You brought up an athletic big who you’d love from the portal in the last week, and I thought it sounded perfect. Any recollection? Sorry for the vague reminder!
I posted this a while back, but our high school recruiting run from 2010 to 2016 was truly impressive. We had plenty of misses (as all teams will), but our hit rate was phenomenal. Then we fell off a cliff. (Note: I use ‘NBA’ below when somebody has played meaningful minutes in the league over multiple seasons)
2010:
- Joe Harris - STAR & NBA
- Akil Mitchell - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- KT Harrell - Transfer
- James Johnson - Transfer
- Will Regan - Transfer
- Billy Baron - Transfer
2011
- Malcolm Brogdon - STAR & NBA
- Darion Atkins - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- Paul Jesperson - Transfer
2012
- Justin Anderson - STAR & NBA
- Mike Tobey - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- Evan Nolte - Limited Contributor
- Taylor Barnette - Transfer
- Teven Jones - Transfer
2013
- Devon Hall - STAR
- London Perrantes - STAR
2014
- Isaiah Wilkins - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- Jack Salt - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- BJ Stith - Transfer
- Marial Shayok - Transfer
2015
- Mamadi Diakite - STAR
- Jarred Reuter - Transfer
2016
- Ty Jerome - STAR & NBA
- De’Andre Hunter STAR & NBA
- Kyle Guy - STAR
- Jay Huff - STAR
2017
- Marco Anthony - Transfer
- Francesco Badocchi - Retired
2018
- Kihei Clark - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR
- Francisco Caffaro - Limited Contributor
- Kody Stattman - Limited Contributor
2019
- Kadin Shedrick - Limited Contributor (potential star ceiling)
- Casey Morsell - Transfer
- Justin McKoy - Transfer
2020
- Reece Beekman - MAJOR CONTRIBUTOR (potential star ceiling)
- Jabri Abdur-Rahim - Transfer
- Caron McCorkle - Limited Contributor
2021
- Taine Murray - TBD
- Igor Milicic - TBD
Between 2010 and 2016, we landed what I’d classify as a star in every class but 2014, when we still landed two major contributors. Between 2016 and 2021, we haven’t landed anyone I’d classify as a star yet (although there might be some potential). Yes, we supplemented this with transfers, but you can’t paper over poor high school recruiting in a system like ours, especially when most of those transfers were only here for one or two years.
And honestly, 2022 is an amazing haul, but we need 2023 to be good too. While we love all of the 2022 commits, unless we luck into a repeat of the 2016 class, it’s likely not every single one of those guys will pan out. If we want to get back to where we were, we need to have multiple successive classes with stars or at least multiple high-level contributors.
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Daron Holmes. But he’s actually not that bouncey. Just tall with long arms.
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That’s an insane run of recruiting especially when you consider the caliber of player. There are misses at every lever but there’s more potential for a 3 star to miss or really stay at the same level than a 4 or a 5. The run the staff put together in that stretch is something that should be commended.
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Anyone know how good the teams we could potentially play next week are? I know UGA is pretty bad but what about Providence or Northwestern? Man it would be great to win that tournament even though the competition isn’t great. We need the confidence boost.
For those upset we weren’t in a more prominent early season tournament, I think it will end up being for the best.
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Providence beat Wisconsin at there place the other night and will beat us if we don’t get our act together
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Providence and Northwestern are both pretty solid teams. Definitely better than Georgia.
Providence has a really solid veteran big man, Nate Watson. Their guard rotation is a little chaotic at this point after losing David Duke (really unfortunate name), who’s on the Nets G-League affiliate now. I watched their game vs. Wisconsin and their backcourt had a hard time getting going — Aljami Durham is a good shooter, though.
Northwestern hasn’t really played anyone yet this year, but the projection systems seem to like them a lot. I watched them against High Point, who they blew out, and Pete Nance stuck out as a really good player. He’s a stretch-four type who can score from just about anywhere on the floor; it’ll be a good test for the defense if we play them because we haven’t seen a legit shooting big yet. They have a few guards/wings who’ll put shots up, the best one imo is Boo Buie. He looked good off the dribble.
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I’ve been thinking about this since last year. What happens if we don’t lose that game, if the offense looked as good as it did the first game?
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We lose to a team ranked even lower than Ohio in our NCAA tournament game?
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Maybe. Does it change recruiting? Just thinking out loud really.
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By that point, I think we were well into recruiting the 2022s, where we landed pretty much all of our targets. Maybe it would have helped with Keels, but I doubt it - I think once Duke offered that ship had pretty much sailed. But I can’t remember if we were still involved with any other 2021s at that point.
I think what is more damaging to recruiting is getting repeatedly blown out on national TV while barely being able to score and getting upset in the NCAA tournament. Not many folks were watching the SF game, and yeah, it dinged our ranking in the polls, but I think the Ohio loss was much worse last season.
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Teams used to hate playing us - we wore them down, we were relentless, we never let a team take off a possession, we got mad if a team had 2-4 points off fast breaks the whole game and we had enough size and mobility to contest 3s. Teams look at us now and see nothing but mismatches to exploit.
EDIT - to me this is part of the issue with transfers. The pack line is organic, you have to grow up in it for a couple of years in order to be the defense I describe above (along with a some players players who despise the other team scoring - Akil, Darion, Justin, Brax, Mamadi) - it becomes instinctual - five fingers forming a fist that just bludgeons the other team every possession. For the most parts, particularly the more recent transfers (Brax being the exception), even one here for two years, just don’t “fit” as well and the entire defense is degraded. I honestly think we can straighten the offense out to some degree, but we are light years away from where we should be defensively (I can live with 47 points against Houston, it kills me to give up 67 to them).
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Think you nailed it here
Used to be amazing to go to big game in JPJ against highly ranked UNC or Ville and see the other team midway through second half just wanna get outta there and go home
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Yep Fresh - we used to have cavalanches (can’t remember the last one). And it wasn’t the cavalanche that broke the opponent, we had cavalanches because we had already broken them.
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I don’t think recruiting is the problem any more in the sense of not being able to get our top targets. Since the national title we’ve been able to get what we want largely. There were a couple of misses in 2021 but we also swung for the fences a bit there.
The problem we currently have is the result of the just awful 2017-2018 recruiting classes compounded by evaluation misses in 2019-2020 classes. Frankly the Morsell miss is really the lynchpin of this mess right now. If he turns out to be what we thought we aren’t having these conversations
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You can add NBA to Devon, Jay, Kyle
I might also say Shayok was a major contributor before his transfer
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I don’t think anything changes, only difference the team has one more regular season win. The SF loss sucked, but it’s not some program ending loss.
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The Morsell mis-evaluation, Kentucky stealing Juzang last second, Jerome/Guy and Murphy leaving early (rightfully so, get the bag). Our roster hasn’t recovered and we don’t have the offensive talent that meet tony’s other standards to excel in the offensive sets he runs.
Im going to try to manifest more minutes for Carson, Taine at the 3/not a blocker, and Igor.
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Guess I’m just wondering if CTB sticks with the 5 out. Are we seeing M/B today? Probably so, again just wondering out loud. Bored during my lunch hour 
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The physicality of those teams was very different. The earlier CTB teams were bruisers in some ways similar to Houston. Big strong guards and wings that got after perimeter players and dogs in the middle. The mold of the Virginia player has shifted slightly, KG Ty ushered in a jump shooting era and changed the look of the guard position physically for the Hoos but those teams still had the physical bigs, Salt, Mamadi even Brax. Then it flipped and you had the shooting bigs in Jay and Sam, but you still had the smaller not as physically imposing guards in Reece Kihei, Casey was a slight outlier. But in a matter of 3 years due to roster turnover, a teams identity has quietly tweaked just enough that what was once a staple is gone.
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