On Bryce Hopkins' departure to St. John's and the increasing rarity of feel-good stories in college basketball

The Bryce Hopkins story in Providence concluded in a most predictable manner — with Hopkins headed to St. John’s to play for Rick Pitino.

News broke of Hopkins’ decision late Monday afternoon, after he visited both Georgetown and St. John’s over the past week. A defection to Cooley and Georgetown was the nightmare scenario in Friartown. For two years, Hoya fans claimed both Hopkins and Devin Carter longed to join Cooley when he departed for the nation’s capital — if only the NCAA would have allowed them to play immediately.

The gloating would have been too much to bear.

But after three years together, Providence and Hopkins split this spring after he suited up in just three games following an ACL tear his junior season. And now he’s off to a different conference foe.

The Amica Mutual Pavilion roared when Hopkins was announced in his long-awaited return against BYU in early December (a rousing Providence victory 11 months in the making over an eventual Sweet 16 team), yet it would be the last game he’d play at the AMP this season.

He appeared two more times, banged up his knee in a collision at DePaul on Dec. 10, and made a business decision shortly thereafter. The Friars went 0-3 in the rest of December without him, and by the time the calendar flipped to January it became apparent that Hopkins would not be returning to a 7-7 club.

Still, the news wouldn’t become official for nearly another month. Days after the Friars grabbed a victory over Georgetown, head coach Kim English announced that Hopkins was done for the season.

Providence lost ten of its final 12 games from that point on.

“He's not going to play for the rest of this season,” English told Sam Knox of WPRI on Jan. 27. “And I get it. I get it, with him losing his junior season last year after playing in 13 games.”

“We didn't want it to be a thing where Bryce is managing his knee game-to-game, playing half a season,” English added. “He's going to get a redshirt and we're going to start our focus on getting him right for next season.”

It sounds like Hopkins will be right. On Monday, he told The New York Post, “My knee is 100 percent now. I feel like sitting out the rest of the year really helped me out a lot, because it gave me time to fully heal myself to the point where I feel like myself again.”

Make no mistake, Providence wanted him back next season, but it became apparent pretty quickly this offseason that a return was unlikely. There was also a growing fatigue in Providence surrounding the situation.

Hopkins has certainly seen a lot in his career. He went from Kentucky castoff to one of the best players in the nation at Providence as a sophomore.

He saw Ed Cooley, the coach he built such a strong bond with as a high school star, depart at the end of Hopkins’ season of redemption.

He became a hero to all of Friartown by sticking with the program after Cooley jumped, and then suffered a tragic knee injury nine months later.

Hopkins’ final season in Providence exemplifies the era of college basketball we are all living through. With his future (and another year of eligibility) on the line, he didn’t return this year. So much for pay-to-play.

As soon as the season ended, Cooley and Pitino were waiting — Cooley with their past relationship and a Brink’s truck to lean on, and Pitino with the backing of a billionaire sports drink manufacturer and his Hall of Fame credentials.

Of course, nothing is public in the NIL era, but Hopkins will assuredly make life-changing money in Queens next year, and he’ll trust Pitino to squeeze every last bit of potential out of him with his playing future on the line.

If Hopkins never got hurt that fateful day last January his story likely would have a dramatically different ending. Maybe the Friars make the NCAA Tournament. Maybe he decides to go professional after the year. Maybe he could have returned home alongside Carter, both Friars for life, and got the same hero’s welcome DC enjoyed.

It certainly doesn’t seem like Providence will ever feel like home again.

The feel-good stories that made up Hopkins’ career — his resurgence from an afterthought at Kentucky to one of the best players in the country, his commitment to PC after Cooley’s shocking departure, the wild emotions of his return against BYU — will be forever overshadowed in Providence by how it ended.

That’s the cost of doing business in the modern age of college basketball.

So much has changed in such a short amount of time in this sport. The feel-good moments, the several that Bryce Hopkins provided earlier in his career, are becoming increasingly more rare.

College basketball has always been a business, but it’s never been so strictly transactional.