You think Dain only left because of NIL?
To be clear, as to both Dainja and Goode, I have no doubt that if the staff told them they were starters and central pieces of the puzzle to next year's team and made them an NIL priority in line with that, both guys would stay. Neither is desperate to leave.
And I would speculate that neither guy would really be beating the bushes for top dollar elsewhere either. We could have them at reasonable prices that would impact our ambitions elsewhere in the portal, but not take us out of the running for Storr or whoever.
If they're leaving it's because Brad doesn't want them to be focal points of next year's team. He prefers to max out on the portal.
There are good players in the portal and our staff scouts really well and has a ton of resources to play with. But I would have made a different choice, I think having a lot of continuity supplemented by a targeted big portal scorer or two would have been the stronger path.
Hopefully I'm wrong. I have a lot of faith in BU, and I know he'll fine tune whatever he ends up with over time. We shall see.