For some reason, I've not seen a single bb writer talk about anyone we have beyond Monte. I mean, Monte deserves the praise, but not a one seems to recall that we have Matt Thomas, Naz Long, Deonte Burton, a few solid grad transfers, and a few solid new additions coming in. Niang, Nader, and McKay are big losses, but I think we'll pick up pretty close to where we left off.
We were also pretty bad in the "luck" statistic last year - lost a ton of close games and games in overtime. History says there is no "skill" to doing that and teams tend to regress to the mean of winning 50%-losing 50% of those games in the long-term.
i.e. the Ejim/Kane team was super lucky, the team after was kind of lucky, and Georges' senior year was an unlucky squad, add it up = average luck over the long-term
If we regress to the mean on that, even if the team itself is not as good on a per play efficiency or some other metric, we might look just the same for rankers and the committee come March. That's even assume we regress all that much as a squad.
I doubt there's 25 teams that have a better core than Morris, Thomas, Mitrou-Long, and Burton coming back. That's 57% of your minutes covered right there (assuming they each play 28 minutes in a seven-man rotation, which is probably low, considering I would expect all of them to play at least 30 per night). There's some question marks in the remaining portion, particularly in the post, but our expectations don't need to be high. If Holden, Bowie, and Young can go out there, maul some people on D, rebound, and catch some lobs, they've met or exceeding expectations, to me. The guards can do most of the hard work and scoring.
That's more than we got from a distracted McKay and, well, not much behind him, last year. I would figure we'll end up in the #4 to #6 range come March.
Not our year to nab KU, but I could see is #2 to #4 in the conference, mixing it up with WVU.
