How Vanderbilt Basketball Feels Like It Has Come Together So Far – Sports Illustrated

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NASHVILLE — One look at the Vanderbilt basketball roster for the 2026-27 season and it becomes easy to quickly notice one big difference from last season’s roster. The amount of new faces is abundant.
From Vanderbilt’s newest freshmen to the players it picked up in the transfer portal, the Vanderbilt roster is in a completely different shape than it had a season ago. In fact, Tyler Tanner, Chandler Bing and Jayden Leverett are the only guys returning from last year’s roster.
With plenty of new pieces means plenty of work to do to bring everyone together. Vanderbilt has been working on that since everyone made it to campus. The Commodores have not only had plenty of practices together, but they have one exhibition game under their belt as well, a win over Virginia in late September.
Between the play styles of each guy to the progression of the team in general as the regular season sits just a couple of weeks away, it seems that Vanderbilt’s team is coming together nicely in terms of building chemistry.
“I feel like we gel really well on the court. Our games complement each other,” Vanderbilt center transfer Bangot Dak said. “We really like to hangout out with each other. We feel like we’re a fun group of guys to be around. We just all like to be around each other.”
The Commodores have had plenty of time to get to know each other both on and off the court this offseason. But with the regular season beginning soon, Vanderbilt needs to make sure that it continues to build chemistry and fit all the pieces together before the toughest parts of the schedule come.
The Commodores do get challenged a little bit early on with home games against Wake Forest, Memphis and UCF in the first three weeks of the season. Fitting everything will not be easy, especially with a roster that is the second-youngest team among all power conference programs.
Both the freshmen and the transfers will have growing up to do. That is a challenge that Vanderbilt knows it will have to overcome in the early stages of the season or whenever adversity comes. When it does, Dak feels confidence on how he and his teammates will handle it.
“I feel like we haven't had too big of adversity, so I feel like when that time comes, that’s just going to show up in our leadership. The returners that we have like Tyler Tanner and Chandler Bing or dudes like me and BK [Berke Buyuktuncel]. So I feel like when that time comes we’re going to have to handle it,” Dak said.
Vanderbilt head coach Mark Byington knows that his team is going to have to go through some growing pains considering how young his roster is.
Byington plays that to his advantage, knowing he will be able to mold his guys into the team he wants on the court. He also has plenty of belief in younger guys to produce and play older than they actually are.
“I feel like some freshmen are ready to play and I think our sophomore class are more experienced sophomores. So we’re going to need them not to act like 19-year-olds. They’re going to have to play older than that,” Byington said.
With as many new faces Vanderbilt has this season, the Commodores seem to have the right types of pieces to be a good team this season. Of course, how good of a team Vanderbilt will be will depend on how they play together over time.
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Graham Baakko is a writer for Vanderbilt Commodores On SI, primarily covering football, basketball and baseball. Graham is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, where he wrote for The Crimson White, WVUA-FM, WVUA 23 as he covered a variety of Crimson Tide sports. He also covered South Carolina athletics as a sportswriting intern for GamecockCentral.
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