PRINCETON – Jackson Hicke is a 6-foot-5 senior on Princeton University’s basketball team who shot 39.8 percent from 3-point range last year while averaging 15.4 points, 5.2 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game.

If he entered the transfer portal last spring, his phone would have exploded.

“It never crossed my mind, for real,” Hicke said after a sharp preseason practice. “I love this place, and we feel so good about where we’re at. I think this team could be great, so I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

So he stuck around, and so did three-year starting guard Dalen Davis (.390 from 3-point range), junior guard Jack Stanton (.377 from deep, .938 from the free-throw line), junior forward Malik Abdullahi (9.7 points per game, .561 field-goal percentage), and everyone else.

“There are so many guys on our team who could have gotten paydays,” said Hicke, who is an economics major. “It’s so important that everyone’s bought in – and everyone is heavily bought in.”

The transfer portal left Princeton with no seniors in 2025-26, but this past offseason, not a single player left the program after a rare down campaign.

“It’s nice and in this landscape it’s pretty rare,” Hicke said. “With some continuity we’re a step ahead of other people because you don’t have to acclimate to a new place.”

In college basketball’s free agency era, when players change schools like socks, the Tigers are a unicorn. No one transferred out, and as is custom, no one transferred in. Even in the Ivy League now, this is unusual. Archrival Penn has five transfers on its roster, including star forward T.J. Power, who previously played at Virginia and Duke. Even Yale has a transfer.

The traditional college model remains in place at Old Nassau, if hardly anywhere else, and it’s a fascinating experiment worth watching this winter.

“One hundred percent continuity – that’s our biggest strength,” Davis said. “When you like being around the guys, you’d do anything for them.”

Last spring, when the transfer portal opened, the guys spoke with each other and with head coach Mitch Henderson about what came next. Henderson was able to add a retention tool – the NCAA’s new five-in-five rule that raised eligibility from four to five years. Although the Ivy League prohibits postgrads, five-in-five could be an inducement for its players to remain in place for four years and pick up that valuable degree while still having an opportunity to cash in via the transfer portal for that fifth year.

“Our language has changed as we talk to families and parents – now we have this totally different situation,” Henderson said. “And I think it’s a huge advantage for the guys to stay.”

In meeting with his players last spring, Henderson said, “we talked openly about 5-in-5 and the value of having a senior class stay together, and then they stayed.”

Part of that talk: “The best chances of you getting what you want is if you win,” Henderson said. “Winning matters.”

Princeton was picked to finish fourth in the Ivy League’s preseason poll, but this team possesses an increasingly rare intangible.

“It’s nuts with the portal, but I think it’s still such an important strength – chemistry,” Hicke said. “It’s hard to replicate that, to teach that.”

Princeton has used that to its advantage before, with a veteran core famously upending Arizona and Missouri in the 2023 NCAA Tournament. But that was before the sport went full mercenary. Making it back to the Big Dance now, and taking out some foes in a non-conference schedule that includes St. Mary’s, Temple, Monmouth, Siena, Hofstra, Vermont and Rhode Island, would be the statement of all statements.

“I hope we’re sitting here in March and saying it’s clear that this is a great thing – that there’s value in staying together and not splitting up,” Henderson said. “This is not normal anymore.”