The starting lineup once the season is really rolling feels like it will be Pope, PJ, Shelley, Mack, and Cade. Jalen Reece,Zach,Rylo will be first off the bench. Tyshawn, and Luke and Jamie who is apparently making the jump will be there, but after that Jeremiah Green, and Chris seem like the obvious players who won't get minutes during the season. I feel like Josh, and Neiko are going to push the older guys. Neiko looked like our best defensive player let alone guard in the Bahamas. Might just have to force Bucky's hand to get him on the floor. Josh will battle Jamie for that back up center minutes should be interesting.

Yikes! Bullets are your friend!

chill was in the middle of class

It's high-quality analysis like this that keeps me reading on this forum.

I think Mundey will take any minutes of Archie's by conference play or more. I am very high on him

Well he starts for sure if we don't have Griffen which is definitely possible. And I don't know if he'll actually play at the five but it's more to show that I think he could be on the court with a lot of different combinations of people. Like if him and Mgbako and Clemence are all out there we don't really have a five but we have like three fours.

Put another way, I think he's our first 3/4/5 off the bench (Griffen pending) but I don't know if that means you slide Mgbako down or what exactly.

But I've seen exactly zero practice so who knows, just projecting possibilities.

vs florida i want to see haggerty, shelley, Mgbako, Clemence, and vinson. tired of seeing them tower over us

Serious Lee said:

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vs florida i want to see haggerty, shelley, Mgbako, Clemence, and vinson. tired of seeing them tower over us

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Sadly have already written that one off as a quad 1 loss that doesn't hurt our resume.

Like Pope, Shelley, Phillips, MgBako, and Clemence I believe Green is also recovering from surgery too. If Green is healthy I think we will be surprised and he will get minutes. His circle is so important to recruiting and retaining Shelley, if he's good enough he sees the floor. #64, Top-100 player, Consensus 4-star. Has to be a plan for him.

"If you want to play, make me play you. Make it so that I'm an idiot if I don't have you on the court." Gregg Popovich

I actually really like this graphic. I feel like my biggest questions are:
1. Exactly how much better is Jamie Vinson this year? Him making a big jump could be key to this season being good vs great.
1a. We've all sean the highlight videos of Josh Irving and seen Rothstein tweeting about him, but how well will that translate to SEC play? Either way, I'm excited we have this guy.
2. The minutes split between the backup guards Archie and Mundey. I think Jalen Reece is a known quantity, but it seems like Archie and Mundey both provide great defense.
3. This one is obvious, but... will Rylen and Pope stay eligible?

The Vinson question is definitely #1, but I think my #2 question is how well can Mgbako defend in the paint.

bobinator said:

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The Vinson question is definitely #1, but I think my #2 question is how well can Mgbako defend in the paint.

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My personal take on both of these questions is to expect little and hope to be surprised.

I'm hoping the poor defensive performance from Mgbako last year was the result of the lingering injury, but he was mostly just an average defender at Indiana. We're definitely going to need him to be a shot blocker at times.

I don't think we need him to be a shot blocker, we just need him to be able to stand his ground and rebound. If he's even a Henry Coleman-level defender and rebounder I think that's probably good enough.

But that's definitely the right approach for sure. Especially with Vinson. It's not absolutely unheard of for a player like that to make a huge jump (Elonu is a pretty good comp) but I'm not going into this year expecting him to be any better than a replacement level player down low. (which would still be an improvement over last season, but not like a huge one.)

Elite athleticism still needs direction and coaching. Different sport, but Reed went from running around on raw talent to playing steadily enough to help win 11 straight last season. Mgbako may not need to become an elite interior defender and better positioning could be enough. He told TexAgs he plans to study more film this season. Combine that with coaching, and those raw tools could become controlled, productive defense.

Topher17 said:

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bobinator said:

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The Vinson question is definitely #1, but I think my #2 question is how well can Mgbako defend in the paint.

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My personal take on both of these questions is to expect little and hope to be surprised.

I'm hoping the poor defensive performance from Mgbako last year was the result of the lingering injury, but he was mostly just an average defender at Indiana. We're definitely going to need him to be a shot blocker at times.

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Poor defensive performance from Mgbako last year? Didn't he play all of like 5 minutes before he went down for the season?

He played in seven games and his defense was mostly bad (only players on the team with worse DBPR on Evan Miya were Isaacs, Vinson and Dominguez.)

But, it was pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that he wasn't really healthy last season even when he did play.

The Archie-Mundey split may be the most interesting one. If both can defend, the minutes could come down to who takes better care of the ball, organizes the offense and fits best next to Pope and Haggerty.

Mgbako's 19.9 DR% trailed only Agee at 24.8% and Vinson at 24.5%, so defensive rebounding was already a strength. Better positioning and holding his ground could make him much more effective inside.

Eh, I think there's a couple of layers that make those stats unreliable. Mgbako only played in two games against top 100 opponents and one of them was the Florida State game that we won by like 40 points. The other game was SMU.

Same with Vinson. He only played 11% of our minutes on the season against top 50 opponents. If he was actually a good rebounder he'd have played a lot more minutes because that was a pretty big weakness for us last season.

The other layer is that they were playing with Agee who basically wipes out the other team's best rebounder.

Put another way, I think Mgbako was an okay rebounder when he was our second or third best rebounder on the floor, but can he be our best one? If he's going to hit those 18-and-8 type numbers that Luke and Rothstein or whoever else are throwing around he's going to have to be much more physical on the block and on the boards than he was a year ago.

And we're not talking about them being able to go out and rebound against fringe NCAA Tournament teams. If we're going to reach our second weekend potential we need them to go out and rebound against elite teams.

Yeah I think the story of this season is going to be how well we manufacture points when Haggerty is off the floor. That's going to determine a lot of things.

I have visions of us basically having a lineup of like Reece/Archie/Shelley/Clements/(someone) that plays basically the middle third of each half and its entire job is just to create absolute havoc and ramp up the pressure to an insane degree and wear down the other team.

I am mostly expecting Phillips to play that Agee role of removing the opposing team's best rebounder. My question is if our other guys can improve at actually then ending the possession. Far too many times last year Clemence and Vinson had relatively easy rebounds land at their feet that got scooped up by the other team.

And Federiko. The ball seemed to be able to somehow phase through him at times.

Bobalou. I think you just described Buckyball. Let's go!

bobinator said:

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And Federiko. The ball seemed to be able to somehow phase through him at times.

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Currently plays for a professional team in Cyprus. Northern Oklahoma, Tech, and BCS environs to......Cyprus. Unsure if he took a pay cut from NIL levels though.

presumably a massive one