I've been bored and looked through some past season stats to see how they compare to the current guys. Now that we've seen the team in live action a bit, I thought this might be an interesting thought experiment, and might establish where expectations lie for the rest of this season and beyond.

Obviously you have the two great seasons 17-18 and 20-21. The preceding seasons are interesting. 16-17 didn't necessarily look like anything special, but you a stellar recruiting class and they hit warp speed. The 2018-2020 seasons seemed disappointing at the time, but they really just needed a little more depth to take off.

My stance this season has been that the team is full of talent, but the inexperienced coaching staff isn't getting the most out of it. That could still be true, but looking more closely at these past seasons has softened my stance a bit, or at least bought Drew a bit more rope. In retrospect, last year's roster might be the weakest in the past decade. But Rubin looks like he'll end up being really really good, and I feel like Watson and Dawson would fit right in on the final four team. Norris, Dolan and Dame all perfectly fine role players, but all gone after this season.

Then there's Phil -- super talented, but kind of a question of if he can fit into a fully functional offense, or if he's destined to be the top scorer on a bad offense. And does anyone actually know if he's eligible next season?

I'd love to be proven wrong, but based on everything I've heard Phil will definitely not have an extra year of eligibility next year. This is his last season.

I'm pretty sure that's right, but Verbal Commits has him as a redshirt junior, which threw me.

I think Krutwig was a program-changing player that we will not see the likes of again. Otherwise, our current talent level is pretty similar to the 2018-2022 years, albeit these teams seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to basketball IQ and cohesion. Also, those teams played together for multiple years, whereas now we just get whichever 5th year Ivy League guys we can find and play them as locked in starters.

There's talent of different types-- athletic and skills. And then there are intangibles like drive, conditioning, emotional stability/maturity, basketball IQ, coaching ability, work ethic, and a host of other factors. Body wise, we're probably the best off that we've ever been considering height, length, vertical, and speed. I think the conditioning of that 2018 team was pretty good-- they looked like they put the work into the gym for the bodies they had. (Absent Krutwig, we didn't have anyone over 6'6" on the court more than 20 minutes all year). Aundre Jackson was listed at 6'5", and he was our backup center. We have more physical talent now, but these guys haven't been together multiple seasons like the 2018 team (and 2021 team).

Comparing this team to 2018 is probably just silly, but one thing that jumps out about '18 is we had seven core guys that played, plus Skokna and Satterwhite playing limited minutes. Four scholarships went to guys who hardly played at all (Negron, Avery, Shanks), and another to Uguak was redshirting.

As others have said, trying to play 10 or 11 guys doesn't work.

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