Well, the 9th man needs to be capable of getting onto the court so that you have a playable option in case of emergency/injury. (To judge this, we can say 28 games is a fine bar)
If not, then it's likely the team has a depth issue.
Illini Basketball 2026-2027
If not, then it's likely the team has a depth issue.
And (again) games appeared in does not prove a player is capable of meaningful playing time
These players tend to come in the game when the score is out of hand or for spot minutes if there's foul trouble
There is literally zero point in reading in to the number of games a guy came in and played for 30 seconds
You know what, that's a fair point. When you say 9-deep, I assume you're saying a 9-man rotation. So, what is a rotation player? I've typically seen it defined as someone who plays at least 10 minutes. I drilled down into that season a little more, and for the sake of argument included some numbers on players playing 5+ minutes as well.
Games with Skyy:
Competitive games - There were 5 in the Skyy Clark era. There was not a single competitive game in the Skyy Clark era where 9 players played 10+ minutes. In 4/5 of those 8 players played 10+ minutes. In the one exception, against Northwestern, only 7 players played 10+ minutes. In that game Sencire, despite starting, only played 9 minutes, and Ty, Lieb, and Paxton Warden were able to check in and combine for 2 minutes. Bar the Northwestern game, all of the other competitive games had 9 players check in for at least 5 minutes.
Blowouts - Skyy played in 8 blowouts. 9 players made it to 5+ minutes in 7/8. 9 players got to 10+ minutes in 7/8 blowouts.
In total, 9 players made it to 5+ minutes 12/13 Skyy games, and to 10+ minutes, 7/13 Skyy games.
Games with neither/Skyy nor Luke
Competitive: There were 7 competitive games in which Skyy did not play, before Luke came back. 0/7 featured a 9th player with at least 5 minutes. 5/7 did not even have a 9th player check into the game.
Blowout: There were 3 blowouts in this time period. All three had at least 10 players check in. 2/3 had player #9 play at least 5 minutes. 1/3 had player #9 play at least 10 minutes.
Games with Luke
Competitive: After Goode came back, all 10 games were competitive. We had 9 players check in 8/10 of those games. We had 9 players play 5+ minutes in only 3/10 of those games. We did not have a single game in which 9 or more players played 10 minutes, even after Goode came back.
So, if rotation is 5+ minutes, then we only had 17 games with a 9-man rotation (in which 9 or more players played 5+ minutes) and 12 of those were with Skyy, so after Skyy left, we only got to a 9-player rotation in 5 of the remaining 20 games.
If rotation is 10+ minutes, then we only had 9 players meet that bar in 7 games, and every single one of them was a blowout while Skyy was still on the team.
As an added fact, after Skyy's last game against Northwestern, in 7/19 of our remaining games a 9th player did not even check in, even for spot minutes.
So, yeah, I take issue with the idea that at any point in that season we played 9-deep in any meaningful way....
But assume we did. Who was the 9th man? You've framed it as being Ty, but if you look at those box scores, after Skyy left Ty was solidly in the 8-man rotation, as was Sencire. They had been promoted to 7th and 8th man by teh beginning of conference play, and were never demoted back. In fact, neither Ty did not come in 9th in minutes in a single game after Skyy's departure, and Sencire only did one time. Here are the guys who came in 9th in minutes for the 20 games Skyy did not play in:
None (only 8 played) (7x)
Brandon Lieb (6x)
Luke Goode (2x)
Jayden Epps (2x)
RJ Melendez (1x)
Sencire Harris (1x)
Zaccharie Perrin (1x)
This is just all a lot of info to say that this 9th man framing is at the same time both an oversimplification of something complicated (the fluctuations of a roster and minute allocation for dozens of reasons) and an overparsing of something relatively unimportant (the quality of a player likely to mostly play spot minutes and in blowouts).
And lastly, this. The utter absurdity of looking at the chaos that is the 2023 roster's minute allocation, looking at our current roster, and trying to make any kind of comparison. Unless things go just horribly wrong, we won't be in the kind of situation where we are asking Zens and Brown to be Ty and Sencire. And if things go that wrong, then there is no magic that any coach could have conjured in the transfer portal that would have saved it.