Fun to get a first look at this years' team tonight. A few observations:
1. Kate Koval, Reese Ross, and Trinity Turner were huge portal pickups. Huge. My assessment after tonight's game is that Taliah Scott and those 3 are the most impactful players on the team this year.
2. Koval is a very good basketball player, but two skills are off the charts. Her shot blocking ability gives us a tremendous presence at the rim to deter penetration; Kate has a wonderful combination of long arms and decent athleticism for her size, and it seems that offensive players frequently misjudge her ability to get to a shot. Her passing ability out of the post is really, REALLY good. Our floor spacing this year will be unlike anything we've ever seen, from the combination of better 3 point shooting plus Kate's ability to move the ball. Won't be surprised if we frequently set her at the high post and initiate our offense with a pass to her in combination with lots of movement and screens on the perimeter. Puzzled how Mulkey didn't play her more last year. Kate averaged 16 mins/game, but was 2nd on team in rebounds with 6/game, and shot 56% from Field, 75% from FT. LSU must have played a lot of small ball last year; only 56 mins/game went to the 3 players over 6 feet tall. The remaining 144 mins/game were split among 5 guards. Surprising for a nationally ranked team.
3. Ross is a glue player, a do the dirty work player, a scrappy, competitive, high iq player with good skills. Essential.
4. Turner is an assassin, in a good way. She has tremendous strength, so it will be hard to bully her off the ball, and combined with her quickness and floor vision makes her very dangerous. That strength and quickness also means she can compete with most of the elite guards in the country without getting overpowered. She'll have a couple of highlight plays in every game. Seems to have good feel for the game, and very good vision for finding passing lanes for her teammates.
5. Thompson is a nice player, a very good 3 point shooter, and capable of driving to the hoop. She'll play an important role.
6. Jones is a tremendous defensive player, and will be an important contributor in many key games this year when we need to match up against a dangerous offensive wing. Won't be surprised against USC in a few weeks if Jones plays a lot of minutes because she's the most effective at challenging Juju.
7. Awou has great size, but needs better quickness and agility/body control if she's going to earn minutes from Koval and Abraham.
8. Goryanova and Nelms show encouraging development from last year; they both show enough flashes and skills that they may earn their way into the rotation.
9. One of the challenges in early non-conference games is projecting how our players will translate to games against Top 25 teams. We still need more playing time together to develop more chemistry, but tonight was very encouraging. The core of Turner, Scott, Ross, and Koval has a chance to develop into something special if they can grow quickly over the next 2 months.
