Why signing Luigi Suigo is significant for Villanova, not just for 2026-27, but beyond

Late Saturday night, Villanova basketball stars of yesteryear took center stage when the New York Knicks won the NBA championship behind the MVP performance of Jalen Brunson and the significant contributions of Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart. Champions at Villanova turned New York basketball heroes.

The trio of Wildcats won in college at a different time, both in the sport and at their school. Villanova is on its second coach in the post-Jay Wright era, and while Kevin Willard’s first season was a step in the right direction after three consecutive NCAA Tournament misses, losing in the first round as a No. 8 seed was not cause to cue a cacophony of alarm bells to let the world know Villanova was back.

But earlier in the day, hours before Brunson joined Michael Jordan as the only player in NBA history to score 45 points in a road clincher, a significant signing may have slightly altered the outlook for both the 2026-27 Wildcats and where the program stands in the New World of college basketball.

» READ MORE: Philly’s Mikal Bridges is in his second NBA Finals. His grit comes from his mom, who raised him as a single parent.

Luigi Suigo, a 7-foot-3 Italian center, withdrew his name from the NBA draft process and signed to play at Villanova, joining a roster rebuild that already had the Wildcats rated among the best transfer portal classes in college hoops.

There is at least some hyperbole happening here. It is June, after all. And if Suigo was truly the “Italian Wemby,” there would not have been any question about whether he would be taken in the first round of the draft. Suigo, 19, played professionally in Serbia this past season and entered the draft looking to go in the first round. There was no guarantee that would happen, though some experts and evaluators had Suigo going off the board in the mid-to-late-20s at next week’s draft.

Consider what signing Suigo means. There is the short-term outlook: Villanova is a near lock to be considered among the top 25 teams in the sport heading into next season. Then there is the long-term meaning: Suigo surely wasn’t cheap. Players going off the board at the end of the first round still make $3 million-plus per season. The Wildcats had already committed quite a few dollars to signing top-end transfers like Kwame Evans Jr. (Oregon) and Devin Royal (Ohio State). They likely had to buck up to give leading scorer Tyler Perkins his market value. Other players on the roster came at a cost.

That there was still plenty of money left in the bag to lure Suigo to the Main Line is a sign that Villanova plans to spend — and has access to — the financial resources required to compete with the top programs in the sport. It’s hard to view the signing in any other way.

» READ MORE: Forget power conferences, the basketball spending at most Big 5 schools lags behind conference rivals

Suigo’s signing completes a roster rebuild that was pretty drastic. The Wildcats finished their 2025-26 season with a first-round NCAA Tournament loss to Utah State. Eight players touched the floor. Only one of them, Perkins, will be back on next year’s roster (Matt Hodge, who is returning, missed that game after undergoing surgery to repair a torn ACL).

Two of the other seven — Duke Brennan and Devin Askew — are out of eligibility. The other five entered the portal.

Willard hit the portal cycle needing, well, everything.

How did he do? It’s hard to argue that the 2026-27 team isn’t better on paper than the roster assembled at this time last year. Suigo’s addition is a major factor in that.

Start with the categories where Villanova was most deficient last season. It was against bigger, physical, more experienced teams that the Wildcats struggled. They played Hodge at the power forward spot when he’s probably better served as a shooter on the wing. After Tafara Gapare left the program in December, the team lacked the requisite size and athleticism inside to rebound. Duke Brennan was a machine on the glass, but at times he struggled defensively. Not that UConn’s Tarris Reed Jr., or St. John’s big man Zuby Ejiofor are easy covers.

The first two portal additions aimed to fill frontcourt needs. Hodge may not be at 100% when the season starts, and his long-term future is probably at the small forward spot. So Villanova signed Evans, a 6-foot-10 forward, and Royal, who is a physical player with a bulky 6-foot-6 frame. Both of them will be seniors.

Villanova couldn’t come to an agreement with point guard Acaden Lewis, so the Wildcats found a cheaper version of him. Elijah Crawford isn’t as flashy as Lewis, and isn’t anywhere close to him on the various lists of transfer portal players, but the Illinois-Chicago transfer, a rising junior who played sparingly as a freshman at BYU, thrives in ball screens and has similar analytical metrics as Lewis in terms of his assist and steal rates. Neither is a proficient three-point shooter. Lewis, who commanded a high salary in the portal and eventually landed at Miami, also struggled at times in Villanova’s biggest games.

» READ MORE: 2026 men’s college basketball transfer portal tracker: Latest Big 5 moves, where Philly-area recruits are heading

Bryce Lindsay scored 25 points and made six three-pointers in Villanova’s NCAA Tournament loss, but he spent the majority of the Big East campaign mired in a shooting slump. He seemed possibly destined for a bench role if he came back. Instead of Lindsay providing shooting off the bench, Villanova will have Cornell’s Jake Fiegen, a 6-foot-4 shooting guard who scored 17.7 points per game and shot 41.4% from deep, and St. Bonaventure’s Buddy Simmons, a 5-foot-11 scoring guard who averaged 16.4 points and shot 42.4% from deep. Both of them will be seniors. They also have Adam Oumiddoch, a 6-foot-5 guard who is expected to contribute right away as a freshman.

The projected rotation as it stands is Crawford, Perkins, Royal, Evans, and Suigo starting with a bench consisting of — in no order — Hodge, Fiegen, Simmons, and Oumiddoch. That’s three seniors, a junior, and a freshman center with first-round size and talent starting, and a four-man bench unit with two seniors, a soon-to-be-22-year-old redshirt-sophomore (Hodge), and a freshman. There are also deeper reserves in senior Abdou Samb, a Towson transfer, returning redshirt-freshman Nico Onyekwere, and incoming freshman guard Carter Fisk.

For context, Villanova started a freshman, a redshirt freshman, a redshirt sophomore, a junior, and a senior last year. The 2026-27 team is bigger, older, and seemingly more versatile. Consider the team that cut down the nets in March. Michigan had 7-foot-3 center Aday Mara and a frontcourt that included big bodies in Yaxel Lendeborg and Morez Johnson Jr. Suigo, Evans, and Royal might not be that trio, but from a physical presence, it’s not far off.

Suigo is still developing, but he’s a 7-foot-3 defensive anchor with some three-point shooting touch who should provide a big body for Willard to utilize in an offense that runs a high volume of ball screens.

The makeup of this rotation gives Willard plenty of options to deploy “small-ball” lineups with Evans at center. He had limited choices down the stretch last season due to injuries and program departures.

» READ MORE: Villanova to begin a home-and-home series with Kansas starting this year at historic Allen Fieldhouse

All of this is a relatively rose-colored-glasses analysis of where the roster stands, but the high turnover rate in the sport makes so much of the roster analysis this time of year speculative.

It’s meaningless rankings season. Portal players, portal classes, and so on. Last year’s portal class wasn’t ranked very high, yet Villanova won 24 games and earned a No. 8 seed.

This year’s portal class is among the best. Analytics expert Evan Miya had the Wildcats at No. 8. Other outlets like ESPN, 247Sports, and On3 rate Villanova’s portal class among the top 25 in the sport. Suigo doesn’t factor into those ratings. He is technically an incoming freshman.

What does all of this mean in June? Nothing. No one gets a prize for winning the offseason. But it’s a start.