Team: Butler Bulldogs
2025-26 Record: 16-16, 7-13 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: A three-way tie for seventh with Marquette and Providence; ended up the #8 seed at the conference tournament because of the records against those two teams.
Final 2025-26 Computer Rankings
NET: #84
KenPom.com: #84
BartTorvik.com: #66
Postseason: Just a 91-81 loss to Providence in the 8/9 game of the first round of the Big East tournament.
Notable Departures: We’re going to start with the most notable of departures, and that’s head coach Thad Matta. It’s not just that the Bulldogs are changing coaches going into next season, it’s how they went about it. Specifically, I mean the part where athletic director Grant Leiendecker told Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman on March 13th that Matta was going to be back for 2026-27…..
…..and then Butler announced Matta’s retirement on March 16th. That noise you can hear is, believe it or not, the giant red warning light blinking on and off. Not an alarm, literally the electricity going in and out of the light is what you’re hearing because that’s how big the light is, you can hear the hum. I don’t know what happened there, but something really bad on the communication level happened at the very least.
And so, as you would expect, Butler’s roster is pretty much gutted after the coaching change. Part of that is three guys on their final year of eligibility anyway. The big name there is Michael Ajayi, who was probably Butler’s best player last season. He was one of three guys to play in every game, and one of two to start all 32 games as well. Ajayi led the entire Big East in rebounding at 11.1 per game, and he added 16.4 points and 3.2 assists a night as well. He was not a very good three-point shooter (26%), so he was doing work inside the arc to finish second on the team in scoring.
The other two guys out of options on returning are Yohan Traore and Yame Butler. Traore was a super-sub, averaging 19.5 minutes per game while never starting but appearing in every contest. He’s a super-sub in terms of minutes, but maybe not so much in terms of stats. 8.3 points and 3.0 rebounds isn’t that much, although that was good enough to get him to third best in scoring if you look at the per-40 minutes numbers. Butler picked up two starts somewhere along the way while playing in 31 games, but still only averaged 13.7 minutes a night. 4.2 points and just over a rebound and just over an assist were his contributions on the stat sheet.
With Ajayi and Traore out the door, the transfers of Finley Bizjack, Jamie Kaiser, and Evan Haywood means that Butler loses all of their top five scorers from this past season. Bizjack was Butler’s leading scorer at 17.1 per game as his 35% three-point shooting on over six attempts per game gave him an edge on Ajayi while trailing him in total field goal attempts. Bizjack also added 2.2 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game, so he’s a far cry from just a scorer in terms of losses here as he transfers to West Virginia. Kaiser is at Richmond now after starting 29 of his 30 appearances this past season and averaging 9.5 points and 4.3 rebounds per game. He actually spent two seasons at Butler after transferring from Maryland, but missed the 2024-25 campaign due to injury. Haywood was also in his second year in Indianapolis, and had bumped forward to averaging over 19 minutes a night for the Bulldogs. He was adding 7.2 points per game, which isn’t a lot, but when your top five scores are all gone, those points add up in a hurry. In any case, the Indiana guy is at Pepperdine now, and there’s worse places to go to college than Malibu.
Two more guys! We mentioned that Butler had a hard time getting the same starters on the floor much less the same guys on the court for every game, so you’re not going to be surprised to see two guys with Games Played totals in the 20s still get double digit starts here. Efeosa Oliogu-Elabor beat out Azavier “Stink” Robinson in terms of total minutes played, 410 to 402, because he had three more games played even though Robinson wins in the starts column, 15-10. Robinson came off the bench to start the year before getting his 15 starts in but missing everything from February 1st onwards due to a wrist injury that needed surgery. 247 Sports has Robinson as the highest rated Butler commit in the 21st century, but he averaged just 6.1 points and 2.5 assists per game before transferring to UCLA. Oliogu-Elabor got his starts after Robinson was lost for the year, which is a nice way to wrap up his year after not playing in BU’s first seven games. He’ll be taking his 5.0 points, 2.2 rebounds, and 2.0 assists from his freshman year to George Mason.
Notable Returners: It depends on how you want to define Notable. Drayton Jones clearly qualifies as he is one of the three guys to play in every game this past season and the only other guy next to Michael Ajayi to start all 32. Even with that being the case, Jones only averaged 19.5 minutes per game in his first season after transferring in from South Carolina State, and only cleared the 25 minute barrier in six contests. Still, the 6’11” junior was just outside KenPom’s top 200 in block rate, and the per-40 minutes version of his 6.3 points and 4.6 rebounds per game are pretty strong.
The question on what’s Notable lands solidly with Jalen Jackson, who averaged 22.5 minutes per game and added 9.5 points, 3.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.3 steals to the stat sheet. He also needed ankle surgery after six games and missed the rest of the year. I presume that Butler has already heard back on his medical redshirt waiver because this was Jackson’s fourth season of eligibility after one at UIC and two at Purdue Fort Wayne. The shift to the five years/five seasons eligibility plan allows for Butler to request said waiver before a deadline, and since he’s on the roster right now, I presume that’s all set to go. He was notable in terms of what he contributed when he was playing, but not so much in terms of the entire season and since he never made it to the month of December, we don’t know what he would have looked like against Big East competition.
And that’s it. There’s three more guys returning, but two did not play and the other is clearly a walk-on who played seven minutes in six appearances in his junior year.
Key Additions: Well, obviously we have to start in one particular place, so, hang on….
Coach: Ronald Nored, in his first season as a Division 1 head coach. According to his Wikipedia page, this is Nored’s third head coaching job anywhere, after a year at the high school level in 2012-13 and two seasons in the G League back in 2016-18. You might remember Nored from his 143 career appearances for Butler between 2008 and 2012, which means yes, he was on both of the Bulldogs teams that Brad Stevens led to losses in the national championship game. He has just one season of college coaching experience as an assistant at Northern Kentucky in 2015-16, and he’s been an NBA assistant for Charlotte, Indiana, and Atlanta since leaving his G League job.
Key Additions: Butler has five freshmen listed on the roster, which is kind of impressive given the coaching change situation. With that said, only one of the five was signed with the Bulldogs before the coaching change, and three of the other four are international players. It’s hard to make any serious evaluations of those three guys as Division 1 contributors, although I will note that Samu Adler (6’6” guard, Espoo, Finland) was on the roster for Finland in the recent round of FIBA World Cup qualifiers, same as Marquette’s Sananda Fru for Germany.
In a slightly odd coincidence, Butler’s November signee is less interesting from a recruiting profile perspective than the American guy they just signed up in mid-April. Baron Walker (6’3” guard, Noblesville, Indiana) is a zero-star prospect according to 247 Sports, but Herly Brutus (6’7” forward, Eustis, Florida) is #124 in the country in the 247 Composite rankings. Brutus was suddenly available this spring after LSU made their coaching change as he was signed with the Tigers since November. I’ll just say it now: Herly Brutus is perhaps my most favorite incoming freshman in the Big East because he is coming from The Villages Charter in The Villages, Florida. Reading his 247 Sports page was the first time I became aware there were even people under retirement age anywhere near The Villages, but Wikipedia provides a helpful explainer on that.
All five of Butler’s incoming transfers fall into the category of “Okay, sure, I guess?” None of them are coming from a situation where they were starting full time for a Division 1 team last season, so based on that alone, it’s hard to see any of them as obvious immediate impact players in the Big East. You could make the best case for Jordan Ellerbee (6’3” guard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), as he worked his way into the starting lineup as a freshman for Florida Gulf Coast last season and stayed there. He averaged 13.1 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 2.1 assists per game for the whole season, but he was scoring and rebounding a little less in his 24 starts even though he was playing four more minutes on average. His three-point shooting also took a notable dip, going from 44% off the bench to end up at just 35% for the entire season, but his attempt rate did drift upwards so maybe that’s just a shot selection issue. Treyson Anderson (6’9” forward, Lincoln, Nebraska) pushed his way into the starting lineup as a sophomore at North Dakota State last season right about as the calendar changed to 2026. His minutes honestly didn’t change all that much, but his scoring went way up, averaging 10.4 for the year but 12.4 per game as a starter. He also shot just under 40% from three-point land in Summit League play last year, so there’s signs that his game is starting to take off.
Christan Moore (6’6” forward, Los Angeles, California) comes over to Butler after three years at The Citadel where he was never a full time starter at any point. He averaged 11.2 points and 3.1 rebounds per game this past year while starting 23 of 31 appearances, and he’s a career 36% three-point shooter. Eduardo Klafke (6’5” guard, Franca SP, Brazil) has been at Ole Miss for the past two seasons where he’s always been a rotation guy for the Rebels. He had 12 starts in the middle of this past season, but his minutes were all over the place all year long, playing less than five minutes (five times) more than he did playing more than 30 minutes (four times). He is a 45% three-point shooter, but he has just 74 career attempts in two seasons. There’s upsides and downsides to that: Small sample size, but clearly he can hop off the bench and knock down a shot. Finally, there’s Samis Calderon (6’8” forward, Vitoria ES, Brazil), and the nicest thing we can say after his 66 minutes as a freshman at Kansas last year is that he was a top 100 recruit in the 247 Sports Composite Rankings and landed with the Jayhawks after spending time at both the NBA Latin America Academy and Overtime Elite.
Outlook: With a new head coach and an almost entirely new roster, I think our time here is best spent assessing Butler’s trajectory as a program more than an outlook about where they were last year and where they’re heading next year. I’m going to give you a category of Coach Butler Hired since the Bulldogs joined the Big East and how those results went for them.
#1 — Former Butler player turned promoted Butler assistant coach with no head coaching experience, 14-17 overall, 4-14 Big East, resigned after one year
#2 — Promoted Butler assistant with three years head coaching experience, 101-70 in three seasons, 34-20 Big East, AP rankings in all three seasons, NCAA tournament in all three seasons, left for Ohio State
#3 — Former Butler player and former Butler assistant coach with one year of head coaching experience, 83-74 in five seasons, 40-54 Big East, NCAA tournament in year 1, AP ranking in Year 3 and stopped from an NCAA tournament by COVID, fired
#4 — Former Butler player turned Butler assistant coach who was promoted to head coach for one year before leaving for 16 seasons at other college head coaching jobs, had left coaching for five seasons before returning to BU, 63-69 in four seasons, 28-52 Big East, retired at 58
And finally:
#5 — Former Butler player with no college head coaching experience and a 44-56 record as a head coach in the G League a decade ago
The one legitimate success story in there is the guy who didn’t play for Butler. Chris Holtmann got the job completely on accident, leaving his head coaching job in the Big South to be an assistant for Butler and just happened to be sitting there in Indianapolis when the Bulldogs needed an interim HC suddenly in October heading into his second season.
And so I ask you these questions:
Did Butler hire Ronald Nored because he was the guy most likely to accept “this is how we do things at Butler” and not try to shake the boat? Did Butler hire Ronald Nored because he doesn’t seem to have any NBA head coaching prospects after seven seasons as an assistant with three different franchises and he just wanted any head coaching job? Why is this hire going to go any differently than the previous three hires of former Butler players during the Bulldogs’ time in the Big East, which have a collective record of 72-120 in conference play? Ignoring the head coach for a second, is there anything about this collection of players that shouts at you “well, they’ll obviously outperform their last place projection on BartTorvik.com!”
But hey, at least Hinkle Fieldhouse is going to host the NBA Cup championship game in December. Fingers crossed that there’s a reason for the Prime Video announcing crew to mention how the Butler men’s team is doing five weeks into the season.
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