Josh LeBlanc with a terrific debut

I had to check multiple sites because I could not believe he is only 6'7". He plays like a 7 footer

I believe it, he played like the biggest guy on the court

Eh, i dont get that at all. Much more of a big to me, maybe more of a brandon bass, bigsby type

Reminds me of a longer Emmitt Williams

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Reminds me of a longer Emmitt Williams

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I think that's what the staff had in mind when they knew Williams would be leaving after last season. They went out and got as direct a replacement as they could for losing Emmitt. Reality of it was Emmitt was a 4-year college player who had a kid and wanted to provide which you cant fault. If Emmitt had any hope of getting into the NBA from college though it was to stay in college and continue to develop an outside game and jump shot because at 6'6 225 he was never going to make it as an old school 4 man. You could tell they really worked on giving him that shot this past year but he obviously needed more time. Now he will probably get his continuing development overseas or in G-League though.

Luckily enough the coaches knew about that enough in time to take Leblanc a little after this point last year as Emmitt had made his decision long before that season was over.

Thunder and Alt i respect yalls opinions with LSU bball so I ask you this:

Do you think he cracks the starting lineup and if so, who goes to the bench?

Do you just start 3 PFs since that’s the 5 beat players? Or does one have to come off the bench for defensive purposes?

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There is a reason NBA scouts, GM's, draft analysist talk about "length" and "wingspan" ad nauseum. That's just as important, if not more, than pure height. A super athletic 6'7" guy with long arms many times can be a better player than a stiff 6'10 guy with average wingspan.

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For a practical example, compare someone like LeBlanc to Darcy Malone, who was 7' with a long arse neck but proportional arms.

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Do you think he cracks the starting lineup and if so, who goes to the bench?

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LEBlanc can be used in situations where we want to go big to start the game for sure, but sometimes in today's game it's not ideal to play 3 forward lineups. There's a lot of teams we will play and have played that use 3 true guards in their lineup and even some with 4. In situations like that generally speaking you want to go with a 3 guard 2 big lineup and to me that's Watford-Days-Manning-Thomas-Smart. When we want to go big, replace Manning with LeBlanc. In the end, who starts and who doesnt really doesn't matter. This team is easily 10-11 deep and Wade will even play all 13 guys and not bat an eye. LeBlanc and Manning to me are interchangable depending on what you want to do and should see similar minutes to one another.

You'll start to see average minutes per game for a lot guys dwindle as we continue to play more and more guys each game, and it's not an indictment on them just we are that deep and having fresh bodies out there is a big plus especially when we want to go full on press for extended periods of time - you need fresh bodies ready to go to do that. We could have beat Sam Houston St by 40 if we wanted to by pressing a lot of the game but we got out of it after we just saw it was too easy pretty much to create the turnover or bad shot attempt so we could work on other aspects.

That press will be a flat out weapon come SEC play.

O'Neal needs to develop this same skill set and same level of intensity. We seem to have the 6'9" guys on the wings and the 6'6" and 6'7" underneath. It works for most teams but we'll meet someone in the tournament where it would be nice to play a reliable big in the paint for extended minutes.