With the 2026-27 college basketball season just over a month away, LSU coach Will Wade is still trying to finalize his roster, which currently has just four players on the team's official website. On Tuesday, news broke that Márcio Santos — a player LSU recruited and hoped to get eligible for the upcoming college basketball season - had signed a two-year contract with Kosner Baskonia, a professional team based in Spain. Santos was part of LSU's intentional recruiting class that features five players: Santos, Saliou Niang (Virtus Bologna), Brice Dessert (Anadolu Efes), Michael Ružić (Joventut Badalona) and Gilad Levy, a 7-foot-3 center from Israel.
Heading into this week, none of those players had been cleared to play this season. Last week, Wade spoke to reporters for the first time this offseason and called his roster and how they're going about the process "unconventional." "What we're doing is unconventional," Wade said. But, 20 years ago, Airbnb was unconventional.
Everybody stayed in a hotel. Fifteen years ago, you rode in a taxi everywhere. So, like, just because it's unconventional doesn't mean it's not going to work.
If it doesn't work, write about what an idiot I am. But just because it's unconventional, like I told our guys, we're going to be unconventional. We're going to be unapologetic about it.
We're going to be unapologetic. This is what we're doing. This is the path that we charted.
We're going to go down it." The path to getting the other players Wade recruited from the international ranks eligible for this season, as well as RJ Luis Jr., Donovan Dent, and Skyy Clark, could get complicated. The same can be said for Niang, who was drafted No. 58 overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2025. So, who is eligible to play and who is still in eligibility limbo?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
