RUBillsFan

Nothing is guaranteed (including Goodwin's contract), but moving from the Wizards to the Suns should be a tremendous positive for him no matter how you look at it. He moves from a team likely to finish near the bottom of the standings to a title contender, but still has arguably just as good a path to playing time given the Suns lack of depth. The Suns aren't the pinnacle of NBA player development / success, but they're not a laughing stock like the Wizards. One of the articles @Pistol linked had a quote calling Goodwin "one of the very few player-development successes the Wizards have had in recent years". I think that says a lot about Goodwin as an individual overcoming the Wizards awful player development and you wonder if he can improve further in a better organization (see Rui Hachimura). The Wizards have incentive to give big minutes to recent high draft picks (see Kispert's minutes that @gobillsgo mentioned). They also have last year's 1st round disappointment Johnny Davis and this year's #8 pick (and could add more draft picks if they sign/trade Kuzma and/or Porzingis). On a team with no incentive to win, those guys might get more run than Goodwin just because they have a perceived higher upside and are getting paid more. Whereas the Suns don't/won't have any such recent high draft picks to compete with. Further their only incentive is to win. If Goodwin is a winning player, he'll get run. It is not difficult to look at a guy like Bruce Brown on Denver and see the role Goodwin can play on a title contender as a gritty defender / hustle guy surrounded by elite offensive pieces.

Ha! My first thought is always that I've got something screwed up on my Apple Podcast app because it never seems to work the way I want it to.

Am I missing something? Did we jump from S3E32 to S3E34? What happened to S3E33?

I’ll take Tre Mitchell or Jesse Edwards and Joe Touissant please.

If we “save” the last 2 scholarships, there will be fewer pages and it will be cheaper to print they programs. Ford is really helping the AD out.

May wanna check that “lesser-than-A10” assertion. WCC has been better than A10 every year since 2018 and San Francisco has been a top 100 team every year in that same time frame. They made the NCAAs as an at-large in 2022. I’d argue they’d pretty firmly be a top half A10 program. UD to San Francisco may be a small step down, but A10 to WCC or A10 to San Francisco is not.

I'm comparing their attention seeking behavior, not their content.

My hope here is that Yuri didn't / doesn't know anything about the sh*tposting on Twitter. His goal is to make the NBA. He's got bigger fish to fry than paying attention to BG's social media activity. An agent / PR person might deal with that stuff if Yuri gets paid, but for now it would all be on him and he probably (or hopefully) doesn't think about it. BG's schtick (same that made you guys want him on the show initially) or some prior connection that made them acquaintances sold him that partnering with him on a few things to boost his profile as we good idea. The fact that BG was clearly wrong on Yuri in the portal and the K-State stuff shows that he has little / no influence there and you're making a mountain out of a molehill over the Snarfs event. To be clear, I'm not casting any shade at you guys for having him on the show. There wasn't any indication back then he'd later be sh*tposting and trolling. To me, BG is like a basketball only Austin McBroom without the "attractive" wife and "cute" kid to exploit for followers. He'll resort to any means to get attention. His initial setup of just trying to showcase small guards wasn't generating clicks, so he's resorted to stirring the pot to get more attention.

Please note that I'm defending Yuri here and not BG: BG set up an event at Snarfs for Yuri to sign autographs for people and Yuri showed up. Based on the reports from people who attended, it didn't even seem like either made any money from the event because it was free. I don't think that means sh*t in terms of influence. You guys had BG on your Podcast and were friendly / complementary of him at the time. That doesn't mean BG has any influence over you.

The problem really isn't the amount of money SLU is spending on basketball and perhaps NIL although NIL is less transparent (for now). As @JMM28 pointed out, we were never / will likely never be competitive with the likes of Duke, UNC, Kansas, etc. SLU spends plenty of money compared to the rest of the A10 & even outspends some of the lowest spending Big East teams despite not having the same TV revenue rolling in. The issue is that SLU has had a piss poor ROI on that money that is being invested in the basketball program.

Dropping my post from 3/31 here because nothing has changed: https://www.billikens.com/forum/index.php?/topic/31201-gibson-jimerson-returning/&do=findComment&comment=754861

I assume there is a translation / ESL quirk going on here, but this quote is both hilarious and awesome. Perhaps we can give Stef the nickname "General Big Man". I really like the idea of a big guy who understands he's big and is fine doing dirty work under the basket.

I don't take any pleasure in pointing this out, but the bigs currently on our roster aren't very good or at best are massive question marks. At this point, Braun would easily be the most proven big man on the roster if he signs with SLU. He has started every game except 1 for a top 75ish Santa Clara team the past 2 seasons. Our other bigs are Dalger who got less minutes / starts for a sub-300 Tulsa team and 2 question mark foreign bigs. Unless Braun signs and we somehow pull a rabbit out of our hat to land someone like Connor Vanover or a reformed / born again Christian Carte'are Gordon (maybe both), I think Braun starts for us. He's not likely to carry us to the NCAA tournament or anything, but he's one of the best realistic options I've seen.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not. If it's not, I can't decide if I agree with it. On one hand desperate times, desperate measures. He'd probably the the most talented player on the team at a position of need. On the other, he's got so much baggage he'd have to pay extra on Southwest.

Hmmmm an Austrialian coming to SLU and having athletics success. We've seen that before at SLU in a sport that involves a ball and a basket. Maybe that could happen again.

Coach, do you mean go to guy on the perimeter in terms of making a 3 point shot or do you mean a guard / perimeter player to give the ball to & create his own shot? 3 point shot - pretty obviously Jimerson Creating his own shot - I'd say Sincere Parker

Harriman was at SLU 2008-2012, Nebraska 2012-2015, New Mexico 2015-2019, and Cal 2019-2023. Wilhelm Breidenbach started his Nebraska career in 2021 & was born 8/23/02. I believe he would have been a 12 year old 6th grader the last time Harriman was a Nebraska assistant. I'm doubtful there is any connection there. There is a possibility Harriman would've been involved in recruiting some New Mexico players. The only one that's a possibility I can tell that is still in the transfer portal is 6-11, 200lb sophomore Birima Seck originally from Dakar, Senegal. He played very sparingly for NM just under 6 mins / game in 28 games. 1.0 ppg, 1.3 rpg. I think Seck would have been a sophomore in HS the last time Harriman was an assistant at NM. Of course there could also be guys he recruited while at Cal or NM that ended up going somewhere else or transferred elsewhere. It would be a lot more work to track those leads down.

To be clear, other than Medley tweeting at Ware there is no indication SLU has reached out or that he would be interested in SLU. I'd probably take Ware over Allen as well mainly because I agree he has a higher ceiling and I think he's more of a 5 has more potential as a rim protector on defense. I also think (not positive) that Ware has 2 season of eligibility left and Allen as 1. All that being said, even with recent commitments, I'm still more worried about our depth inside than at guard and I'd take both. With some fluidity in the positions, I think some combo of Medley, Hughes, Parker and Noland can handle the 1/2 with Jimerson/Hargrove/Thames at the 3. 4/5 is Dalger and 3 guys who are question marks (Rivera, Zhang, and van Bussel).

Leaving this here: https://twitter.com/treyballc/status/1654139564775071744 Medley is always recruiting for SLU on twitter, so probably nothing here. That being said Lance Ware would be a great fit IMO. Didn't get much playing time for Kentucky, but his rate stats were pretty good.

If the guy can ball out & spell normal words well enough to pass college classes, I'm okay with him misspelling a fictional good luck creature.

Worth noting on Dalger. His shot% per KenPom was 25.1%. Shot% is the percentage of a team’s shots taken while the player is on the court. That would have been 3rd highest on the Billikens last year behind Perkins and Parker. He played for a Tulsa team that was putrid on offense (296th in adj off efficiency & 301st in effective FG %). Therefore, he was one of the better offensive options on Tulsa. The hope here is that with better offensive options surrounding him, he could have better shot selection & raise his overall efficiency. Based on Tulsa's roster, I'd guess that Dalger played PF (or was the 2nd biggest guy on the floor) almost exclusively last season. I'm not sure that means he is a true PF, but I'd guess that he's play a similar role for SLU given the current makeup of our roster.

The info / noise (or lack there of) on international recruits compared to most US players is pretty jarring. Searching "Stef van Bussel" on twitter gives you exactly one result from 8/5/22 prior to the @Midtown Madness tweet about van Bussel annoucing on Instagram. Really wild for a guy who a reasonably well known media guy like Goodman is saying sources say is "one of the best available bigs in Europe". That being said, mystery box players are more exciting from a fan perspective than a guy who we know more about / what to expect.

I haven't seen this previously posted, but another new rule in the CBA that should significantly help Yuri's chances of making an NBA roster is teams are going to be allowed to carry 3 two-way players in stead of the past limit of 2. That's essentially 30 more NBA roster spots. I'd guess Goodwin would have gotten a 2 way deal a year earlier if teams had 3 back then.

Per Wikipedia, Conklin's elbow incident(s) happened during the 2015-16 season when he was with the Townsville Crocs. He was suspended & then was some contract shenanigans too, but that seemed largely a beef between Conklin & Townsville rather than the NBL as a whole. He then played in Puerto Rico, Domincan Republic, and France over the next few years, but returned to the NBL in 2018-19 with the Illawara Hawks. That leads me to think that he'd still have connections in Australian despite being "booted out". Piecing together the info on Wiki, I believe he has played 4 season in Australia (1 being cut short with the suspension & contract termination), 4 in Puerto Rico, 4 in France, 2 in New Zealand, 1 in Dominican Republic, 1 in Turkey, and 1 in Portugal. Note that some of those were in the same year & I'm not sure all were full seasons. I don't think he'd necessarily have better connections in Europe than Australia, but he could potentially have connections in all those places. Edit: None of this is meant to necessarily be an endorsement of Conklin as an assistant coach nor do I think he'll be the hire we make.

I like Harriman. SLU needs to put the resources in to be able to successfully recruit Australia / NZ for his hire to really make sense / be great.