Texas Tech basketball: These six newcomers will be critical in 2018-19

The Texas Tech basketball team enters the upcoming season with six newcomers on the roster and each will be expected to be important pieces of the puzzle.

The prevailing thought around the country is that this season’s Texas Tech basketball team will take a step back after losing six of its top eight scorers from last year’s Elite Eight run.  Certainly, there will be more new faces than normal on the bench this year but that is nothing out of the ordinary for head coach Chris Beard.

After leaving Texas Tech (where he had been an assistant coach under Bob and Pat Knight) in 2011, Beard became somewhat of a basketball vagabond making four different head coaching stops in five seasons.

But while his unusual career path that led him through the American Basketball Association before climbing the ladder from Division II McMurray University to Division II Angelo St. to Division I Arkansas-Little Rock and the Texas Tech may have kept Beard from putting down roots, it forced him to learn the art of making new rosters mesh in a short amount of time.

Never was that skill more evident than in his lone season at Arkansas-Little Rock.  In 2015, he took over a program that had gone just 13-18 the previous season but with ten new additions he guided the Trojans to the second round of the 2016 NCAA Tournament.

He now faces a similar task with the Red Raiders this year.  Beard has added two graduate transfers, three true freshman and a JUCO signee to his program with the expectation that each one will be a key contributor this year.

So let’s take a look at the newcomers on this year’s Texas Tech basketball team.  Get to know these names because in just under a week, you will be hearing then quite frequently.