Alright, just for kicks and giggles- where (approximately) would you put Eli Brooks on this list? IRC he wasn’t ranked last year and would take him on O every single time over McConnell and wouldn’t think there is a ton of daylight between Eli and McConnell on D. Thoughts?
There’s a lot more daylight than you are implying. I love Eli and he was great for Michigan. Smart and dependable on defense but U-M was terrible defensively last year. McConnell is the best defender on one of the best defenses in the Big Ten and is a game-changing defensive player with steals and blocks (more like a Franz than an Eli).
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Gah that’s fair. Really wish there were good representative statistics for D
Accounting for team D isn’t really fair though is it? Arguably if you have a solid team D around you, it makes your 1v1 D easier bc you don’t have to worry about your teammates as much
Yep Rutgers as a team was much better defensively than Michigan at nearly every position. Omoruyi is significantly better defensively than Hunter and Mulcahy is a pretty good defender too. McConnell is excellent defensively and also is a large reason that Rutgers is good on that end of the court, but it helps having an athletic shot blocking presence behind you. It allows you to be more aggressive on ball.
I do think McConnell’s performance in the NCAA tournament game is affecting some of the preseason perceptions around him though. His 10/12, 23 point, 11 rebound performance isn’t likely to be repeatable because he didn’t have a single game that was even close to that level of production the entire season. He shot 39% from the field and had 7 double digit scoring games the entire season last year and only once scored more than 13 points before that tourney game.
I guess I’d put it like this. I think most coaches in the Big Ten would draft McConnell for his defense alone. I’m not sure people would be keen to draft Mulcahy to run their teams. Just my 2 cents.
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Hey, I said at the outset of the top 25 list that I didn’t envy your task this year because you have to squint real hard to come up with legitimate guys after the top 7 or so.
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I’m just really surprised that people are that high on Mulcahy to the point where there was speculation that he’d be a top ten player.
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I think we’ve got to respect any player who wanted to punch Xavier Johnson so badly he was willing to almost cost his team a tournament berth.
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That’s fair. On the other hand, the same could be said about anybody who wants to punch Mulcahy, who would be my favorite to be a worthy recipient of the Brad Davison award.
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The Eli benchmark is an interesting one when considering the quality of the conference this year. He wasn’t ranked last year and I think that HM was probably about right. Valuable veteran role player wasn’t worthy of being in the top-25 last year. This year I think the list is littered with “valuable veteran role players” who do some things well, are important to their teams, but are never going to be a star.
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Wahl at #10 says something about the individual talent level in the league this year. To me, he’s the very image of “just a guy”. This is certainly my Michigan bias showing, but I have hard time believing at the end of the year that anybody would put Wahl above Llewellyn.
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The big takeaway from these threads is that people really hate Wisconsin 
Wahl is a really solid 2-way player IMO and he’ll play a bigger role this year.
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IM READY TO RUN THROUGH A WALL!!!
Feb 14. Locked in.
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I think that’s going to be a take away from a lot of threads for a long time
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I guess I’m wondering what in his game could possibly play up with an expanded role. He plays offense like Junior Brandon Johns
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Fwiw I embrace the Wisconsin hatred and realize I’m 100% bias and will continue to trash Wisconsin every chance I get
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Not as if we had a choice in the matter. Wisconsin decided that for us.
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Wahl is one of 8 guys returning with > 70% minutes, > 20% usage and > 100 ORtg, FWIW. Mulcahy is the only one in that group of eight not ranked and I’m completely okay with that
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Do you have a sense of how low that number of returnees is across the conference compared to other years? Seems pretty low.
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Looks like only four guys last year: T-Rank Player Stats - Customizable College Basketball Tempo Free Stats - T-Rank
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