UMass men’s basketball on Wednesday earned its first verbal commitment of the 2025 class in Archbishop Stepinac point guard Danny Carbuccia.

COMMITTED‼️ pic.twitter.com/Su2amd3ObJ

— danny carbuccia (@nolimitdannyyy) September 18, 2024

The class of 2025 is significant for UMass because it will be the first class of players to play in the MAC, after UMass announced its departure from the Atlantic 10 — viewed as a stronger basketball conference — back in March.

The 6-foot, 172-pound Carbuccia is rated as a three-star recruit, per the 24/7 Sports composite, which ranks him 166th in his class. The composite rates Carbuccia as the second-best recruit of the Frank Martin era, trailing only Tafara Gapare, who transferred out of UMass after his freshman year in 2022 and now plays at Maryland.

Carbuccia visited UMass over the weekend of Aug. 31-Sept. 1.

“I saw he was happy about it, you could tell he definitely was glowing,” said Ross Burns, a former UMass player who trains Carbuccia and other players in the New York City area. “He was excited about it.”

Carbuccia ultimately chose the Minutemen over offers from Hofstra, Providence, Maryland, West Virginia, Xavier, Dayton, Seton Hall, St. Bonaventure, Fordham, Saint Louis and more.

“Thank you to @Jaylencurry0 @RahsoolDiggins3 and the rest of our players for helping @UMassMBB grow to where we are right now and caring to help us for the future. #YourPlayersAreYourBestRecruiters” head coach Frank Martin posted in a tweet.

Carbuccia is entering his fourth year as the starting point guard for Archbishop Stepinac, a Catholic high school in White Plains, N.Y. well known for producing Division I talent. As a junior last year, Carbuccia averaged 8.7 points, 5.9 assists, 3.3 rebounds and 1.6 steals while playing alongside five-star recruit and Arkansas commit Boogie Fland for a Crusaders squad that finished last season at No. 13 in ESPN’s national Top 25.

This summer, Carbuccia led the FIBA U18 AmeriCup in assists (6.0 per game) and earned All-Tournament honors while playing for the Dominican Republic. Burns said Carbuccia’s success at the international level was what intrigued him the most.

“He’s been playing with pros for a long time and he’s had success,” Burns said “… His teams always win. When you get a point guard that’s like that, they find ways, I think that speaks a lot about them as a player and especially about that position, because you do a lot of things as a player that don’t show up on the stat sheet.”

Come the start of his senior season this winter, Carbuccia will hope to lead Archbishop Stepinac to its third straight New York State Catholic High School Athletic Association City and State championships.

“He has a tad bit of an old-school mentality and style of play in this modern game,” Archbishop Stepinac head coach Pat Stepinac told Zagsblog.com. “He has an ability to get guys shots and create for himself. He’s one of the strongest and most dynamic blow-by guys in his class in the country and what the UMass community and faithful should understand is that you’re getting a winner.”

Carbuccia choosing UMass over offers from other A-10 schools and Power 4 programs will at least temporarily assuage concerns that the Minutemen would not be able to recruit as well with their move to the MAC. Last season, UMass recruited the best class in the A-10, per 24/7 Sports, but the MAC finished 24th in the NCAA’s NET rankings, while the A-10 slotted in at eighth.

“Will their recruiting drop off from the Atlantic 10? I would say there is a pretty good chance that it will drop off slightly,” Toledo head coach Tod Kowalczyk told the Gazette in March. “The Atlantic 10 name recognition is better than the Mid-American Conference in recruiting. It just is. Anybody that states otherwise is not being realistic. We see that in our state when Dayton gets involved. The Mid-American Conference schools have a very difficult time beating them.”

UMass athletic director Ryan Bamford said in March that UMass would solve that by pouring more money into Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) deals. UMass spent $4.5 million on men’s basketball last season — over a million more than the highest-spending MAC school – and Bamford vowed to increase the budget even more when UMass joins the MAC.

“The MAC in basketball, from an NIL perspective, is doing very little,” Bamford said in March. “We’re going to go in and we’re going to be spending probably half a million dollars a year in NIL collective money for men’s basketball.”