Is Adonis playing? With him I think this years team wins, without him, probably still win, but it'll be interesting to see how Finke, JCL, and DJW perform under different circumstances. Might change my mind.
Illini Basketball 2018-2019
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Deleted member 746094
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Yes. The front court, obviously, is the questionable matchup because the guys you listed were terrible and the bigs on our current roster aren’t much better(on paper).
Hands down our current 1-4 are better than what you have listed for no other reason than what we have already seen on the court. Trent over TJL, Damonte all around over JCL(spit up shooter, what else?) and especially if he improved his shot even marginally, Andres/Ayo or the best intramural player currently enrolled at UofI over Mark Smith. Kipper is All-Big Ten talent if he gets out of his own way. We will struggle at first because of youth and because of the competition we are up against but I think our backcourt will be athletic, fast, relentless and deep. Or should be....
ChiefGritty
- Chicago, IL
Does Austin Colbert still have eligibility left?
Well, Black isn't going to playing college ball anywhere next year... But I'll give you Matic
Who is coaching them?
It is always easy to compare "new" players with former players who did not pan out. Obviously, the former players already ended their career as Illini, for the new players there is always hope, so everyone will view them in a more optimistically positive light. Yet, the new players can certainly end up as bad as worse than former players and may move to the same "former" player category in the future that we now compare them to. Rinse, repeat.
Deleted member 746094
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Per Hampton’s 18’-19’ roster he is a R-SR.
You really wonder??? This Illini team would kill that team.
Epsilon
M tipping over
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I suspect he's making a point, not wondering.
So stick with the players who have a proven record of ineffectiveness, then?
Good point. Compare this list of guys to our current team but only use the rankings/hype/expectations coming out of high school. I would pick every one of those guys over the current team except Ayo over Tejon.
But with Jordan and Dosunmu both at 6'5" and probably starting (if Jordan doesn't he will play a ton) that would be four starters 6'5" or better. Add in Tevian Jones at 6'7" off the bench, and it isn't a great difference. The Flyin' Illini also had 6'3" Larry Smith in the lineup quite a bit. Now, is this current group even close in athleticism to that group, probably not, and that would more so be the difference than 1" here or there.
Huh? The point is that these hypothetical comparisons are meaningless because former players have ended their careers, yet "hope" is driving "success" for new players although they could end up better but also worse.
Not sure where you got "stick with the players who have a proven record of ineffectiveness?" Former players have ended their IL career one way or another.
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From various posts you've made, I get the sense that you're very concerned with the roster turnover from the past couple of years. I guess I'm less concerned when I look at who's headed out the door and feel like it's unlikely that we'll do worse with the guys coming in. No better, perhaps, but not worse. That's a bit different than having judgment clouded by optimism around the shiny new object.
I am actually less concerned with roster turnover by itself. I just do not agree with the repeated statements that roster turnover was just created by Groce's recruits/players in a change of culture effort. Underwood's entire class left the program, his own recruits.
The concern is recruiting, especially failure to close and whiffing on Fall recruiting desperately scrambling for recruits in the Spring, having to take chances with lower ranked recruits to fill scholarships from Fall and having additional scholarships open. As I have said before, the chances that all of our lower ranked recruits will pan out is slim to none, so turnover is inevitable even this Spring (it is an inevitable cycle). Fall recruiting is the cornerstone of successful recruiting, unless you are a blue blood like UK.
As far as expectation on "new" players it is really easy to say now that "new" players (lower ranked) will be better than Mark Smith, Tejon Lucas, Finke, JCL, Colbert, and DJW, but in reality there is no basis to justify that "new" players like Kane, Higgs, or Giorgi will indeed be better. They could be worse. If you can turn the point in time, the same high expectations were true for Mark Smith, Tejon Lucas, Finke, JCL, Colbert, DJW and others... and if all of them were coming in the same class, you could easily make a case that these players (Smith, Lucas, etc.) would be better than Kane, Higgs, and Giorgi. Guess what, if Kane, Higgs, or Giorgi happen not to pan out, their names will be added to the "former" player list and future "new" players would for sure again be unlikely to perform any worse. Rinse, repeat.
I wouldn't disagree that there are going to be players who wash out, every program does. Sometimes you even lose players who leave for reasons other than their inability to perform at a high level. And I think Underwood will lose more players than an average coach, if we're to believe he's inherited his philosophy from guys like Huggins and Martin.
Some of the guys that he brought in last year won't make it. But my personal expectation isn't, and will never be, that everyone coming in will be better than everyone going out. What I will say is that it's unlikely that the guys coming in will be markedly worse than the guys coming out, simply because the guys going out performed very poorly by high-major standards. The dust hasn't settled yet, but my expectation is that one of the guys on your list will perform well at a P5 school, and that's Coleman-Lands. (Who, incidentally, was not an Underwood recruit.) The balance of the list save for Mark Smith wound up at mid- or low-majors, and did so for a reason.
The situation that this team is in right now blows. But the guys who left didn't really establish themselves as guys who could meaningfully contribute to a winning P5 team, regardless of what we thought of them coming in. Their performance in college is a far more meaningful data point than whatever their ranking coming in was, and honestly, that's all I care about. And that performance could technically be worse -- you know, the team could go 3-15 instead of 4-14 -- but it was bad enough last year that I don't really consider the possibility that this year's team could put up a worse record to be meaningful.
That's what I mean when I say that the guys coming in shouldn't be any worse, and that's why I'm not rending garments over anyone's departure.
Sounds like the Golden State Warriors!
Illwinsagain
- Cary, IL
Of course, you are leaving out Ayo and Tevian.
Seemed like they just wrote that article based on individual player ranking. It was incredibly generic. 9th place isn’t too bad of a prediction though.
No I am not, we are talking about expectations of lower ranked players who people present as unlikely to do worse than those departed (most of whom were higher ranked), I am actually a big advocate of talent via recruiting, and the reason that I "expect" Ayo to do better is because he is highly ranked and talented. My position has always been on the need to drastically improve overall talent at UI without leaving positional gaps. Talent like Ayo, which unfortunately is not enough. I am not the one who is having unrealistic expectations without those more talented players.
We will probably end up exactly where we were last year...in that case, we will have had an exceptional year imo, due to simply getting all the new parts to meld together with most of it being unranked or low ranked freshmen.
Geez that was some poor writing! And the analysis left much to be desired as well:
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