Hokie Hoops Statistical Notes: Volume 9: Year Two Pre-Season Edition

Year Two of CMYBall is just around the corner, and I thought it time to dust off this series from last year to get an idea where things stand as we enter the season.

Scoring

My end of the year assessment of only losing 0.18% of scoring took a bit of a hit when leading scorer from last season, Landers Nolley II, left after a single* season in Blacksburg. Also leaving was top 5 scorer "big man" PJ Horne, Isaiah Wilkins, and Jon Kabongo.

What the Hokies return, instead, are five guards and a forward with 1516 combined points, led by Senior PG Wabissa Bede's 367 career points. Following him are Sophomore guards Tyrece Radford (325 pts), Naheim Alleyne (281 pts), Jalen Cone (255 pts), Hunter Cattoor (203 pts), and Sophomore forwards John Ojiako (85 pts).

Reinforcements have arrived from the transfer market. Graduate transfer guard Cartier Diarra leads all new Hokies (and all Hokies for that matter) with 862 career points. Behind him are graduate transfer forward Cordell Pemsl, and redshirt Junior Justyn Mutts, both with 569 career points. Rounding out the transfers is now-eligible redshirt Junior forward Keve Aluma, who's 326 career points had to ride the bench last year. All told, the new Hokies have 2326 career points, bringing the entire Hokie crew up to 3842 combined points.

Rebounding

The Hokies lost their #2 and #3 rebounders from last season, but the 6 returning players from last year managed an even 700 career rebounds over their 8 seasons of play.

What about the new players? (Grinch smile) Pemsl comes in with 410 by himself, Mutts adds 388, Aluma another 352, and Diarra tacks on a final 300. All told, that's 1450 rebounds achieved against Big 12, Big Ten, CAA, and Southern Conference competition.

Assists
As a team, the Hokies are returning a 442/214 ATO margin, good for 2.07:1 ratio, lead by Bede's rather comical 282/99, which is 2.85:1

The new players don't have quite the quality ratio, but as they are mostly post players, the 534/527 or 1.01:1 is forgivable.

Experience/Depth
My prediction last year of a well experienced team with 8000+ combined minutes of gameplay was wayyyyy off. The six returning players (plus Aluma who I included in my end of year analysis) return 6267 minutes.

The new transfers of Mutts Pemsl, and Diarra add a quality 5726. Add it up, and when the clock strikes 18:59 in the first half of game 1, the Hokies will instead have 12000 minutes of experience. I don't have the time or energy to look up every single school in the country, but I'll be surprised if anybody can exceed that by much (considering the soft maximum of 32 games at 200 minutes a game is 6400 minutes) This team is, for all intents and purposes, comprised of 10 players who have played 2 full seasons of basketball at this point.

Unlike last year, when the vaaaaaast majority of minutes came from Freshmen, only 3 are added to the roster in forward David N'Guessan, and guards Darius Maddox and Joe Bamisile.

First Four

Hokies open with Radford (21-11), neutral site games against Temple (14-17) and USF (14-17), and then back home to face VMI (9-24). If they can get by a Radford team that returns...wait...let me double check...really???...10.3 ppg from last season after losing their top 8 scorers, they should start the season off 4-0 going into the second 4-pack of games.

DISCLAIMER: Forum topics may not have been written or edited by The Key Play staff.

Comments

Please join The Key Players Club to read or post comments.

Never Forget #1 Overall Seed UVA 54, #64 UMBC 74