Utah State transfer portal player breakdown — Kolby King | Sports

Kolby King marks the most recent addition to Utah State men’s basketball’s transfer class for the upcoming 2025-26 season. The Aggies lost a potential key returner at point guard in Deyton Albury, and King appears to be the top candidate to replace the lost production. There’s a pretty easy comparison between the two, but ultimately there’s more to it as we’ll examine below.

As a quick introduction, head coach Jerrod Calhoun described King as a “dynamic guard who brings toughness, athleticism and high-level shot making ability to the court.” All of those things play out on film and King should make a great addition to the Aggies’ rotation.

“His ability to impact the game on both ends fits perfectly with our style of play,” Calhoun continued. “Kolby is battle-tested and well equipped to create for both himself and his teammates. We look forward to adding him to the mix with our talented returners and signees.”

With that introduction settled, let’s get things started.

A note on source for stats in this piece. Basic averages (points, rebounds, etc.) come from Sports Reference, as do the advanced stats of Win Shares and Box Plus/Minus. Bayesian Performance Rating comes from EvanMiya.com as does any lineup data used. All stats referencing specific shot types (i.e. shots at rim or jump shots) along with play-specific shot attempts (such as post-ups or spot-up shooting) come from Synergy Sports.

Biographical Info

• Height: 6’2″
• Weight: 185 lbs
• Class: Senior (1 year of eligibility)
• Hometown: Pompano Beach, FL
• High School: Pembroke Pines Charter
• Previous Colleges: St. John’s (2022-23), Tulane (2023-24), Butler (2024-25)

King will end up playing for a different school for all four seasons of his college career. He’s been in and out of the power conferences, being a contributor on every team but arguably reaching closer to his peak when playing in a mid-major conference. His time at St. John’s was easily his least productive, playing just 7.7 minutes per game but then at Tulane he broke out ending the year as the Green Wave’s fifth-leading scorer on a team that ranked 20th in the nation in points per game. That breakout year facilitated a jump back to the Big East with Butler. And while his time there was more productive than his first stay in the conference, his role as a sixth man still left King short of his potential and he’s now coming to Utah State with expectations that he could be a top contributor for the Aggies.

Statistics

Here’s a summary of King’s advanced catch-all metrics, with context of his rank within Butler and his conference (Big East).

• Box Plus/Minus (BPM): 1.8 (7th on team / 63rd in Big East)
  • Offensive BPM: -0.2 (9th / 68th)
  • Defensive BPM: 2.0 (2nd / 40th)
• Win Shares (WS): 1.1 (6th / 65th)
  • Offensive WS: 0.4 (8th / 68th)
  • Defensive WS: 0.7 (4th / 58th)
  • WS per 40 Minutes: 0.070 (9th / 75th)
• Bayesian Performance Rating (BPR): 1.68 (6th / 62nd) 
  • Offensive BPR: 1.12 (8th / 61st)
  • Defensive BPR: 0.56 (3rd / 55th)

Strengths

• Highly efficient 3-point shooter
• Very quick guard
• Elite in transition
• Quickly improving defender

Weaknesses

• Can be turnover prone
• Struggles to finish at the rim
• Inefficient mid-range shooter

Scouting Report

In broad strokes, King is a talented collegiate scoring guard whose biggest hang-up is that he could (emphasis on “could”) be labeled a tweener, being a 6-foot-2 combo guard that isn’t a point guard in the classical sense and doesn’t have the height to be a wing. And if that’s the worst that can be said of him, nobody in the Utah State fandom is going to have a problem with King. His relatively low assist numbers don’t tell the whole story about his point guard ability and his scoring and shooting can bring a lot to the Aggies this upcoming season.

Scoring and 3-point shooting is pretty clearly King’s calling card and to that end it’s worth drawing a lot from his time at Tulane as much if not more from what he did at Butler. His offensive role was bigger with the Green Wave than it was with the Bulldogs so we get a better idea of what King can do when we look at his 2023-24 season alongside what he did last year at Butler. To that end, we end up getting a great view of King and what his peak could be along with what the floor is for his potential.

Peak Kolby King is undoubtedly the first 13 games of his time at Tulane. In that span he averaged 15.8 points, 4.8 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 2.1 steals while shooting 55.2 percent from the field, 39.6 percent from three and 78.3 on free throws.

Within this span are solid games against decent teams. His best games were against lower ranked/non-D1 teams like Nicholls State, Northwestern State, Southern and Dillard, but among this stretch were games against Bradley, California, Mississippi State and Furman. Over those four tougher games he still averaged 12.5 points and shot 65 percent from the field. The most productive King has ever been came in the first two months of the 2023-24 season. And it’s not like he was a one-trick pony in terms of scoring. He did a number of things in these games, from tough 3-pointers, to finishing in the paint and even getting his hands dirty in the paint with offensive rebounds.

While there is a lot of good film and stats that come from those 13 games, it’s also a relatively small portion of his career. And what he’s done since then is pretty important. In the final 18 games of his one Tulane season, King’s averages plummeted. And when you combine those games with his full year at Butler, King has averaged 5.9 points, 3.5 rebounds, 1.5 assists and 0.7 steals on 41.8 percent overall shooting (38.3 from three and 70.3 at the free throw line) in his most recent 52 games.

Those numbers are not as rosy, but not horrible by most standards. The main point is this return to earth primarily highlights where King’s strengths truly lie as you can see his 3-point shooting hardly dipped, and he was still a decent scoring contributor. He just wasn’t a star-level scorer. The first 13 games at Tulane and the 52 games afterward show King’s peak and his floor. At his best, King will take over a game at times and at worst he’ll be a solid producer.

Although scoring can be, as I called it, the “calling card” for King, his point guard skills are an interesting study. His assist numbers suggest he fits into the tweener combo-guard archetype. After all, his career best assist percentage of 16.6 (last year at Butler) would have ranked him second-to-last among USU’s rotation guards last year. And yet, there are plenty of instances of King being a very solid pick-and-roll passer sprinkled all over his film at Tulane and in spurts with Butler. Regardless of the success rate, the passes are often accurate and the big is able to at least try to make something of it. There are plenty of examples of him making good passes in ball screen actions, and several other situations, that make him a much better passing guard than his numbers indicate up front.

What can be pretty exciting about the pick-and-roll passing in particular is it compliments rather well the kind of chaos that King can cause when he attacks the defense off any ball screen action. Given how quick he is, King is able to put any defender on his heels and create scoring chances in the paint.

For all the potential good, there is a major hitch to this area of King’s game. He has largely been inefficient in these situations and more than a little turnover prone. Over the last two seasons he’s averaged 0.650 points per possession on plays where he attempts to score out of pick-and-roll actions, the low number deriving from a poor field goal percentage (33.3) and a high turnover percentage (23.1). Last year, King ranked 713th (out of 780 players with at least 60 PnR possessions) in turnover percentage on these plays.

Turnovers aside, King’s struggles to score in these scenarios seem to come from a general struggle to finish at the rim (at least on pick-and-rolls specifically) and a lack of even a decent mid-range shot. Starting with rim finishing, despite King being a 6-foot-2 guard, he’s been a decent finisher at the rim in college. His overall career shooting percentage at the rim is a rather solid 60.6 but in pick-and-roll action it plummets to 42.1. Then, there’s his mid-range shot. King already had a low mid-range percentage (22.9 for his career), but in pick-and-roll situations he’s 3-for-20 in the last two seasons. There just seems to be a lid on the rim whenever there’s a ball screen involved and King enters attack mode.

It’s not the end of the world if King can’t raise his efficiency in this one specific area (Mason Falslev had really similar efficiency numbers in PnR this last year and it didn’t stop him from being a positive impact on offense), but it will end up being a limiting factor to his potential as a point guard and overall scoring threat. He may have to stick more to 3-point shooting in halfcourt settings if he can’t find a way to be at least a viable scoring threat in these actions.

Much of the offensive analysis has looked back at what King did in a larger role at Tulane, but when looking at defense, there’s a different story happening. King’s offensive role got limited when he went to Butler, which is not the most unique phenomenon for college basketball players transferring up. What is intriguing is that his defensive impact went up and he became a far more interesting player to watch on the defensive end. Advanced stats seemed to pick up on this improvement, as he went from a very mediocre 0.2 Defensive Box Plus/Minus to a 2.0 (second on his team) with a similarly solid jump in his Defensive Bayesian Performance Rating. A big reason for this could have been a change in team. Tulane, under head coach Ron Hunter, have been a pretty consistently mediocre defensive team while Butler, under Thad Matta and even LaVall Jordan before him, have been staples of the top 100 in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric.

King’s performance against Boise State in the College Basketball Crown postseason game is a pretty good showcase of the kind of defender he became at Butler. The first thing to not is that Broncos point guard Alvaro Cardenas scored 19 points with four assists in what was eventually a Boise State win. But in all the possessions I tracked where King was the primary defender of Cardenas, he scored five points with one turnover forced and no assists for Cardenas (three of those points were on non-shooting fouls when Boise State was in the bonus).

The highlight of those defensive plays came on the forced turnover. King hounded Cardenas all the way down the court, around multiple screens and then and swiped the ball from behind. He didn’t get the steal credit, but that’s very much a turnover forced by King even if he didn’t get credit for it on the stat sheet (he also pushed the tempo and it led to a made 3-pointer for Butler).

There were also a few plays where King had to switch onto bigger players like the 6-foot-7 Pearson Carmichael and 6-foot-8 Tyson Degenhart. He can’t physically match those players, but stood up rather well when he ended up in those in ideal defensive situations.

It’s not like King became a defensive player of the year caliber player overnight. In fact, there remain some yellow flags in his defense. There are a lot of times where he doesn’t read the development of an offensive play well enough to ad-lib and cut off an attack before it happens. He also gets back-doored for easy layups a little too often. But the difference was just stark when it came to how he approached the game at Butler as opposed to at Tulane. He gave more effort on closeouts, chased players around screens harder, defended more physically. Sure, King had a higher rate of steals while at Tulane, but his overall impact on defense clearly went up while at Butler and that is something that should translate well to Utah State.

Fit with Utah State

You don’t often get 1-to-1 replacements of departing players in the transfer portal, but King will probably be about as close to a role and replacement as the Aggies can get to fill the hole left by Deyton Albury entering the transfer portal. Aside from similarities in height and position, the areas of production from Albury and King will be similar. But there will still be distinctions.

Both Albury and King have excelled in transition and in spot-up situations. King posted a 1.290 points per possession average in transition with Tulane in 2023-24 with Albury having an identical PPP average with the Aggies last year. And in spot-ups, Albury averaged 1.047 PPP at USU with King averaging 1.055 PPP at Tulane and then raising it to an elite 1.333 at Butler. Production in these specific areas is incredibly important with Calhoun’s offense, which ranked a healthy 85th in the nation in frequency of transition scoring attempts and every team in the country sees the majority of their offense come on varying spot-up looks. But it’ll be the manner in which King gets his transition and spot-up points that will differ from Albury.

The strength of Albury’s game is attacking the rim and he does it at one of the highest rates in the nation. King, meanwhile, frequently goes for jump shots. To contrast specifically in the areas of transition and spot-up scoring, Albury attempted 72.3 percent of his shot attempts those those two types of plays inside the arc. Conversely, King — over the past two seasons at both Tulane and Butler — attempted 53.1 percent of his transition/spot-up shots outside the arc.

In a way, this will make King’s style almost more similar to what Ian Martinez and Dexter Akanno provided. The two accounted for a hefty chunk of USU’s transition 3-point shooting. These 3-pointers can be particularly backbreaking for teams as they’re quick points that can easily swing momentum back in favor of the Aggies. King was particularly deadly at Tulane, shooting 14 of 24 on 3-pointers in transition (58.3 percent). He tapered off at Butler last year in both attempts and percentage, but was still a solid 3-for-8 on transition threes.

This is going to make King more than just a carbon copy replacement of Albury. He’s his own player and his differing style is going to be important to helping Utah State have a diverse offense and help make up for lost production behind the 3-point line. Martinez and Akanno, who were two of the Aggies’ three best 3-point shooters, are gone. And while there’s some hope that Tucker Anderson and incoming transfers Garry Clark, MJ Collins and Zach Keller can improve on their career numbers to replace the production of Martinez/Akanno through platooning, there are quite a few question marks regarding whether any of those four will make said improvements and be able to efficiently replicate what USU has lost. There are no such questions about King. And if he plays starter minutes, or close to starter minutes, he’ll very likely match both the volume and efficiency of either Martinez or Akanno.

Hearkening back to King’s pick-and-roll passing, there’s an interesting level of potential for him when working alongside some of Utah State’s bigs who project as pick-and-pop threats. looking at the bigs the Aggies have brought in shows how much Calhoun could be aiming to add pick-and-pop scoring to his offense. Both Clark and Keller can step out and hit 3-pointers with Karson Templin having put in work to improve his 3-point shooting last year and will likely make another jump this year with the same effort. Utah State had limited moments of pick-and-pop, mainly coming whenever Isaac Johnson was hitting his shots or when Karson Templin baffled Saint Mary’s by making several 3-pointers against them.

So where does King fit in with all of this pick-and-pop business? Given his aggressiveness in attacking off ball screen action, there’s every expectation Utah State will be able to take advantage of its shooting bigs to create space in the lane for King and/or get those bigs wide-open 3-pointers. Templin’s 3-pointers against Saint Mary’s and Johnson’s triples against Air Force are a pretty good showcase of that potential where each of Martinez, Albury and Jordy Barnes took advantage of both defenders collapsing on their drives. But the other side of this coin is that if the big can’t hedge on the ball screen because he has to stick to USU’s shooting big, that makes for an open driving lane for King (or Falslev, Drake Allen or another of the Aggies’ perimeter ball-handlers). There’s a lot of ways Calhoun can play with these scenarios, which is something that will come up again when we take a look at Keller in the next of these breakdowns.

As far as King’s experience in utilizing pick-and-pop bigs, he did have access to a couple of capable shooting bigs at both Tulane and Butler, but he didn’t actually produce many potential points by passing to those shooting bigs. Synergy only recorded five 3-point attempts out of pick-and-pop sets in the past two seasons. King did make some of these passes, actual 3-point attempts just weren’t super frequent. Whether Utah State aims to utilize these on a high-volume basis will depend largely on whether and how many of Clark, Keller and Templin manage to be solid volume 3-point shooters this season.

The biggest question about King is whether he’ll start or if Allen will get the nod over him. It’s a hard one to answer without sticking an ear in the coaching staff’s office, but King is going to contend for a starting role. At minimum, he should be able to get 15-20 minutes per game, but he’ll very likely get closer to the 20-25 range, splitting the point guard minutes with Allen and whichever starts will merely be a formality.