Thomas Allen is officially going to be the last casualty of the Tim Miles era of Nebraska basketball. The shooting guard entered the transfer portal the day after Tim Miles was fired, but there are rumblings that his decision was not a side effect of the firing. In fact, it appears that Allen was going to be departing the program even if Miles had somehow been retained.

Allen had claimed he was adding his name to the portal just in case he didn't like who the new head coach was going to be. The thing is, most people knew that Fred Hoiberg was going to be the head coach even before Tim Miles had officially exited the program.

This is one of the reasons people are claiming the guard had enough of Nebraska before everything went down in the last week. It should also be pointed out that Hoiberg was actually hired on Saturday (March 30), but Allen waited until after the press conference on Tuesday (April 2) to officially announce he was departing.

Thomas Allen looking for greener pastures

As Nebraska basketball fans have pointed out, the shooting guard was a key recruit of Kenya Hunter. Hunter left shortly after the 2017-18 season came to a close. He moved over to Connecticut in a lateral move that had plenty of Husker fans more than a little nervous. It turns out it was exactly the kind of lateral move that Matt Abdelmassih made from St.

Johns. Of course, Abdelmassih is also a long-standing, good friend of Hoiberg.

That wasn't the case when it came to Hunter. The assistant's departure was more about "moving his career forward." It's likely he knew that Miles was very much on the hot seat. His leaving also took a recruit or two from the Huskers' grasp. Now the team has lost one of the only returning players that contributed to this season's statistics.

Nebraska basketball will struggle next season

Though he missed the end of the season due to injury, Thomas Allen was certainly a contributor this season and likely would have been a full-time starter next season. This year, Allen started 25 of 29 games played and averaged 30.2 minutes. This was after averaging just 9.9 minutes per game as a true freshman.

He also scored at a clip of 8.7 points per game and shot 49.6 percent from the floor and was a dead-eye from three-point land, hitting 36.4 percent of his shots.

It's clear that wherever Allen ends up is going to be getting a talented offensive player and the Nebraska basketball team is going to struggle to replace his contributions. Fred Hoiberg's next move is going to be trying to keep the rest of the team currently on the roster, on the roster come next November.
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