Illinois Hoops Recruiting Thread (October 2018)
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illiniCA
- DC Area
And I thought we weren't on the same page. This is really how I feel.
He also listed Laphonso Ellis from East St. Louis and Kevin Bontemps from Morton.
Yeah what's up with that?
If Walker is gone then I'm more concerned with a prospective assistant coach's recruiting ability than anything else. I don't think we've had much in the way of damaging defections, unless you count Black's graduating and moving to the pros as a damaging defection, which I wouldn't. I think this team will be significantly better than last year's team, with a lot more offensive weapons.
This narrative is so tired. Yes, he was a master at diamond in the rough finding and player developing, but all his good teams contained some high rated talent. Not to the level of Duke or Kansas or UNC these days, but guys like Dekker and Butch were 5 star guys, and I'm sure if recruiting ranking was as prolific as it is now, many more would be higher ranked, especially guys like Joe Krabenhoft, Jon Leuer, and James (?) Bohannon would've been higher, though IIRC they were considered good gets.
So yeah, Bo Ryan found a lot of lesser ranked kids and turned them into great players. He was a fantastic coach who implemented a system and stuck to it (thought you could argue Dick Bennett laid the foundation perfectly.) However, he had plenty of what we would consider top 150 players. He did fine (top 5ish in the Big 1Ten1) on the recruiting trail, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. Notice even his "down years" correlated with some of the worst recruiting classes he had.
Moral of the story is that you need to do more than just one thing good, unless you're a blue blood, and there will only ever be 4 of those. Recruiting some talented players, developing them and other less talented players and being a good basketball coach/mind are necessary skills for any coach that wants to be a perennial B1G contender.
Side note, I'm fine with a revolving door of 2/3 scholarships every year, so long as they are Matic level production, not Black (though I dont blame BU at all for Black leaving). We need to show kids we can develop them. Having a team consistently only of sophomores and freshmen doesn't work unless they are all top 50 players.
Ask Matt Doherty or Billy Gillispie if blue bloods only need to do one thing good.
The four guys occupying those jobs at present are all HISTORICALLY great coaches who would have been enormous successes absolutely anywhere.
sacraig
- The desert
I bet they do their workouts in the equivalent of 1960s Huff Hall locker and weight rooms, too, right?
You are completely missing the point (or points) here.
First, Assembly Hall opened in 1963. If you are honestly claiming that 1960s basketball is the same as 2010s basketball, then I don't know what else to say here.
Second, sure Duke plays in a historic, old-style gymnasium (which, I'll note, is actually twice the size of Huff, not "slightly larger"), but it isn't the game facilities that have the impact. As long as game facilities draw a crowd then it's pretty irrelevant (and sometimes even that isn't relevant). Practice and training facilities are where the big sell is. We aren't talking about selling tickets to fans, who want a good gameday experience. We are talking about selling training and playing opportunities to athletes who, just maybe, might someday get a shot at the pros. Training facilities matter, and having state of the art training facilities (where players spend most of their time anyway) can be a huge selling point both for the awe of it and for the fact that good training facilities can help players reach the pros.
Duke may play in a (charming) old building, but they practice in a palace. We don't.
Foggy Notion
- San Francisco
I find it interesting that optimists call realists pessimists.
Exactly! I don't think that facilities are the deciding factor in getting a recruit but, one will certainly lose recruits if one doesn't have prime facilities.
I think Ohio St. got some tremendous mileage out of Bates-Diop just coming of age. He wasn't much of a factor prior to this last season. If AJ has a Bates-Diop season this year, all the credit in the world would go to our staff for player development and recruits will be beating down the door next year.
sacraig
- The desert
One more point supporting my original thesis, this time taken from the football side of things: Jimbo Fisher left FSU in part because Texas A&M offered him a fat paycheck. But the biggest factor he cited was that the FSU administration would not commit to upgrading the training facilities in a timely manner, and A&M's administration would. Training facilities are a huge party of today's haves-and-have-nots landscape in NCAA athletics.
Whitman, for his part, seems to understand this.
I have an acquaintance who is an athletic trainer and he recently got to tour Alabama's facilities. They basically have stuff that you'd only expect to see in places like the USOC facilities in Colorado Springs, or in forward-thinking pro facilities. I would expect that OSU or Oregon would have that type of human performance infrastructure as well, and I can confirm that Illinois does not.
It's not the only factor, but for athletes who are focused on making the NBA it should not be taken lightly.
The only thing Matt Doherty did well was get in a fight with Chris Collins. In a just world, that would be enough to make him a successful coach.
That elite coaches tend to excel at both player development and recruiting is an enormously confounding factor when folks try to parse out whether on-court talent leads to winning basketball or vice versa. For the Selfs and Caliparis and Williamses of the world, the answer is simply "yes."
IllFanInMi
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Guest
Facilities help but are not the main determinant. Illinois has never had the best facilities in college basketball, yet there were periods of time (80s and 1999-2006) that we really really good, if not outstanding. If we are waiting for all facilities to become state-of-the-art to become contenders in the B1G, then unfortunately that will be a long wait. Again, taking a steady NIT team and making it a steady NCAA team is not the impossibility that some fans believe. It should be expected to happen, and it should actually happen before major upgrades are undertaken let alone completed. We just completed a major major renovation at Assembly Hall (SFC), yet there was no impact on performance or recruiting.
I don’t think anyone is saying that any specific thing is the deterrent for recruits but we there needs to be a focus on some of the limitations since they are the ones that can be controlled. At the very least we should have some of the best practice facilities in the conference but I’d be surprised if we’re even in the top half.
I understand that, but hey, we just finished an amazing renovation at Assembly Hall that was frequently cited as a potential positive influence. No real effect on performance or recruiting. Was it a bad idea? Of course not, great idea and needed to be done. But that was not the core of our problems. Same with practice and training facilities. We should eventually do a renovation, definitely. But it will take some time and in the meantime I believe we really CAN become a consistent NCAA team/program. Even before completing the renovations that will take some time.
It’s hard to say. Maybe we wouldn’t have gotten Ayo or Tevian without the renovation but we’ll never know. I agree with the last part though, if anything for my own sanity.
enormous successes...except at West Point. Success maybe...but not "enormous".
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foby
- Bonnaroo Land
The glass really is half full, and it really is half empty.
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