Vanderbilt Basketball Player Report Card: Lee Dort

As usual, the player report cards are in order from fewest to most minutes played. So we start with Lee Dort, who was last among Vanderbilt’s 13 scholarship players in minutes. (I’m not giving report cards to the walk-ons this year. None of them played more than 30 minutes all season.)

Dort playing the fewest minutes on the team was fairly predictable; as I wrote in my preseason player preview, Vanderbilt already had Liam Robbins and Quentin Millora-Brown around, so minutes at the five were going to be difficult to come by, and Dort’s recruiting ranking was based much more on how good he projects to be in a couple of years than how good he is now. The reason he played the fewest minutes on the team, though, wasn’t necessarily predictable: Dort missed 13 games late in the season due to injury, and his absence immediately followed his season high in minutes when he played 16 in the first game against Alabama.

That actually really did a number, because Liam Robbins missed that game and the next three before being lost for the season in March. Had Dort been healthy, he would have gotten more minutes in Robbins’ absence; as it stood, he played 26 minutes the entire rest of the season during Vanderbilt’s SEC Tournament and NIT runs. What we did see from Dort when he played was, well, pretty much what we expected out of him: a guy with great size and athleticism who still looks like he’s fairly new to playing basketball. Dort attempted 20 shots on the season and made 13 of them for a 65 percent clip; that’s to be expected when the vast majority of your shot attempts are layups and dunks. And in his limited action, he posted excellent rebound and block rates, averaging 13 rebounds and 4.3 blocks per 40 minutes of action.

He also shot 30 percent from the foul line and got whistled for 25 fouls in 111 minutes of action, and he had a 29.4 percent turnover rate — an extremely high rate for a guy who wasn’t handling the ball much.

In other words... well, this was exactly what we expected from a talented-but-raw big man. So far, Dort has not entered his name in the transfer portal, which is good because I would prefer that he still be at Vanderbilt when he reaches his upside.

Grade: C