3star_recruit

Gotta start somewhere.

Excellent points. Just because you're the best player on the floor doesn't mean you won't get outplayed occasionally by a lesser player. Sometimes it's just not your night.

Most schools recruit locally. Some of those players only become role players or don't make the rotation at all. If a player becomes disgruntled, that's the cost of doing business. Hughes has been a classy, team-first guy the whole time he has been here. In this case, there's no sign of a disgruntled player. We're just engaging in the normal message board chatter of who makes the rotation. I'm rooting for Hughes to develop into a glue guy. He has the right attitude for it.

Makes sense. Outside the obvious draw of when either Caitlyn Clark or Angel Reese is in town, St. Louisan Napheesa Collier is a perennial All-Star. I think an WNBA team would do decent numbers here, provided they draft well.

Yuri Collins wasn't recruited to be the man. He was a lightly recruited point guard from a small private school whose role was to be the distributor. He averaged about 5 ppg a game during the summer for Bradley Beal Elite and that's about what he averaged here his first two years. But I agree that Coach Ford required someone to be "the man". When Perkins got injured, Yuri was forced into that role. And when Perkins never returned to form, he was forced into the role again. It's not a role for which he was suited or recruited. That's why it didn't work.

I don't think his defense is exaggerated. I'd say he is an above average defender. Unfortunately last year was the worst defensive Billiken team I've ever seen so having at least 3 guys who were below average defenders more than cancelled that out.

If a person's main contribution is volume stationary three-point shooting, I don't see it how that person gets enough minutes as the 9th player in the rotation to have a meaningful contribution. The reason Coach Schertz mentioned that McCottrey has the potential to change our ceiling is because he's the best driver on the roster. He does something nobody else can do. If Hughes is in the rotation I suspect it's because he has developed into a glue guy. The streaky 3-point shooter we've seen thus far in his career won't cut it.

That would require genuine artificial intelligence. We ain't there yet.

I've noticed that when you dig deeper into work related around AI, it usually means automation. Which computer programmers have been doing forever by writing scripts in their computer language of choice. Now regular folk can just ask computers to run scripts by using human language instead of computer language.

I agree that if Coach Schertz deviates from his norm of an 8 player rotation it's because of McCottry's potential. As he stated in the Sunday radio interview, "if Amari can get to where he's able to play consistent minutes, it changes our ceiling as a team."

Some families will tell you early in the recruiting process by words and actions where they're leaning. This is a good thing. You don't waste time on recruits who aren't interested.

It's a different level of basketball but Coach Schertz's 13 years at Lincoln Memorial gives us insight into how he approaches depth. Most of the time he played eight guys. A typical minutes distribution was three guys that play 30+ minutes a game, two that play 25+, two that play about 15 and one that plays about 10.

If there are good solutions to the challenges faced by schools like SLU then why are so many schools not exercising them?

Agreed. There are players who have managed to play for decades at the high school level, college and pros without suffering a serious injury. They've played for numerous coaches. They've literally played thousands of games, including pick up games and charity games against random guys looking to make a name for themselves. There is no magic formula for avoiding injury. A lot of this stuff is just luck.

Rose-Hulman is a small engineering school yet has twice as many students and at least four times the full-time staff as the Parks College at SLU does. The engineering-focused schools were created with job placement at tech companies in mind. There are some things that certain schools do better than better others. If you want a career in aviation or aerospace engineering, I think Parks is a good solution. Other than that you're rolling the dice. But I would say something similar for the majority of universities where engineering is not a primary focus. There are so many engineering schools designed with the end goal in mind I don't know why anybody would go to a liberal arts/medicine/business-focused school instead. Unless you're one of those kinds of students that can successfully merge a liberal arts training with STEM skills. But those kind of people are in short supply.

Per his commitment video, Luke's mother is from Washington, MO and his grandmother is still here in St. Louis. There's quite a few native St. Louisans that have moved to Texas over the years. Hopefully this is the beginning of the Texas to St. Louis pipeline that SLU coaches have been attempting to build here for decades now.

Another 2025 player who can light it up from 3. https://underarmournext.com/basketball/players/?spid=664666fb7bd85d6a9a83087f&c=2024boys

The Mountain West plus two also-rans from the Pac 12 just seems like a rebranded Mountain West to me. What do our West Coast folks think?

It's definitely the worst thing to happen to college fandom. But hopefully there's a couple of tournament appearances left in the program before the football schools officially demote us to minor league status and send us grumpy old men into Billiken retirement.

CenHudDude asked if an NIT berth would be a step in the right direction. Sure, this team was horrible last season. An NIT berth would mean we've experienced one of the greatest turnarounds in Billiken history. My assumption is that the overall skill level of Coach Schertz's team 2 years from now will be higher than it is now. That's been the track record everywhere he's been.

I thought the whole point of Coach Schertz was to bring in a coach that is fundamentally sound, is committed to a style of play and constructs his rosters accordingly. I thought it was the way he does business that would be the bedrock of our success, not whether there are three seniors on the roster in any given year.

Three-point shooting is a issue at the point guard as well as at the open forward slot. I trust that Coach Schertz did the best that he could given the short recruiting window he had to work with. He's already corrected for this in his recruiting of the 2025 class. I think third place is a fair expectation of this year's team given its deficiencies.

I've never cared whether a coach plays with a short bench or a long one. There are numerous examples of coaches winning with either philosophy.

10.7 ppg 7.0 rpg in the 7 games listed for his AAU team. Shot .550 from the field, 72% from the free throw line and 48% from three. https://www.thecircuithoops.com/roster_players/71825108

I'm not sure Coach Tillett is recruiting locally but we did make this young lady's final cut earlier last month. She's a double double machine out of Texas: