Veteran Center Joshua Ojianwuna Enters Transfer Portal

ABC BEAR said:

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Damn. I just learned how to pronounce his name, and now you tell me he's leaving.

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Drew keeping you sharp. New name to learn.

In fairness your definition of a scrub is pretty much anyone who isn't a 5 star. I mean you called Royce O'Neale a scrub…

IowaBear said:

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In fairness your definition of a scrub is pretty much anyone who isn't a 5 star. I mean you called Royce O'Neale a scrub…

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If 10ppg, 3.4apg, 5.8rpg (His senior year) is scrubly, I'll take a scrub five.

Very wild take even by your standards. I don't think guys have to be 5 stars to not be considered scrub nor have I ever implied that. O'Neal was never a scrub and worked himself into a fine NBA career.

Anyway, regarding our curren team, Dbrojvic (sp) was really the only guy I would have wanted back. The rest were walkon guys, Josh who isn't healthy, Love who couldn't stay healthy, and Celestine who was a one-dimensional player who wasn't very good at his one dimension.

Drew absolutely made the right call to clean house and start from scratch. Would I want that to happen every year? Absolutely not. I would love having guys come back a 2nd or 3rd year to establish program continuity. But for this year's situation, he made the right call.

His list of scrubs had much bigger names than Royce on it…….
Not judging Craw but his idea of a scrub vastly differs from everyone else

You quite literally called Royce a scrub… among others. You got push back from tons of posters until you ultimately moved the goalposts. I'm not judging you. It's your opinion. But I have no idea why you're denying it. I could go find the post. It included several really good Baylor players

Guitarbiscuit said:

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Porteroso said:

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Mitch Blood Green said:

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It's obvious that some guys entered the Transfer Portal, and the Transfer Portal entered some guys. Not speaking of Josh O but this roster got churned and it needed to. Team chemistry last year was poor.

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We've never done all that well with a really young team. Our natty came because of vets. You can try spinning the team blowing up as good, but I don't think it is.

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This.

Too much spinning going on.

Teams don't win churning out all new players every year. And we're no exception.

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It depends on what you mean by win. You can build a talented roster and make a run to the Sweet Sixteen or Elite Eight with a brand new or mostly new team. We see a team or two do it most years. But if your goal is conference championships, Final Four appearances and national title contention (and ours should be), the data says that's not how you build your teams.

I've been very vocal in my preference to get back to building the way other teams around the country are still managing to do in the NIL/transfer portal era. I'm not a fan of the way we've built our rosters the three or four years.

That said, I do think we probably made the right decision in letting the substandard and/or injured role players left on our roster walk and replacing them with guys more likely to contribute next year. And if you're going to lose every player on your roster -- a less than ideal situation by virtually everyone's standard -- I think we managed to make some pretty decent lemonade with this transfer class.

To me, two things can be true. 1. We're not optimizing our resources or maximizing our chances of contending for championships building our rosters the way we do. And 2. The roster we're building from scratch this offseason looks (on paper, of course) like a better and more complete team than we've fielded in recent years.

If Scott Drew is going to insist on building transient/mercenary teams, something I've lamented here for years now, I like this group of mercenaries better than any we've had since 2022.

Guitarbiscuit said:

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Porteroso said:

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Mitch Blood Green said:

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It's obvious that some guys entered the Transfer Portal, and the Transfer Portal entered some guys. Not speaking of Josh O but this roster got churned and it needed to. Team chemistry last year was poor.

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We've never done all that well with a really young team. Our natty came because of vets. You can try spinning the team blowing up as good, but I don't think it is.

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This.

Too much spinning going on.

Teams don't win churning out all new players every year. And we're no exception.

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So much for Joy. It's all about $$ now.

IowaBear said:

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You quite literally called Royce a scrub… among others. You got push back from tons of posters until you ultimately moved the goalposts. I'm not judging you. It's your opinion. But I have no idea why you're denying it. I could go find the post. It included several really good Baylor players

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I honestly don't know what TF you are talking about. You can find the post if you want to. But I can assure you I don't think Royce O'Neill is a scrub.

Who's Royce O'Neill?
Baylor did have a Royce O'Neale.. guy definitely wasn't a scrub as mentioned

OK I now remember the post that ruffled your feathers. The point of that post was apparently lost on you. Bear2be2 mentioned a strategy called "stars and scrubs" and when I responded my point was how in the past we were able to find those under the radar guys like O'Neal who had no stars by his name and transferred here from Denver. You can substitute "sleeper" if the term "scrub" hurt your feelings. We used to be able to find the sleepers like O'Neal, Teague and EJ and develop them into studs but we haven't been able to do that over the past several seasons. I hope we are able to do that again even though the transfer portal makes it near impossible.

The point definitely wasn't "lost on me" your post talked about how we turned "scrubs into studs" you than mentioned guys like JMot, Teague, Flagler, Ish, Royce etc. and my entire point is those guys weren't scrubs prior to arriving like you insinuated. Those were good ass ball players coming to BU

IowaBear said:

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The point definitely wasn't "lost on me" your post talked about how we turned "scrubs into studs" you than mentioned guys like JMot, Teague, Flagler, Ish, Royce etc. and my entire point is those guys weren't scrubs prior to arriving like you insinuated. Those were good ass ball players coming to BU

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In hindsight we know they were talented players and the staff recognized their talents despite the lack of stars by some of their names. The point I was and am trying to make is our staff has seemed to have lost their ability to evaluate the sleepers like they did in prior seasons. Busts in recent recruiting classes such Lohner, Loveday, Little, Grimes, and Turner have hurt our program's continuity. When we bring in 2 or 3 one-and-done players every recruiting cycle it's extremely important to find those diamonds in the rough in order to establish program continuity. That is perpexing because our program was built upon finding sleepers and developing them into studs. We have failed miserably in that regard over the past 3 recruiting cycles.

TexasScientist said:

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Guitarbiscuit said:

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Porteroso said:

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Mitch Blood Green said:

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It's obvious that some guys entered the Transfer Portal, and the Transfer Portal entered some guys. Not speaking of Josh O but this roster got churned and it needed to. Team chemistry last year was poor.

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We've never done all that well with a really young team. Our natty came because of vets. You can try spinning the team blowing up as good, but I don't think it is.

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This.

Too much spinning going on.

Teams don't win churning out all new players every year. And we're no exception.

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So much for Joy. It's all about $$ now.

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Correct. It is now MOY

Crawfoso1973 said:

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So....your solution would be to build around Love, Celestine, and a a bunch of scrubs and walkons?

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No. The solution is to get solid players who can play both sides of the ball and manage to keep them for more than one year.

Those players you mentioned were not what our program needed going forward, but at this point there is a lack of trust that Scott Drew will be able to hold onto his upcoming players for any length of time.

Having a rental player for one year is, to me, nothing. Spin it all you want, I'm not excited. And I'll bet there are a few others that don't look forward to this prospect.

We want a sense of cohesion from year to year. That's what we want. Kelvin Sampson and a few others know how to do it. Scott Drew has not yet mastered this art.