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Username Post: 2021-2022 Numbers Game
UPIA1968 
PhD Student
Posts: 1117
UPIA1968
Loc: Cornwall, PA
Reg: 11-20-06
09-02-21 10:31 PM - Post#326502    

This will be a fascinating season in two respects

First, we are now well into the Donahue recruiting process. This we know: He has not upped Penn's game into the Harvard realm. He has gotten no more 3-star or more recruits than traditional Ivy programs, including Franny's.

This we hope: Among the nineteen players on the roster there are three players that will rise to stardom and five of six more that prove to be solid Ivy talents. It looked like Donahue had achieved that before all the injuries. The jury is still out.

The second issue is how quickly Steve sifts through the current hoard of players. By my count there are eight returnees who have shown talent: Charles, Dingle, Lorca-Lloyd, Williams, Martz, Washington, Wang, Monroe.

Then there are nine newcomers: Chambers, Spinosa, Laczkowski, McMullen, Holland, Smith, Slajchert, Larson, Moshkovitz. Since we can safely assume that the staff saw potential in each of these recruits, one expects some significant contribution from this group by the beginning of the Ivy season.

Finally, we have two incumbents, Ryan and Imegwu who have shown only modest potential to date.

The three lists total nineteen players. More than anything else Steve and the staff will be challenged to make sense of this group in order to identify the eight or nine that would make up an effective team on the floor. That is something that Franny did well. Miller was off to a good start pre-injury bug. Then several years during the Allen regime the team seemed to have workable depth only to come up short once the ball started bouncing.

Steve did this well until halfway through the first Wang year. As optimists, this talent collection looks tantalizingly deep. But that is distinct from developing the chemistry that will produce a victory in the first Princeton game for a change.

There are three scenarios to watch for in the pre-Ivy schedule. The first is the immergence of the kind of superior talent (Maloney, Allen, Pierce) that take the team quickly to a new level. We thought that might be the case two years ago. The second is the kind of confusion that such a numbers game suggests. The staff is still searching for the right mix in late January. The third is perhaps the most likely: Very inconsistent results early as the staff tries different combinations - then steady improvement as the best seven to ten players emerge.

This process should give us much to talk about as the reports about Gus Larson already show. There are plenty of prospects to keep our interest. My sleeper is Moshkovitz.
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