Basketball Tips Off In Less Than a Month

With the overhaul by new coaches in all three major mens sports, I think it’s hard for fans to concentrate on more than one thing at a time.

It’s football season. Which means we won’t see many basketball threads. More than that, the casual fan thinks this team is going to be terrible because of the turnover…not realizing McMahon kept/brought in some decent talent.

This probably isn’t a top 4 SEC team. But it’s not unreasonable to think they could finish in the top half. 6 schools in the SEC have new HCs. You can make an argument McMahon was the best hire (on paper). The non-conference schedule is unremarkable, so don’t expect serious attention until January.

TBF, I havent seen overhaul on a basketball team at LSU like this as long as ive been alive so I dont know what to expect. No one really does. I think everybody has lower expectations than the past 5 years so no one is blowing their load on anything.

Listening to McMahon’s presser, he wants to play the top 8-9 guys a lot. He made it sound like the players will decide who those guys will be.

Top 8 locks are Justice Hill, KJ Williams, Adam Miller, Kendal Coleman, and Mwani Wilkinson imo. Coleman has led team this summer in rebounding per McMahon. Those may end up as your starters on opening night. I have my suspicions who 6-9 will be, but I guess it needs to play out.

To be honest the wind has been taken out of my sails since we turned our back on the general. I might not watch a game this year and this is coming from someone who went to most last year.

I haven't heard much about the team lately but I also don't know where to get updates at.

Tyrrell Ward is a guy that can elevate us to being a tourney team in addition to the guys you brought up. And remember Justice Williams came in a year early, and had some flashes last year. We've got a lot more depth in the backcourt than the front court.

I'm excited to see what McMahon does. He built a roster capable of making the tourney despite all we lost. It's gonna hurt seeing guys we lost play around the country. Namely Fudge, Murray and Julian Phillips.

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I hope you're wrong, but I fear you're right about LSU not taking men's basketball seriously.

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The athletic department just sunk a TON (relatively speaking) into the women's basketball program. Something that will NEVER produce a financial ROI....no matter how good they are. That's not a knock on Mulkey. She is a tremendous coach. It's just the market for women's basketball is not big. If LSU is willing to spend that kind of money on WBB, then I'm confident they are willing to invest further into MBB.

I liked Wade. I hated to see him go. I think he brought the most energy to the program in almost three decades, along with the most consistent period of winning since the late 80's/early 90's. That said, Wade could be a difficult "employee" because he was incredibly demanding. He wanted upgrades everywhere and wasn't shy about demanding them. That probably (no, I know) didn't sit all that well with an AD who didn't hire him and was brought into a situation where the basketball program was under a cloud of suspicion from the very first day of the AD's tenure. In fact, Scott Woodward doesn't become the AD in April of 2019 without the flat-our revolt against Alleva following the suspension of Wade at the end of the 18-19 season.

I suspect Woodward feels now that Wade is gone the program can "reset" (though not fully until the IARP issues it rulings). And I think the department would be willing to invest in the program. In part, that is a huge benefit of having Mulkey in the same building. She is tremendously demanding herself. But, unlike Wade, she has the skins on the wall that give more effect to her demands.

As for this year's team, no one really knows what to expect because everything is new. For the first few months after Wade's firing we had bozos on here convinced LSU wasn't going to win an SEC game for two years. In the age of the transfer portal that was NEVER going to happen. But now we have almost a completely new team. The good news is that fortunes in college basketball can be turned around quicker than in any other sport. All one has to do is look at LSU's final opponent of the Wade era...Iowa State. In 20-21 they were absolutely horrible. They won 2 games all season (both against SWAC schools) and went 0-18 in the Big 12. A year later with a new HC and several new players (most via transfer) they reached the NCAAT and, ultimately, the Sweet 16. You also look at a program like Arizona who, similar to LSU, has been under a cloud of suspicion for several years. In 20-21 they are a mediocre Pac-12 team. A year later with a new HC and some new players they are 33-4 and a No. 1 seed in the NCAAT.

I'm not saying LSU is going to have an Arizona level turnaround. Or anything close to it. But recent history has proven a program can improve drastically in the course of just a single year.

I wasn't thrilled about the McMahon hire. Namely because the Murray St. program has been very good for a long time...throughout the tenure of multiple coaches. The coaches that preceded McMahon, Billy Kennedy (A&M) and Steve Prohm (Iowa St) ultimately had limited success at bigger jobs. Of course, you also have Mick Cronin (Cincinnati/UCLA) who has been very good since getting his first HC shot at Murray St. So I guess you can't say anything for certain.

Still, some of my initial concerns were eased with the job McMahon and his staff did in rebuilding the roster. I figured he would get some Murray St. players to come with him, and he did. I figured he would convince a few LSU players to stay. And he did. Though convincing a guy like Adam Miller to stay was completely unexpected. Miller, no doubt, had a ton of options besides LSU. And he was a guy who was very tight with Wade. So for him to stay speaks highly of McMahon and his staff. The icing on the cake was LSU signing 3 top 100(ish) recruits late in the signing period. LSU's program seeming didn't have a whole lot to sell at that point. Yet, they convinced several "in demand" players to join the team.

Now we have to see how that collection of players performs. For as much as I liked Wade, my biggest criticism is just how unbalanced his LSU teams were. For most of his tenure LSU was elite offensively, but atrocious defensively. Last year they were elite defensively. But terribly inefficient offensively. Being elite on one side of the ball is enough to get you to the NCAAT. But it is not enough to win big. (It's no coincidence that Wade's best LSU team was also his most balanced). McMahon has talked a lot since he got the job about "being balanced". He noted that Murray St. last year was a top 30 offensive AND defensive team last season in terms of efficiency. So, at minimum, he recognizes what it takes to be successful. Achieving it is a whole different story.

The non-conference schedule is weak. Perhaps by design. The SEC schedule is always tough. Though not quite as brutal as last year's start, January will tell us just how good this team will be. My hope/expectation is that when the calendar turns to February LSU will be in the mix for a NCAA Tournament spot. I'm not saying I'm EXPECTING them to be a NCAAT team. But I do think they can compete for a spot. McMahon had good options besides LSU. He didn't come here to collect a nice pay check before heading back to the mid-major level. He came because he sees what Wade saw. LSU has the resources to potentially be a great program (just like Florida was under Billy Donovan). It's just a matter of finding the right guy and the right administration to unlock them.

I’m excited to see the guys he brought with him. They are talented guy who were very good in his system. Especially KJ Williams.

After Wade was fired and all of the players left I figured we’d be lucky to get to 10 wins. I think being in the hunt for an NIT bid is a realistic expectation for this team. Somewhere around 17 wins.

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We usually see things the same way, but don’t agree with you here. Nothing in the last 2 years signals Woody has any interest in investing the money to keep LSU as a top 4 team in the league - where Wade had this program in year 5.

I hope you are right, but have not seen anything that would convince me that this is accurate. If any part of the decision to fire Wade was due to him being demanding about facilities, than that is all you really need to know.

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I don't think it was that Wade was asking for facility upgrades. All coaches, everywhere, are constantly doing that. It was probably the manner in which Wade was going about it (the guys is incredibly aggressive...sometimes to a fault) ALL while his program was under investigation and Wade wasn't particularly cooperating with LSU in the investigation. I'm not saying either side was right or wrong in the way they went about things. Just that the AD may not have been so eager to meet the big demands of a HC who is under investigation and not willing to cooperate. The fact that the AD dumped a TON of money into the sport that is generally the biggest money loser in most athletic departments (the expenses in WBB have far out stripped the actual revenue market) suggests he would be willing to do so on the mens side. Despite what many will argue until they are blue in the face, being a great WBB program is not lucrative. So that big investment is strictly about winning.

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He had us as a consistent top 4 team in the league after taking over a team that won 2 conference games the year before. Yet, our facilities are easily in the bottom third of the conference (battling it out with State, UGA, and Mizzou in the arms race). Alabama has committed to massive upgrades already.

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In the age of NIL that is antiquated thinking. Facilities are secondary to NIL. Even Wade himself recently said that. He was asked in a recent interview point blank that if he only had a finite amount of money to commit to either NIL or facilities upgrades which would he choose? He said 100% NIL. Otherwise, you'd have a team of MMMF's (mid-major mother frickers) playing in a really nice building, getting their brains beat in.

So while the facilities do need to be improved, securing a purse to bring in players is more important. If that means facility upgrades take a backseat, so be it.

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The McMahon hire was another very clear sign that we don’t intend to put money into basketball. Woody knows how to spend money on coaches (arguably overspend), but chose not to on this one. Pretty sure McMahon’s salary is below the SEC average - compare that to the other coaches Woody has hired at LSU - Johnson, Mulkey and Kelly - all at or near the top of the conference pay scale

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Perhaps. But you also have to consider McMahon may have been the best option who ACTUALLY wanted the job. LSU basketball is not viewed with the same sense of gravitas as the football and baseball programs in their sports. It just isn't. The attractiveness of being the LSU football or baseball HC is much greater in those sports than it is in basketball. So while Woodward may have been willing to spend much more, the people who command such salaries may not have been willing to come to LSU. Particularly in light of the fact the program is under investigation and just about everyone knew the roster was going leave with Wade's departure. A big salary is nice. But why would I leave a comparatively similar salary at Arizona, Baylor, Gonzaga, UCLA, etc AND a nationally competitive program, to take over a job rebuilding LSU?

In Kelly's case, the LSU job offered him something he didn't have at ND. Access to the talent pool necessary to win a national championship...established by the fact LSU has won 3 (played for 4) in the last 20 years.

For Johnson, he got a bigger salary to come to a program that (a) has a history of great success, and (b) has greater interest in the sport than just about any other college baseball program. That was a no brainer.

For Mulkey, the allure was simply coming home to Louisiana and a school one of her children attended.

The basketball program didn't have any of that allure. Unlike football and baseball, the basketball program hasn't been a consistent national championship player over the last 20+ years. And, at least to my knowledge, there was no big time college basketball HC with significant ties to LSU or Louisiana to bring him "home" (and no, I don't think Tony Bennett ever had any desire to leave his championship caliber program at UVA to rebuild LSU).

McMahon wasn't my "first choice" either. But he may have been the best option among those who actually wanted the job.