Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread (April 2019)

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#226      

ILL in IA

Iowa City
When Illinois has been good, they put players in the NBA draft. Recruit top talent, develop lower ranked players. Either way, they put guys in the league. We have had 1 player get drafted 2007-2018. Recruiting, development, it has all let us down. I hope Ayo can change that for us in a few years, and then we have a steady stream of rosters we can look back on and say had multiple NBA guys on them.
 
#227      
Players are over rated and ratings are overrated. Mix. Chemistry, and coaching do matter. We lacked for a PG and then we lacked for quality big men, and now for a four and maybe a coach with BIG experience. Not berating our coach because I love his moves, hiring assistants that can recruit, recognizing a weakness and recruiting bigs, and developing a roster with varied pieces. Not big on patience but still optimistic that we have a smart coach who will adapt. Want to see drastic improvement next year, however.
 
#228      
I guess the real question would be: are our top 100 players failing at a normal rate or higher? If we are doing worse with top 100 players than average, why is that? Bad scouting? Bad skill development? Or just bad fit in the program? I don't really know the answer, it's just curious, because the chances of us just constantly being the team that gets the overrated top 100 players who wash out doesn't make a lot of sense either.
That is the question, and God bless the person willing to put in the effort to finding out. What I will say is that if you have a relatively high washout rate -- say, half of the guys ranked 31-100 hit and the other half don't -- you can have pretty wild swings in what looks like relative success or failure based on randomness or statistical noise alone. If you're just talking about ten guys over eight years, you only need one or two unusual cases to skew the results quite a bit.

I don't necessarily think that there's anything about being Illinois that causes us to have more guys flame out. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's something about John Groce that causes it, though I'll never know for sure. And the jury is still out on Underwood until he's got guys who stick around long enough for us to judge, knock on wood.
 
#229      
When Illinois has been good, they put players in the NBA draft. Recruit top talent, develop lower ranked players. Either way, they put guys in the league. We have had 1 player get drafted 2007-2018. Recruiting, development, it has all let us down. I hope Ayo can change that for us in a few years, and then we have a steady stream of rosters we can look back on and say had multiple NBA guys on them.

Weber as a head coach has had 50 guys play professionally.:D
 
#230      

ChiefGritty

Chicago, IL
it begs the question of how good the RSCI rating is as a method of evaluating talent

Like Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst system ever devised, except for all the other ones.

For whatever it's worth I'm 100% with you on a healthy skepticism for how recruiting rankings translate into wins. On the spectrum of how people view that correlation, I'm on the lower end. Reasonable people can disagree. But what you can't do (and I don't want to accuse you of this personally, I'm speaking about the board more broadly) is slide up and down that spectrum at will, depending on what's needed to advance the narrative. And then what's doubly crazymaking is the way that narrative just cycles back to the top after every coaching change with seemingly no awareness of what we've all just collectively been through.
 
#231      
What boggles the mind is how about half of those didn't turn out to have much of a career at UI. Either the rating services are not that accurate or we have done a poor job at player development/utilization or both.

Rating services are devised to get clicks and interest....we all do this very well to see who will be our next "great" player or fail? We also do this to lament how bad our misfortunes can be or have been. But riddle me this....who would have taken these players previously?

2014 Illini recruited #4 Alexander and we got #41 Black, I think we did well there? Ratings weren't 100% here.
2015 Illini recruited #19 Evans and we got #35 JCL, I think we obviously lost this one...Ratings were still not 100% because Evans was way better!
2016 Illini recruited #105 Moore and we got #230 Lucas, I would argue we definately got the better here.
2017 Illini recruited #46 Goodwin and we got #147 Smith and #149 Frazier....I would argue we WON both of those so far! Love Frazier!
2018 Illini recruited #30 Ayo and got him, would anyone on any other player take # 10-11-12-13 from this year based solely on rankings? Many would and you would have gotten Simons, Garland, Hagans or Grimes? I will take our #30 over these guys.

I tried to pick a player of same basic position and our highest ranked player for that year. At least what I could find anyways. So many clamored for the "whiff" players and when it was all said and done, the ILLINI fared well, just not well enough as a team.

The point is the services have a bunch of armchair experts, just like most of us and evaluators who place certain rankings on players based on their subjective viewpoints. Rankings are numbers and that is all, that said we need to keep getting some lower numbers for sure, but I am not disappointed in what we got, WHEN we got them. We had nothing to sale any player other than PT basically and even that as always is not a given.
 
#248      
Smart kid who values a 5th year f free education? Samba and January still good is my spin.
 
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