I do think you're definitely right, he's not going to play as much, but I think that might make him a better player when he is out there.

It's like everything else though, we just don't really know. There are players that get stats when the team is bad but disappear and fade into the background as the talent around them gets better, and there are players that get better because they can play a better defined role and excel in it.

We'll see what kind of player Gordon is.

I just can't wait to get this season started. I'm excited that we have options. Last year, we had to ride or die with Gordon, Chandler, Flagg, etc. Didn't matter if they worked their ass off and played well and just floated around the court doing nothing, they were gonna get 20 minutes minimum.

And I can't even imagine what practices looked like. We were like five deep before you got into guys that were either walk-ons or true freshmen that didn't have any summer workouts.

I'm just glad we finally have options and can have debates on who is going to get minutes.

No doubt. There's several guys that I'm interested to see what they've really got. I think we're going to know pretty quick if Diarra and Hefner can play at this level. Based on last year you'd say probably not, but like I said it's hard to know what we can really read into last year.

Early on I liked the idea of Hefner growing into a guy that does some of the dirty work in the paint, he's a decent athlete and seemed to have a good knack for getting boards but he clearly needed to add some weight. He looked like Alex Caruso trying to play like Nathan Walkup.

No chance he plays the old Shaka Smart at VCU style, playing 10 guys 15-25 minutes each?

I think early in the season we're going to see a lot of guys as we figure out what works, but no, I wouldn't think so.

For two reasons. One, we're deeper than last year, but we're not like deep-deep like a Texas is going to be. I think we're going to have at least a couple of guys, like Williams and Radford, that play a lot of minutes and are clearly better than our other guys. VCU did that at times because there wasn't much dropoff in quality in their depth.

The second is they did that to athletically overwhelm people and even if we're deeper, we're not particularly athletic. We don't have that depth of speed and length where we're going to be trapping people full court the whole game.

I'm also interested to see how he mixes rotations. If you have Radford, Williams, and Gordon on the floor at same time, that is a lot of 6'2" and under at same time. We'll see.

bg92 said:

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I'm also interested to see how he mixes rotations. If you have Radford, Williams, and Gordon on the floor at same time, that is a lot of 6'2" and under at same time. We'll see.

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Radford rebounds and defends, and even scores in the paint, like he's 6'6" though.

Yeah, I'm not really worried about size being one of our problems.

I think we are athletic and fast, certainly compared to last year.

O/U on number of games it takes before the team becomes watchable by anyone besides their mothers? Buzz has this way of getting the ugliest basketball possible out of his teams early in the season. I expect no different with number of new faces. I expect a decent product at some point this season.