Just for the sake of conversation, who’s plan B if storr goes NBA or elsewhere?
If we don't happen to land Storr, I do expect the exact same backlash from fans a la RayJ.
Then we will get to hear about it all next year despite being ranked in the top 5-15 teams in the nation and going to the E8.
Everyone said this same thing last year. Doom/gloom crowd didn't think we'd be any good at all. We didn't have RayJ so cancel the season.
To kinda synthesize these two together
If a whiff on Storr just becomes an un-replaced empty chair a la RayJ, we have a few internal backup options unlike that situation, but the most prominent one as a bucket-getting wing is now Tre White.
And as I said earlier, relying on Tre White to be a leading scorer-type star would be an undue risk, it COULD work, but it's not a high percentage bet.
However, it is a higher percentage bet than Marcus Domask being a straight-up point guard in the Big Ten, something that neither Domask nor Underwood themselves intended or thought was something that would work. It's not the way we started the season even after crafting the team without RayJ.
You need a point guard to succeed in basketball, and Underwood and staff colossally failed in constructing last year's roster with that in mind, and had they been forced to shoehorn Ty Rodgers or others in that role all year we would have been much, much worse.
Insane amounts of luck, both on and off court, blessed us this season. Illinois Basketball deserved all that luck and more after what we've been through the past two decades, but the reality is that we got it. Credit Domask's flexibility and basketball IQ, but it shouldn't have worked and it's a dang miracle it did.
Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity though, and one thing that's true about Underwood come what may is that he's one of the best and most willing tinkerers in college basketball. Whatever goes wrong next year, and something always goes wrong in competitive sports, we will keep trying solutions until something works.
I guess what I'm saying is, on some level it does a disservice to how good Underwood is as a coach and how good a job he did last year to retroactively deny how completely screwed we were without RayJ. The doomsayers were right, and BU MacGuyver'ed his way out of it anyway.