Cofie makes it seven Cavaliers now in portal

By Jerry Ratcliffe

New Virginia basketball coach Ryan Odom may have to recruit an entire new team after three more Cavaliers have announced they will enter the transfer portal.

Promising freshman Jacob Cofie became the latest to go portaling on Tuesday, making a grand total of seven Cavaliers now in the portal. Only returning senior Elijah Saunders had not announced any intentions of leaving as of late Tuesday afternoon, meaning six of UVA’s top nine players are in the portal, along with TJ Power, who played sparingly. Senior Taine Murray exhausted his eligibility.

Cofie is likely a player that Odom would like to return. The 6-foot-9 West Coast forward could score inside and outside, starting 16 of 32 games as a true freshman this past season, averaging 20.8 minutes per game.

The Seattle native averaged 8.7 points per game, shooting nearly 50 percent from the field (49.5) on 90 of 182 field-goal attempts. He was also an effective shooter from the 3-point arc, making 39.7 percent of his attempts (10 of 41), along with 75 percent of his free throws to go with 4.6 rebounds and 27 blocked shots.

A total of seven Cavaliers have entered the portal, including the newest entries: freshman Cofie; redshirt freshman forward Anthony Robinson; and sophomore TJ Power. The trio joins guards Isaac McKneely, Dai Dai Ames, Andrew Rohde, and forward Blake Buchanan.

Of the seven players who participated in Virginia’s last game of the season, a 66-60 loss to Georgia Tech in the second round of the ACC Tournament, only Saunders remains. Neither Robinson nor Power played in the game.

Robinson appeared in 26 games and became a crowd favorite as he gave UVA a physical presence in the paint, something this team had lacked until he began to clock some meaningful minutes. The big man, who still needs footwork development, did make 72 percent of his field-goal attempts (31 for 43), many of them coming from powerful dunks, while averaging 3.6 points and 2.4 rebounds per game, along with 15 blocked shots.

Wahoo fans were hopeful that Power could rediscover the magic that made him a 5-star high school prospect, but it never arrived.

Virginia recruited him out of high school, but Power chose Duke, where he played sparingly (7 minutes per game over 26 games). He transferred to UVA after his freshman season in Durham and started the first five games this past season for the Cavaliers, but was never able to build his game.

For the season, Power was 9 of 44 on field goals (20.5 percent) and 6 of 33 from the 3-point line (18.2 percent). He made all 8 of his free-throw attempts.

McKneely, the team’s leading scorer, left the door open in his portal announcement, noting that he gave himself the option of returning.