This is what should happen..................should

Posted on: February 6, 2019 at 07:07:49 CT

We lost Puryear. Not sure anybody is really panicking about that. Mitch is starting to come around a bit. Santos should get better....more confident mainly. And we have a very well regarded frosh. More well regarded than Puryear was, or probably is.

Losing Geist's grit will hurt, but Dru Smith should be a more talented and athletic player. Not that I expect Dru to dramatically outscore Geist, but hopefully he's a little more efficient and can play better D with his athleticism.

You should see notable improvements from Pinson and Watson. Both have already improved a lot this year and it is very reasonable to think that if they were playing like they are now a month ago, we hold onto a win or two.

Tilmon has made big strides the last few weeks and should continue to develop into a dominant force. It has taken longer than we all hoped, but the ball looks like it is rolling now. Again, imagine if this had started a month sooner. Probably 1-2 games difference.

Pickett probably has a lower potential gain, but we should still expect him to improve.

The sophomore slump is real, but it usually applies to guys who start great guns as freshman and then come back to reality. It does not usually happen to guys who start slowly as frosh and build along the way.

Mark should improve, but how we may see that improvement is in consistency more than him having bigger high end games.

Nikko is providing respectable backup minutes. Not great, but it's no longer a trainwreck when he's out there. He'll continue to get slightly better.

We are not going to be great next year. Anyone thinking so is foolish. But we can and should get back to about the 20-win mark and be right in the mix for a tourney bid. A lot of our losses have been blown leads or very close games. It does not take a lot to start getting those back other than simple experience.

So. let's try to add up what we hope could happen.

Trade Geist (13.7) for Dru---We should expect Dru to put up 12-14 ppg and hopefully shoot more like 45% instead of Geist's 41%. Dru's career average is over 50%. Maybe he has slightly fewer turnovers and slightly more steals.

Trade Puryear (7.4) for Jackson and improvement from Mitch (2.7)---We should expect those two guys to combine for at least 10 ppg.

No reason we should not expect Santos (1.6) to improve to say 5 ppg or he won't play and Jackson is playing well enough to surpass him.

Not unreasonable to see Pickett go from 8.3 to 10. He has been in double figures in 5 of the last 8, where he started doing that in 3 of the first 13.

Similar with Watson (5.0). His scoring average is up 0.5 ppg in the last 10 games. No reason we should not be able to expect him to add 1-2 baskets per game. I'd like to see him get to 10, but 8 is very fair.

We all see that Tilmon has played much better lately and his ppg is up 1 over the last 5 as he has stayed on the floor. We should absolutely expect him to continue to develop and probably to start to do so at a faster pace.


We are averaging 68 ppg. If Martin does not use pace to hold the team to that range and allows the offense to do what it is capable of doing, the modest gains noted above would put us around 75-ish ppg. Obviously it's not that clear cut and doesn't quite add up like that, but it is a ballpark estimate.

Other guys on the roster may play a little, but they will not make a difference in the season.