re: MBB Offseason '25 Transfer Portal Tracker

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Or maybe the excuse of him being "extremely underfunded" a bit suspect?

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the players didn't seem that good, which would make sense if he were underfunded. perhaps other programs passed on these fellas, ignoring their rankings for their own assessments, meaning they were available for lower pay.

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To be fair, our end of the year Kenpom rating has gotten better each year. The team this past year was easily the best of his 3 years, just didn’t seem like it with the historically great SEC

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The reason is because the defense was the highest rated it's been in his 3 seasons. The biggest factor in that defensive rating was LSU was a good shot blocking team. They had two guys in the top 10 of the SEC in block %...those two guys (Collins and Chest) are no longer on the team. Without the uptick in shot-blocking the defense would have been on par with last year's team (which was 99th in DEff.) This past team was almost as bad as his first team offensively. LSU's average point margin in conf. games was -10...the worst in the SEC. Even South Carolina had a lower point margin.

Last year was his best team. Now, that team would not have been .500 vs. this past season's SEC. But it would have been a few games better than this year's group. Regardless, none of it is "good". You could see the conf. collapse this year coming well before January because even though LSU was winning in the non-conf schedule, they were still steadily in the bottom three of the league in the KenPom rankings.

In MM's opening press conference he said he wanted to be "balanced" on both sides of the ball. Coache's speak, for sure, but it should have been music to every LSU's fans ears because that was Wade's biggest flaw. His teams were incredibly imbalanced (generally elite offensively and awful defensively...until that flipped in his final season). To his credit, MM's teams (until this year) have been "balanced". It's just they've often been equally bad on both sides of the ball.

It will be interesting to see if the defensive uptick from this past year maintains without the rim protection Chest and Collins brought to the table. Reed has never been a great defender, and he is a below the basket player (even before his injury). Miller has the length, but he doesn't seem to have the timing/aggressiveness to be a great shot blocker. Nwoko is the only guy that has rim-protection traits. The question is can he defend without fouling?