UWGB coach Doug Gottlieb welcomes return of players who enter portal

University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball coach Doug Gottlieb welcomed LeBron Thomas back to the team last week after Thomas entered the NCAA transfer portal in April.

But the 6-foot-3 senior guard never really left.

“We don’t cut off workouts with the guys, he’s been here the whole time,” Gottlieb said. “I don’t know if he went on a couple visits, I know he went home for a little bit, but most guys, most places, you put yourself in the portal and you are out.

“We don’t clean out lockers. The only thing is if they don’t have insurance to where they can’t be in a team group activity. But we want them to lift with us. We want them to work out with us.”

“It can be. Most of them don’t take us up on that offer,” Gottlieb said. “They don’t, and that’s OK, that’s their right. But you can’t tell a kid all year he’s family and he wants to look around and you are like, you’re not family anymore. Kids aren’t dumb.

“I do this with guys we recruit. Most guys we recruit, 95 percent of them we leave it on unbelievable terms. Like, 5 minutes ago you wanted a kid to sign to change the trajectory of your program. He picks somewhere else and now you are going to be, F-you? It just makes you look so fake.”

Thomas’ first season at UWGB was a bit underwhelming, at least with the expectations he brought after two seasons at NJCAA Division I Vincennes University in Indiana.

He was a two-time NJCAA All-American at Vincennes, finishing with more than 1,000 career points, 300 assists and 275 rebounds.

Gottlieb told Thomas in his office while recruiting him that he had gifts others can only dream about and that the Phoenix hoped to build around him.

Thomas was in the starting lineup to open the season at Kansas and started six games overall while appearing in 32 contests.

He averaged 4 points, 1.9 rebounds and 0.9 assists in 12.1 minutes per game, shooting 48% overall (36-for-75).

His most notable game came in a win at IU-Indy in December, when he scored 20 points in 30 minutes. He arrived at UWGB with a knack for drawing fouls around the hoop, and he shot 14-for-16 from the line that night.

It was one of five games in which he scored in double figures. Not bad, but the overall impact he had wasn’t as big as anyone likely hoped.

Gottlieb looks at the first season for any player as their floor, that it often only will get better. If that was Thomas’ floor at the DI level, the third-year coach didn’t think it was shabby.

Entering the second season in Gottlieb’s system should only help Thomas, as will the type of players the Phoenix signed in the offseason.

With the exceptions of injured forward-center Jalen Overway and guard Jaxon Edwards, everybody shot 36% or better from 3-point range.

“LeBron, obviously, does most of his damage within 5 feet of the bucket,” Gottlieb said. “We feel like we created more space for him. With him [at his former school] he played, when I say Vincennes is rigid, a lot of times with people that resonates in a negative way. It’s not. They are unbelievably successful, but they come down and there are no reads. We don’t teach basketball as much that way. There are defined reads and get the ball here to start something, starting actions, but a lot of it is just playing with pace, playing with space, playing to our roles and then just read the defense.

“He struggled with that. Like, ‘Wait, I get to do what I want to do?’ Sort of. You get to do what the defense determines you do. I would guess that the volume of reps that he has seen, same offense, slightly different personnel, I think more space, more comfort in it, my guess would be that he will have a better year.”

There are some coaches who have no interest in bringing back a player after they enter the portal. Thomas would have been kicked to the curb as soon as his name hit the wire.

Gottlieb isn’t one of them. He almost never closes the door, although he always reserves the right.

If a player handles the situation in a professional way and wants to explore his options, then Gottlieb will even help by making calls for him.

“Some of it has to do with how you leave,” Gottlieb said. “I mean, a lot of it has to do with how you leave. We had one guy who came in here and we had an exit meeting, and we all went around the room and said something great about the kid and how we thought he contributed to our success and how much we appreciated him.

“There was one kid who was like, ‘I’m out.’ So, that one is like, you didn’t care about us. Even that one, I was like, ‘Hey, look. It might have been from somebody at home. Somebody in his ear. Whatever.'”

Of the players UWGB lost to the portal this offseason, there wasn’t a bigger hit than the departure of guard C.J. O’Hara, who went from a walk-on his first year to one of the Horizon League’s best 15 players by the end of his sophomore season in 2025-26.

It wasn’t a surprise O’Hara wanted to look at other schools and to perhaps find a big payday.

Gottlieb remained in contact, only to watch him sign with fellow Horizon member Wright State.

“We talked about him coming back the whole time,” Gottlieb said. “I was really surprised by the Wright State thing, but I knew what his agent had told him he thought he was going to get. I talked to C.J. and his dad and said, ‘Hey, we want him. He is going to have a huge role. Here is what we are willing to compensate him at the top of our payroll. We want him and [senior forward] Marcus [Hall] to come back.'”

Hall did come back. O’Hara did not.

“They wanted to go and look around, and I don’t think they necessarily had the intent on coming back,” Gottlieb said. “But then midway through the process, the door was still open. We had a good, long talk. I wanted to talk to them before we took Jaxson, because I do think we recruited Jaxon with the idea that he is C.J. 2.0. But I did think they could play together. So even C.J., up until he surprised us with Wright State, he won us a lot of games.

“It’s not his fault that he was promised 2½, 3 times of what he even got from Wright State. That’s a hard thing for any player, especially when he came here two years ago as a walk-on and now he’s a third-team all-league guy.”

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: UWGB coach Doug Gottlieb welcomes return of players who enter portal