Fresh off the press from @Cuts_from_The_Corner:
Good kickoff to a portal post-mortem.
We didn’t land our first portal commitment until 8 days after we’d wrapped up our class last year. Again, positive by comparison because it means we were patient and held on until we found higher quality, but still illustrative of the struggles we had early and our inability to close any of our initial priorities.
Nice summary of the multiple ways to interpret the arc of the portal season (being patient vs hitting roadblocks with targets).
Thanks for sharing it!
As college basketball and football become more like their pro counterparts, important to remember that in the NFL and NBA, teams don’t “win” free agency in the first week of it. The first week is when teams overpay for splash signings. The depth is built, and the value additions happen, after the initial frenzy dies down. In college hoops, especially as guys continued to enter the Portal (“became free agents”) nearly a month after the season ended, patience will become ever more a virtue.
Coming into the offseason, it sounded like the staff’s solution was primarily going to be “add more talent” and they were going to do so by being more aggressive with NIL.
I’m not sure I understand the basis for that statement. Can you elaborate?
I’m not sure that’s as relevant when there’s no salary cap, though.
With no cost limit and with so few roster slots, beating other teams to the best players to enter will likely be a viable strategy.
Of course staggered entry of players does add a wrinkle of complexity and need for flexibility, but if someone prioritized top recruits in the market in week one and landed all of their guys I’d imagine that would be a positive for them.
Wouldn’t be the same thing as bleeding through your cap with still x roster slots to fill.
When listening to CTB recap the season, he mostly focused on talent and how they needed to look at that - saying the team had mostly maxed their potential (which I didn’t agree with).
It sounded then as though his primary solution was going to be embracing NIL and adding talent.
I suspect this offseason has made it clear that that can’t be the only solution - there are going to have to be some changes to approach on the court as well (which it sounds like he’s coming around to in comments from recruits but we’re still unclear of the extent and/or what that looks like).
It’s basically - this recruiting cycle, while eventually a good one (I believe), likely isn’t as good as they imagined it could be when leaning into NIL and should be a signal that they do need to work to overcome the narrative if they want to maximize their appeal in the portal.
Always appreciate your insight and analysis. As usual, great stuff. Thanks
It’s like MLB in that there are the Yankees and there are the A’s. No functional cap, but still budgets and a finite number of dollars to go around.
Right, but in that environment the bigger spenders tend to be in better shape compared to something like the NFL where you can get saddled with dead cap and everyone’s on level playing field with ability to spend, etc.
Most looking forward to the Saunders piece.
I feel like I have a pretty good beat on Warley. He can run the offense and play credible defense and is a veteran who knows the league, but most likely won’t shoot at any great efficiency or certainly volume. There’s some slight chance that Tony unlocks some upside, but as I said, slight.
Power? There’s very little film unless you want to make your eyeballs bleed watching BABC play zone. I suppose there’s some film… but not much. He only took 9 2-pt FGs.
Saunders has a lot of film, is relatively unknown, and has a pretty high range of outcomes.
Saunders shooting numbers don’t match the eye test. He looks like he can be a really good shooter. Even if he gets to like 35-36%, at his size, that’s valuable. I’d like to see more balance between his 2pt FG and 3pt as he’s been pretty trigger happy from deep. His interior FG% is strong at 57%.
I think he’s basically what I wanted McKoy to be. It’s still fascinating to me how he would A) choose to leave a program like SDSU at a time when he was going to be one of the key players and B) choose a program like UVA relatively quickly with plenty of other high level options on the table. Sounds like he knew what he was looking for.
I’m also kinda curious why he left / why he chose us. He left a good program that has been doing well, that’s closer to home (Phoenix).
We are a natty-caliber program, with a potential HOF coach, so that’s always good, but no regional affinity, no prior connection that I’m aware of, etc. I mean, great diploma, good NIL, nice place.
Like, Power is objectively a better pull, but we came in a close second the first time around, so it makes more sense. Anyway, good problem (meaning, trying to figure this out) to have.
Considering what happened this past season I think we did pretty well. It’s now up to Tony. I still wish he had hired a bright young offensive genius .I love Tony but he’s always been a defensive coach.
Let’s see how it plays out. We have a lot of young talent . Looking forward to it
Great job as always Cuts
Great piece. I’m also curious if TB is going to change anything or rely on talent. He might feel like he won his way with better talent before, who essentially created their own offense while he thought the defense. Of course, he had the luxury of locked-in players who had to learn his system.
One thing I think deserved more mention is our admissions department, which doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo yet.