Scottie Pippen's son bails on Michigan Sweet 16 trip for transfer portal
03/24/2025 01:11 PM
The Michigan Wolverines are headed to the Sweet 16 in Atlanta where they will take on No. 1 overall seed Auburn on Friday. Justin Pippen, Michigan basketball guard and son of Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen, won’t be with them.
Pippen, who averaged 1.6 points per game in his freshman season, has entered the transfer portal, according to Travis Branham of 247Sports. The portal opened for men’s college basketball on Monday.
Though Pippen will not accompany the team to the South Regional, he had not been playing anyway as he remained in concussion protocol. He last played on March 9 against Michigan State.
Pippen will surely take heat for not sticking out the season with Michigan, but this is a new era in player transfers. Last year, the portal opened before the tournament started. Now, it happens smack in the middle of the Big Dance. Pippen, even if cleared, likely would not have seen significant minutes anyway in the tournament’s second weekend. He also doesn’t figure to have a major role lined up for next season.
We don’t know what sort of conversations his representation has had or what the exact circumstances are, we can only assume that Pippen is doing what he believes is right for himself.
Michigan basketball dances on to the Sweet 16
Though Pippen won’t be there, the Wolverines are about to take on an Auburn team that is among the favorites to win the National Championship. It’s quite a turnaround in the first year under Dusty May after Michigan went 8-24 last season.
Michigan opens as 7.5-point underdogs on Friday night but don’t count out the Wolverines just yet. Though Michigan stumbled down the stretch in the regular season, it came back to win the Big Ten Tournament, defeating Purdue, Maryland and Wisconsin along the way. As for Auburn, the Tigers entered the NCAA Tournament as losers of three of their last four games and haven’t exactly blown the doors off their first two opponents.
Michigan is led by a pair of transfers, Danny Wolf (Yale) and Vlad Goldin (Florida Atlantic) themselves, so the staff and fanbase surely understands the ups and downs of the portal.
"You're constantly trying to get things the way you want them,” May said of his team. “And if it's not going well, sometimes you're kind of inching it there. Sometimes maybe we've done too much. I don't know, I just know when this group is locked in on something together, then they're going to figure out a way to do it."
The post Scottie Pippen’s son bails on Michigan Sweet 16 trip for transfer portal appeared first on ClutchPoints.
