Norm Peterson

Roby could be an NBA player. He has the length and the athleticism. But NBA wings have NBA 3-point range. Right now, Roby doesn't. If he wants to be an NBA player, he needs to be able to knock it down from deep. Reliably. (40%+ as a college player)

Whoa, wait. You don't have Shavon in your top 5 most talented Miles players, but you have Ed Morrow there? Boy, I can't agree with you on that one.

It's almost self-evident to say but it bears saying anyway: If you aren't getting a lot of assists, then you either aren't scoring very much or you rely a lot on guys being able to make individual plays. And you can win with either style -- either a style that gets a lot of baskets off assists or a style where you employ a couple o Terran Petteways to beat their guy off the dribble. But I think basketballjones makes a great point. A dribble drive motion can involve assists. When your point guard beats his man and forces help, it's going to open up a kick out usually to the weakside corner or wing, or you get the dish to your big man at the rim. Those options would directly pad your assist numbers. And our problem in the past is that we've had guys who are afraid to take that kick-out 3. Just watch film from about any game in the last few seasons. Our guys spotting up in the corners are getting open looks ... and then passing out of them instead of taking the shot. It's not surprising we're toward the bottom in attempts. And if players were taking those shots (and converting a decent number) you'd see our assist numbers go way up. Hopefully, the influx of shooters coming in will have that effect.

Cuonzo is a good coach, too. So, if he can get some talent there (which he will with all the recruiting success they're having) he should be set. That's a gig that will serve him well as a launching pad for the Purdue job when Painter gets the axe.

Wow, that was fast.

I remember commenting at the time to the effect that Petteway hits shots most other players are afraid to even take and his ability to score in so many different ways would be an asset that we should enjoy while we have it and will miss when we no longer do. His ability to get shots to drop from creating his own offense was a rare gift.

One thing I think needs to be made very clear about this. This isn't a case of a rat leaving a sinking ship. This isn't "turnover among assistants" that people often fret about. This is a simple deal of a guy wanting to be a coach rather than an administrator of sorts and doing what he can to get his foot in the door. That's all. Good luck to Teddy.

Here's something interesting. Our team 3-pt % last year was 32.0, which was good enough for 303rd out of 347 D1 programs. If we improve our 3-pt % by 5 percentage points to 37%, it would move us up into the top 80 teams but only result in 2.7 more points per game (just a shade under 1 additional make per game.) Our team 3-pt defense last year was 39.9, which placed us 345th out of 347 D1 teams. If we improve our 3-pt defense by 5 percentage points to 34.9%, it would move us to about number 180 out of 347. And that would make a difference of about 2.9 points per game. But add those two figures together and it's a swing of almost 6 points per game. It would push our scoring average to 72.9 and our defensive average to 70.1. Given the influx of shooters that we're going to have and the fact that, with an emerging Jordy Tshimanga, we won't have to double the post as much on defense, I think those differences are reachable. It's going to be really interesting to see how all of this unfolds. This team might not end up being much better than they were a couple of years ago. But then again, they might be a whole lot better. I think we finally have a full array of pieces to play around with.

Good post CWG, and good questions. I don't have a magic crystal ball. Magic 8 ball is about as good as it gets with me. But, having said that, I think there's good reason that the BTN folks named Jordy as one of their breakout players for this coming season. He has a lot of tools to go along with fantastic size and a great work ethic. He was raw at the beginning of last season and just improved by leaps and bounds. I suspect the player who takes the floor for us this fall will be virtually unrecognizable compared to his beginning freshman self. Copeland has put up some numbers already that give us a barometer of what we can probably anticipate there. Palmer is sounding like a better shooter than he had the chance to prove at Miami. Same thing happened to Andrew White, so it's not out of the question that Palmer could produce a sizable increase in perimeter accuracy. Will he? Who knows. I do know this: We won't have room for all the guys who could get a lot better to show it. Only 200 minutes per game to spread among an entire roster and some will play a lot and some only a little. I think our starters will all be improvements over their 2016-17 counterparts except for the SG position (Tai.). And I think our depth will be better. Bench scoring should improve. Biggest jumps we might see are team 3-point shooting % and 3-point shooting defense. If that happens, we could be pretty good.

Are you kidding me? Has the worm finally turned on Nebrasketball (bad) luck? With what this kid can do as a freshman, if we happen to be fortunate enough to land him, he could easily be the highest ranked recruit we've had out of high school since Andre Woolridge.

I'm going out on a bit of a limb here with these predictions because, according to Verbal Commits, right now this kid is a composite 2 star with no Rivals, Scout or ESPN rankings. But I still think he's going to be a stud before too long. With that stroke and that bounciness at his age? Look out.

I'm going to go out on a limb and make a couple of predictions: 1) He's not going to end up at Nebraska; because 2) He's going to wind up a Rivals 5-star and land at Duke. Or UNC. Or Kentucky. Or someplace like that. He has an incredibly quick release and looks like he's uncanny accurate. As a freshman in HS. Almost looked like he could just flip the ball at the rim and it would go in. I get that these are highlights, but he still had to make those shots in game situations. He just looks like he has that shooter's touch. He's very bouncy and probably is still growing. Who knows how tall he'll end up being? But even as a 9th grader, he has the intuitive sense to block shots back into play. He's not swatting things out of bounds but rather swatting them to keep them in play. This kid is quite the prospect.

He's like 15 years old in that video.

This kid is to Ed Chang as Nana Akenten is to Aguek Arop.

I guess I don't really care at this point. I can see value in Darrington but now that we got Allen, our need for a perimeter shooter is not as acute and I don't want to upset the apple cart as far as team chemistry. Darrington is a high-volume shooter and it's yet to be seen how that would blend in with guys who've already started to acclimate. I'll trust that Miles knows what he want and needs and can identify it when he sees it. Don't get me wrong: I liked what I saw of Darrington. (The Vincennes kid, right?) If we didn't get Allen, I would really have loved to see us land this guy because I think he's a guy who can get to the rim, etc. But I'd take a 4-year player who's a 4-star recruit over a juco at this point. Not sure we need both. Not with the other guys already on the roster. I do think we need another big boy. He has to be able to bang, though. Can the guy from Princeton do that?

I sure hope you hold paid writers to a higher standard than some anonymous dude behind a keyboard who posts on a message board.

We'll have to see. Duby's junior numbers are probably misleading. He was much better as a freshman and sophomore. If he'd taken a jump forward from his sophomore year, he'd have averaged Ed-like numbers for Winthrop but, instead, he took a leap backwards. It's clear he has athleticism in spades. Great length. Good size. Does he have Ed's nose for the ball? Let's be honest. Ed wasn't very skilled, but he was athletic (so is Duby) and tough (yet to be seen with Duby.) Ed's primary strength as a player, in fact, was his toughness. Among his many weaknesses were that he didn't want to play the position for which he's best suited (which Duby obviously doesn't have an issue with) and, from what I understand, he wasn't willing to put in the work that would have developed the skills he needed to develop in order to play the position he wanted to play. I have a prediction that we'll never know the answer to: If Ed had stayed, he would not have started. He would have backed up Jordy at the 5. Which is what Duby is probably going to be doing. And, when you're talking about a backup, you're not going to probably see a whole lot of difference between the numbers Ed would have put up in 15-18 minutes versus the numbers Duby will probably put up in 15-18 minutes. I mean, to be somewhat crude about this, comparing which back up would have posted the best stat line is a little bit like arguing which Shim Sham dancer had the best legs. (That was a visual even I didn't need and I'm mad at you guys for making me try to come up with an analogy. Darn you.)

He might be a good dude, but he's way too much of a Creighton homer to be writing for a Husker periodical, IMO. Someone sent me a link of a BJU discussion, which I clicked on against my better judgment. And there was a discussion about Husker recruiting in which Mr. Padilla made a comment damning Nana Akenten with faint praise. (Don't recall his exact words and I'm not going to look for them.) Basically said he was mediocre and wouldn't make our mediocre team any better. Something like that. Our recruiting is blah, we got one player who isn't horrible, but ... Kind of about that sentiment. Very superficial analysis, which was the word that popped into my head while reading the above-linked piece. I'm sure he does a much more thorough job of analyzing Husker football.

Perhaps, but that wasn't the question or the way it was presented. The way the question was presented is whether we're upgrading the talent over last year with all the newcomers versus the guys who transferred away. Hsker4life thought it was a push basically between the guys who left and the players we added who weren't eligible last season. He's got a point about experience, but I think the overall talent of the players we've added since last year is better than the overall talent of the guys who left early.

Padilla had that column 80% done and a submission deadline looming when the kid who was supposed to commit to KU decided to buy into Miles' vision of Nebraska Basketball. Ooops.

Watched a couple of quick vids on Isaiah -- one from his sophomore year and the next from his junior year -- and he seemed to make a lot of progress from the one year to the next. Plus he has good size. I might be coming around on this just in time for him to commit somewhere else. (Story of my life.)

Copeland, Allen, Palmer, Akenten, Okeke >>>> Morrow, Jacobson, Horne, Fuller. That's a 5-star, two 4-stars, a Rivals 150 plus whatever Duby was compared to one 4-star, a 150 kid and two unranked guys. If recruiting rankings mean anything, then clear advantage to the newcomers.

Numbers suggest a bit of a story here. He averaged 13.7 minutes as a freshman and scored 4.4 ppg. Then, he jumped up to almost 18 minutes as a sophomore and was averaging about 5 pts and 5 bds/game. Then, junior year, instead of taking a big leap forward, he drops back to 14 min/game and 3.2 pts, the lowest scoring output -- overall but also in terms of points per minute played -- in his career at Winthrop. And then he transfers. My best guess is we'll get something more approximating his sophomore year numbers from him. Fewer than 20 minutes, but he'll have room to score and rebound at a Michael Jacobson-esque pace.

Updated with the recent commit. Now, I'd look for another Andrew White/Anton Gill kind of transfer player, probably shooting guard, who would sit a year and join Roby and Tshimanga as juniors in a year, and then a freshman big like Isaiah Chandler. That'd get us to 13 and that's how I'd fill out this roster.