Day after season ends in NCAA Tournament, Lobos have first two transfer portal entries, though both expected

Late Sunday night in Cleveland, as he tried to find the right words to put a bow on a 27-win, Mountain West championship season that ended in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, Richard Pitino also had to speak about the new reality of the sport.

From the final buzzer of UNM’s 71-63 loss to Big Ten champion Michigan State in Cleveland’s Rocket Arena to the stroke of midnight in the Eastern Time zone was less than one hour.

That meant Pitino had less than one hour to go from processing the end of a season until the official opening of the NCAA’s transfer portal on Monday morning.

“The portal opening on Monday is the dumbest thing ever,” Pitino said over the weekend in Cleveland. “There’s no logic behind it whatsoever. Why not do it in April? School doesn’t end until mid-May, so give them a month.”

But the modern college basketball era of Portal Combat waits for no man. And the UNM Lobos did have a couple dominos fall Monday — one not all that unexpected and another maybe only surprising in that some assumed it had already happened.

Third-year guard Quinton Webb entered the portal with two years of playing eligibility remaining.

In three seasons, Webb redshirted as a true freshman to preserve a year of eligibility and over the past two seasons saw action in 32 games, averaging 6.9 minutes, 1.4 points and 1.1 rebounds per game.

VerbalCommits.com first reported the transfer news.

Webb’s high with the Lobos was seven points, done twice last season (vs. NMSU in the Pit and vs. Rice in a game played in Henderson, Nevada).

The other Lobo transfer news was that walk-on Shane Douma-Sanchez, who has never appeared in a game for UNM. in November, Douma-Sanchez left the team and eventually filed a still pending lawsuit against the team saying he was punched by a teammate on a trip to California.

Douma-Sanchez, a Del Norte High School graduate, remained on the team roster throughout the season, though he made the decision to stop attending team activities in late November after the incident he says happened.

Pitino said during Sunday’s postgame news conference that he and his staff were planning to work on next year’s roster throughout this week — a combination of attacking the transfer portal hard for new players (primarily finding some bigs to replace starters Nelly Junior Joseph and Mustapha Amzil) and also meeting with current players to discuss their status with the team for next season.

“I don’t really want to have meetings with the players tomorrow,” Pitino said. “I want everybody to take a little break. But I’m going to have to. ...

“I told all of them in the locker room, I’m not bringing anybody in (to these meetings) that can come back (next season) and telling them they need to leave. We want them all to stay. They’re a huge, huge part of what we do.”

Those player meetings are to begin Tuesday. Pitino and Webb had already talked about his transfer decision.