When Buzz Williams led the Hokies onto the court the first time in 2014, the roster he sent into action looked very different from the roster he will potentially have in 2019.
Four transfer players made up the roster, including two who were ineligible for that season. The highest rated recruit on tge team was Ahmed Hill with a 247Composite rating of .9754. The mean rating of that team was .8850, while the median was Seth Allen at .8764. This roster also consisted of two unranked players, in Malik Muller and Adam Smith. Four scholarship players on the roster measured in at 6-7 or taller.
Fast forward to 2019, and the roster has certainly strengthened, from the standpoint of recruit ratings. Led by Landers Nolley's .9752 (nearly equal to Hill's .9754), the mean rating currently sits at .9194 (+.0344) with the median sitting between KBJ (.9270) and Yavuz Gultekin (.9095). The roster also contains three players at or taller than 6-7.
Should Williams be able to bring in Qudus Wahab, the 6-10 C from Flint Hill, the numbers would only get better, with the mean rising to. 9206 and the median becoming KBJ.
Buzz has done a phenomenal job bringing aboard more depth of talent than most Hokie fans can remember.
Comments
Say he doesn't land Qudus, all the player rankings and median improvements will be nullified by one stat: avg height.
Small ball can work, but historical stats and population statistics show that taller players tend to mean more wins. I am really glad we have improved across the board, but the teams we need to beat fit the same metrics and manage to have some height.
Next year we will have KJ at 6'10", Gultekin at 6'7", Nolley at 6'7", Miller at 6'6 and Horne at 6'5". Those last 2 play bigger than they are too. If we don't land Wahab (which we probably won't), we have a good shot at JUCO Atticus Taylor who is 6'7" with a 7'2" wingspan. Ideally we have a vice-Blackshear in the wings, but size is the least of my concerns for next year. That's perfect size IMO. I'm more concerned with our lack of playmakers for next year given how we looked without NAW and 5 yesterday during that 20-0 run.
I wonder how aggressively Buzz would have pursued another true PF/C in the last cycle if Sy didn't hem and haw between staying and going. I'm pretty fuzzy on the timeline between when he became unavailable again and when last year's class was cemented.
He left in September 2017, joined back in December 2017, and left again in August 2018. So he screwed us over tbh
It's great that Buzz took us from a cellar dweller to an above-average/great ACC program. The problem is the price of success is expectation. The ACC is the best basketball conference in the country. There needs to be another standard deviation jump to compete with the Dukes and the UNCs.
We're not a program that can win games against elite program "on the cards", we have to knock those fuckers out. We've gotten our fair share of KOs in the past two years but haven't been consistently great.
I'm excited to see if Buzz can make the next step.