Illini in Italy
- Illini HQ, Florida Panhandle
Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread
stop it with the depth thing. this team has more depth than any illini team EVER!
It's hilarious reading all your posts referring to player ranks as a value to this team after Keaton Wagler just did what he did.
Should have predicted pro-Carey Booth revisionism would eventually be a thing, yet I really did not see it coming lol.
He played well, but inconsistently, at a mid-major. Imagine he's some Mountain West guy with the same numbers who never played for the Illini. Would you ever devote a post to saying we should transfer that guy in? In fact, let's say he's Boise St.'s Andrew Meadow, a guy who had arguably a better season than Booth. Meadow was ranked as the #193 guy in the portal and ended up transferring to Oregon, a team that's expected to end up near the bottom of the conference. I don't recall a ton of people on here clamoring for that one, and I kinda feel like we'd have been a bit underwhelmed by it. But I'd much rather have him than Booth, so why are we talking about Booth again?
Also, what did he ever do while here that showed he deserved more playing time? Hearken back to the Chicago St. game as an example. Extremely weak opponent. Booth gets 11 minutes. He is the only Illini not to score a single point. Even AJ Redd and Keaton Kutcher got on the board (in just 3 minutes each). Booth did however manage to lead the team in one category - turnovers (tied with WR, though Riley played more minutes so tiebreaker to Booth).
Is it? The freshman you're talking about wouldn't get minutes on any championship contending team this year.
It's pretty much a guarantee that somebody claims this every off-season.
Every single offseason that I can remember! "Why don't we use a hockey-style substitution. We could go 12 deep! No one can stay with us."
Every season: The deepest team EVER!
By game three: We have no shooting depth and we need to tighten the rotation to six players, people want Nico Moretti playing 35 minutes a game.
I feel like our depth as a team this year is different. Our overall talent is obviously great, but every guy on the bench can fill the primary role of the guy in front of them and also add something of their own. I think except for Vaaks, that is. We have no other primary ball handler, but have guys that can fill in and provide different looks.
When did I say we should've transferred Booth back? Clearly things didn't work out here, so no.
Because he was a former player. Sencire Harris became the talking point for that very reason -- he was a former player.
I never said Booth deserved more minutes.
My point was that TEAM was very deep. Because we were so deep, somebody had to be buried. It just became Booth.
He's not as much of a dud as some think, given he had a fairly solid year on a good mid major team.
Sencire Harris who people DO want to transfer back, shot 11% from three last season. Booth was at 41%.
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But what a memory!
But Sencire Harris would?
Why isn't Sencire's jersey in the rafters yet?
Booth would be the missing piece for this year's squad!!! Everything I saw his first go around here screamed "Big 10 caliber big man". He made tremendous strides at Colorado Poly Tech State University last season.
Jesus, put down the pipe
Booth would be the missing piece for this year's squad!!! Everything I saw his first go around here screamed "Big 10 caliber big man". He made tremendous strides at Colorado Poly Tech State University last season.
Jesus, put down the pipe
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Proven at bricking shots?
Edit… that’s mean to Sencire. I actually liked him a lot and know his value isn’t merely tied to shooting.
Just think we play a lot different now and Brad wants everyone to be able to space
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I, for one, am shocked a senior Sencire Harris wasn’t moved by the board pitching him on “come compete to maybe be the 9th man, and guard an opposing guard up 3 with 15 seconds left.”
(Which honestly I’m not even sure on that anyway because we can’t risk him getting the ball and being fouled)
Eastern Michigan makes sense. He isn't really a P4 player.
hmmm very unequivocal comment by you.... Have you seen all of them play, and charted their progress this summer?
Doesn’t that make sense though? As a thought exercise, I’d ask what underwood/groce teams here you thought were deeper than this one.
I’d say it’s been about as linear growth as can be over 9 years of Underwood when it comes to talent level.
Depth isn’t as black and white as “Brad played freshmen year Sencire, he trusted Sencire. He didn’t play Lee or Petro, he didn’t trust them.” A large reason Sencire played is because we didn’t have guards NEARLY as good as Boswell + Keaton + Stoj/Davis
Our overall talent level is much higher, therefore our depth is better. I unequivocally believe Petro is better than Jaylon Tate
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Nuance when discussing our depth?!?!? How dare you!
I tend to agree with you about the quality of Illinois' depth this year but honestly think this shouldn't really be argued about, mostly because it's statistically irrelevant for elite teams. The roster as it stands is a top-10 team at worst, likely a top-5 team, and potentially a top-3 team. In all reality, having a lot of depth or utilizing your deep bench (9th+, etc.) as a core part of your scheme doesn't have anything to do with Championship basketball, at least according to data from the last 5 seasons.
I got a bit of time to take a look at this statistically, and depth (for which I'll use bench usage) has a weak-to-negative correlation with a team's success.
If you look at the top ten teams from each year's bench usage, each year it's less than the bench usage for all teams in D-1. Most elite teams float around the 200-250 rank, and the table below shows the difference between top-10 teams and all teams in terms of % bench usage.
Further, you'll find the same correlation between the top 10 overall programs (average KP rank over the past 5 years) vs their bench usage over the past 5 years. The Pearson correlation between overall rank and bench usage is r=0.165 (happy to share the data set if anyone is interested in digging into it more).
We have awesome bench pieces for what we need them for, no matter how good any of the Freshmen are. If they're really good, we have a great problem, if most aren't B1G caliber, also great, because we have a elite-level top 7 or 8 already, which statistics show is what you need to win a championship (not 9 or 10). I hope this helps end this one, because at the end of the day, we're an Underwood-level team having Groce-level arguments.
illiniswish09
- Northwest Suburbs
AJ Storr???? But how???!!
5 teams in 5 years would kinda be legendary. He bounced back pretty nicely from the KU debacle. But I never was all that enchanted.
I have to imagine he'll draw some serious interest.