Sharma, a sharpshooter from Canada.
That’s six guys for three spots on the floor right there.
The assumption here is that Bliss and Sharma have proven themselves capable of earning and holding down rotation spots in the backcourt, and that Rohde has continued to build on the improvements in his shooting that we’d heard were evident from summer workouts.
All six of the guys that I went over above are at least adequate from the perimeter, making it tough to foresee giving a guy like Warley, who is a perimeter liability, 15-20 rotation minutes a night to basically spell Ames as a big point guard.
It’s fair to assume here that the interim head coach, Ron Sanchez, would have relayed this to Warley, so that the young man could best decide what to do with his academic and athletics career.
Share
Chris Graham
