John Groce:

That's an easy one, I couldn't have answered this a week ago, but we practice now and we grade out every practice, Brandon (Miller) may have to help me here, today we had no contact, so as of yesterday, if we had to play today, Paul would start at 1, DJ at 2, who else was the highest graded guys? It's so close, Joe Bertrand would start at 3, Myke Henry at 4 and Nanna Egwu at 5 if we played tonight.

You got those five there, Griffey and McLaurin and obviously you have Abrams (in the top 8). Brandon will tell you it's a dogfight, Abrams has made a heck of a comeback the 2nd cycle of practices, the first set of practices he had 4 days where he was like 7 assists and 17 TO's and that snipered him. We had a day off and he came back and I'll give it to him, he's close to 2:1 assist to turn in the second cycle, so he flipped it, he shot the ball well, he made a little bit of a comeback. The way it's graded out is half of it is like box score production when you look at a stat sheet.

The other half is transition defense, post defense, scores, positioning, jumping to the ball, blocking out, not bailing out on a charge, diving on loose balls, executing your responsibility on a ball screen. All those things are graded out and I think it's good. Practice is competitive, almost every segment we have is competitive. I tell them, there is 14 guys we have on that poster, I like all of them, but it's about putting the best team on that floor, and the guys who play the best together, and go out and earn it. I tell them players play (against) players, coaches don't play players, players play players, you want to earn it, go get it. At this point, those 5 would be the guys tonight, but some other guys have also made a lot of progress and will be significant contributors.

justsomedude