CHAMPS XVIII

Dump · May 19, 2022

junior5 said: ↑

just watched the video. Jimbo is such a bitch He's insinuating that Saban built his programs by cheating. So are you admitting that you've helped an organization cheat? wtf
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Everyone cheats

junior5 · May 19, 2022

Dump said: ↑

Everyone cheats
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but not everybody wins 6 championships in 14 years

Dump · May 19, 2022

junior5 said: ↑

but not everybody wins 6 championships in 14 years
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While cheating their asses off

junior5 · May 19, 2022

Dump said: ↑

While cheating their asses off
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but everybody does right? So it all equals out

junior5 · May 19, 2022

I think the collectives are not good. It’s strictly a pay to play. It’s not about a kid making money off their name.

Joey Freshwater · May 19, 2022

HtownTide · May 20, 2022

Jimbo with the big time Hugh Freeze vibes

Odin · May 20, 2022

y'all motherfuckers crazy if you legitimately think that tuscaloosa alabama has the money to compete with los angeles, etc when it comes down to it. we are pretty fucked after saban leaves if the landscape stays as it is today.

Clown Baby · May 20, 2022

junior5 said: ↑

but not everybody wins 6 championships in 14 years
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6 in 13

Joey Freshwater · May 20, 2022

junior5 · May 20, 2022

when people like Jimbo speak to Saban only being considered the best because of all his built in advantages what do they mean? He inherited as bad a program as I've ever seen.

stric006 · May 20, 2022

Odin said: ↑

y'all motherfuckers crazy if you legitimately think that tuscaloosa alabama has the money to compete with los angeles, etc when it comes down to it. we are pretty fucked after saban leaves if the landscape stays as it is today.
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Probably 20 schools ahead of us, not counting the Yale's and Browns of the world.

colonel_forbin · May 20, 2022

Alabama also has a much smaller alumni pool than a lot of other places.

For example, Alabama never had more than 20,000 students before 2003. Ohio State has had at least 40,000 every year since 1965, and their current enrollment (including graduate students) is 30,000 more than Alabama's. Texas A&M has had at least 30,000 since 1978, and at least 40,000 since 1989. USC has 10,000 more students than Alabama right now, and 57% of its total enrollment are graduate and professional students, which will presumably be higher than average earners.

They just have much larger resource pools that Alabama will never, ever have.

i am a bammer · May 20, 2022

Alabama also has relatively few oil reservoirs

TrustyPatches · May 20, 2022

Odin said: ↑

y'all motherfuckers crazy if you legitimately think that tuscaloosa alabama has the money to compete with los angeles, etc when it comes down to it. we are pretty fucked after saban leaves if the landscape stays as it is today.
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The answer is to tax the poor

Z · May 20, 2022

Odin said: ↑

y'all motherfuckers crazy if you legitimately think that tuscaloosa alabama has the money to compete with los angeles, etc when it comes down to it. we are pretty fucked after saban leaves if the landscape stays as it is today.
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We can never compete with them straight up. But we have to be able to get in the same stratosphere and hope we can leverage other things.

Clown Baby · May 20, 2022

Let’s pump the brakes and wait for other teams to start competing with us on the field before we start declaring the dynasty dead, Wolkens

southlick · May 20, 2022

Joey Freshwater · May 20, 2022

southlick said: ↑

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HOW?! He literally had better stats, as a rookie.

southlick · May 20, 2022

Joey Freshwater · May 20, 2022

TrustyPatches · May 20, 2022

Joey Freshwater said: ↑

HOW?! He literally had better stats, as a rookie.
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He literally just missed it. Finished 5th among forwards. Would’ve been the first rookie to make an all defensive team since Tim Duncan

TrustyPatches · May 20, 2022

Point being: Herb Jones has an entire career of All Defensive teams ahead of him

Z · May 20, 2022

southlick said: ↑

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We’re up 8-4 in top of 7th. We’ve got to have this one.

Since that Friday night win against Tennessee, we are 2-12 in SEC play.

southlick · May 20, 2022

Joey Freshwater · May 20, 2022

southlick · May 21, 2022

From a bol poster

Dominick Welch deep dive

I’ve taken some time to watch as many clips of recent basketball transfer commit Dominick Welch as I can find, even locating most of one full game from the A-10 tournament, and I thought I would share what I see. Some of this will be a repeat of things that were said in other threads, but the more that I see, the less I change my mind.

<WARNING: long post>

First and foremost, if you’re unaware of who I am talking about, Alabama received a recent commitment from Dominick Welch of St Bonaventure. Welch is a 6’5 205 lb small forward that projects to play primarily on the wing for Alabama. Based on all information that I can find, he goes by “Dom” rather than his full first name. He played one year of prep school before enrolling at St. Bonaventure, so he will turn 24 in late August.

His basic stats break down as:

minutes - basic slash - shooting %

- FR - 29.1 - 7.5/4.4/1.4 - 38/36/50
- SO - 35.4 - 11.8/6.9/2.1 - 40/37/77
- JR - 34.2 - 11.4/6.0/2.1 - 43/39/72
- SR - 37.5 - 12.3/6.0/1.6 - 41/37/78

After his freshman year he’s been high volume on both minutes and shots, averaging 10.2, 9.3, and 10.5 shots per game the last three years. These numbers came in the A-10 conference, tho they do include 9 P5 matchups and an NCAA tournament appearance as a junior. In those games he slashed 12.1/5.4/1.4. So not terribly different from his normal slash line.

For his career he has averaged more than a steal per game and a half a block. The steal numbers increased to as high as 1.6 with his minutes volume as a senior, and the 21 blocks from last year chart as a solid number for a guy who primarily plays on the wing. Specific defensive metrics are hard to truly gauge, as they tend to be highly reliant on who you are playing along side, but his career 5.8 defensive win shares, 1.4 DBPM, and 99.4 DRtg all point towards him being an above average to plus defender.

Looking at both the numbers and the film, he looks to be an ideal fit for our system, especially given the need we had for someone to play as the mid level wing (traditional SF position). For his career 67% of his shots have been 3pt shots. Last year that number was 70.4%, compared to just 11.8% from midrange. That leaves 17.8% at the rim. That last number isn’t ideal, nor is his 10.4 free throw rate (how often he gets to the line). Tho both of those numbers indicate that he wasn’t being asked to perform dribble penetration in the half court very often.

So he is mostly a spot up shooter, with 86.7% of his made 3s having been assisted. Stylistically and functionally, that’s a fit for our offense and what we ask for out of that wing position. For reference, Keon Ellis was at 85.1% last year, and John Petty at 81.8% the year before. Our offense, by design, generates a lot of uncontested shots because of dribble penetration, and the ability to knock down those shots was something we struggled with last year.

Typically for a guy making a move from a mid major conference like the A-10 to the SEC you can expect to see a guy’s overall production drop around 40%. That’s partially because of the increased level of competition and partially because minutes (or overall usage) also tend to go down. While I do think it’s likely that Welch will see his minutes dropped considerably from the 37.5 that he played last year, I am not as concerned about the increase in competition level. That’s partially due to his numbers not really dropping against high level competition (albeit a small sample size) and partially because at 24 he should have a strength and physical maturity advantage over most of the players in the SEC.

Mostly, tho, that’s due to what he does and how he does it. A mid major guy who is winning individual battles based solely on size or being able to beat a slower guy off of the dribble brings a little more concern on that front as he’s not likely to have those size/speed advantages at the higher level. But the things he does are pretty standard basketball things that don’t require low level competition to do well. Essentially he’s mostly being asked to hit uncontested shots.

Here’s a highlight package (thanks to @comet2009 in another thread) that shows him in action.

We get to see him spot up in the corner a good bit, which is a staple of our offense. The corner 3 is the shortest of the 3pt shots and usually carries the highest make percentage due to that and how frequently it’s uncontested because of the shortness of the dribble drive outlet to it. He shows a good ability to get that shot off quickly, as well as the ability to pump fake and dribble-step to the side to create space when necessary. Close outs will come quicker and with more length in the SEC, so he’ll have to make good decisions on that, but showing the ability to do it already is a nice building block - especially with one on the clip coming against Oklahoma.

We also get to see him coming off of down screens on the elbows, which is another major staple of our offense. He shows good activity and pre-screen movement to set up the screen, and then shows good quickness in getting into shooting form once around the screen. Again, the defender’s ability to beat the screen will likely be better in the SEC, but in theory the increased size of the screener should help mitigate that. Our spacing should also help give him more room once he clears the screen, and he shows good range in that clip, with several shots coming in that 3-5 feet beyond the line area that we actually encourage shots to come from.

Furthering that stylistic fit, there’s some hope that we could see his shooting percentages actually increase in our system. Here’s a shot chart for Welch (thanks to @JasonK08 in another thread) from last year.

On top of the absolute dearth of midrange shots, the thing that stands out is his 20/47 (42.5%) from the two corners. As I said above, the design of our offense heavily features this shot, and it’s likely that he’ll be encouraged to shoot more than just 19.3% of his 3PA from there. Improved shot selection from that point should benefit him, as we rarely ask wings to take shots from the top of they key area, where he was just 9/31. The bulk of his shots should come from the four areas highlighted in red on that chart.

If he took more shots from inside 3pt line I would probably be a little concerned about his overall FG%, but when the bulk of a guys shots are coming from 3pt range, overall numbers typically don’t look good. That’s why stats like eFG% and TS% were invented, to weight 3pt shots and account for the difference between Charles Bediako shooting 69.2% from the floor compared to Steph Curry only shooting 50.4% in his best year. A guy taking the vast majority of his shots from within 4 feet of the basket should make a massively higher percentage than a guy who is taking the bulk of his from 23 feet+. For example, in that same year, Steph’s TS% was 66.9.

On that front, Welch’s TS% was 55.9% and his eFG% was 54.6%. Only Bediako and Keon Ellis topped that last year, and our highest volume shooter, Jaden Shackelford, was at 49.5%. So unless he starts shooting an abnormally high number of midrange shots to drive that number down, which is highly unlikely in our system, we should see him be an effective player from that standpoint. That becomes especially true if my above guess is true and he takes a larger percentage of his shots from the areas where he converts at a higher percentage.

Having said all of that, I do expect his overall numbers to drop. Like I said above, I don’t expect him to play nearly as high of a minutes load here. Based on what should be good depth and our expected pace of play, I’m projecting that he’ll play more in the 23-28 minutes range. Tho the pace we play at should allow him to maintain a decent amount of his shooting volume. I would guess we’ll see him go from 7.4 3PA per game to closer to 6. With that in mind, I see him as more of a 8.3/4.1/1.1 guy here. Those numbers might not make you do back flips with excitement, but on a minutes volume of around 24, that would be very effective. For example that on a “per 40 minutes” basis that would be closer to a 14/8/2 guy. For reference, that’s pretty close to what we got out of Keon Ellis in aggregate over his 2 years, and only slightly below what we saw from John Petty in his senior year.

On a team like last year that needed a star, those numbers wouldn’t be great. On a team like the 20-21 team that needed guys to fulfill their specific roles, those numbers were extremely effective. While we never know what a team will look like from year to year, the expectation, both internally and nationally, is that this roster is constructed much more in line with the 20-21 team. There’s obviously no Herb Jones, but there should be more overall offensive firepower on this upcoming roster. Essentially, while I don’t expect Welch to come in and be a major scoring threat, I don’t think this team will need him to be that. I also don’t think they’ll ask him to be that on a nightly basis.

Welch’s addition gets us to 12 for next year, meaning we’ve still got a spot open. We recently heard Oats publicly discuss that our roster depth (ie minutes situation) was scaring off some potential transfers, and Welch is a guy expected to play at least high-medium minutes. So I think from the perspective of a potential transfer looking our direction, that situation just got worse. As such, I don’t expect us to add another major transfer. I think we’ll either look for a reclassification signee from high school or JuCo to essentially stash on the bench as a redshirt, or we’ll take a flier on a D2 player or former pedigreed recruit who hasn’t found the right fit in college to be effective. While the addition of a guy like Matthew Mayer would be hugely welcomed, I just don’t see a player like him wanting to walk into this crowded of a minutes situation.

So keeping that in mind, this is how our roster currently looks:

Ball handlers (3) - Mark Sears, Jaden Bradley, Jahvon Quinerly

Wings (6) - Nimari Burnett, Dom Welch, Brandon Miller, Darius Miles, Rylan Griffen, Noah Clowney

Bigs (3) - Charles Bediako, Noah Gurley, Nick Pringle

There is some positional versatility among certain guys that will allow us to be pretty flexible if game situations dictate that. Really only Bediako and Pringle are locked in to only being able to play one position, and a guy like Miller projects to be able to play pretty much all of 1-4. So we’ll have options to play small or play big, based on the matchup we see from our opponents.

It’s hard to project a starting lineup at this point, with so many newcomers as a part of things. I think the only thing that we know for certain right now is that Bediako will start at the 5, health depending. Outside of that, we’ll likely see a battle between Sears and Bradley, with the ultimate likelihood possibly being the two of them playing together for large chunks of time. Once JQ becomes available, the likelihood of us playing with 2 dribble drive ball handlers at once increases, especially if Miller is capable of being that guy, as some national guys think.

If I was pressed to make a guess now for our first actual game in November, I would say Sears-Burnett-Welch-Miller-Bediako.

The August trip to Barcelona and Paris should help us get a glimpse at what some lineup constructions could look like, tho JQ will not be available and Burnett could be either unavailable or highly limited - he hasn’t been cleared for full contact yet. We don’t know what the competition level will look like there, tho typically it’s some amalgamation of a country’s national team (minus NBA players) and their junior national team. That should at least give us a better idea of how the freshman will look, tho I’m not sure it will tell us much about the transfers. Tho the 10 additional practices that we will get, as well as live scrimmage video from those 3 games, will likely be invaluable to our coaching staff. That along with the culture building that typically comes with a trip like this is why it was so imperative for us to take one of these trips this year.

Getting back to Welch, specifically, I do not expect his addition to be a season changing one. This is unlikely to be a Walker Kessler type of massive impact, so I hope people don’t look for him to be that. But I do think he definitely makes us better, especially in the places we needed to get better coming out of last year.

- Leadership - you never know what team chemistry will look like or how a guy will fit with that, much less be a leader within it, until the guys are all here. As a 5th year senior and 24 year old, the expectation is that Welch should help here. The fact that we essentially passed on a guy like Bridges because of fit concerns, but took Welch so quickly during his visit should tell us the staff believes he can be a leader.

- Defense - I gave the numbers above, but he grades out as a positive defender. On St Bonaventure’s A-10 championship team in his junior year that ranked 20th in defensive efficiency, he produced a 94.4 Drtg that compares favorably to the 95.3 that John Petty put up in 20-21. He’ll be defending better players now than he did in the A-10, but a reduction in minutes and offensive usage should allow his defense to play up.

- Proven shooting - much like Mark Sears he’s still going to have to prove it at the SEC level, but this team will be returning no one that has proven to be a consistent shooter at this level. Welch has 687 career 3PA with a 37.4% make rate. That should give us a baseline expectation that he can make shots.

In another thread @asparrish1 aptly noted that prior to Welch’s addition that we were being seen nationally as a top 20-30 team. His addition doesn’t all of the sudden propel us into being an expected top 10 team, but it does probably change our expectation to a top 15-20 team. As he said in that thread, “It raises our floor more than it raises our ceiling.” I agree with that statement considerably. Basketball is a sport of tremendous random variance, but Welch gives us much more of a known quantity in college basketball, that it should raise the extreme negative variance level by a good bit.

Ultimately our ceiling will be determined by how well Sears transitions from the MAC to the SEC and how much production we get from the 3 former McDonald’s All-Americans that will see their first action with us - Burnett, Miller, and Bradley. If we get close to the high end variance on those guys, then we should be a team that can contend in a deep and talented SEC. That would also give us an opportunity to potentially be a national seed in the NCAA tournament (teams seeded between 1 and 4), which would give us a great opportunity to be placed in Birmingham for rounds one and two.

Hopefully we’ll hear something soon on that 13th spot and we can have an injury free summer. This roster currently stacks up to be a likely NCAA tournament team, and Welch’s addition should help with that considerably. I think he was a really good pull by Oats and staff in terms of fitting our specific needs.
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Odin · May 21, 2022

those are some pretty shit stats lmao

jplaYa · May 21, 2022

Odin said: ↑

those are some pretty shit stats lmao
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Which exceed those who saw lots of playing time on the court for us last year.

Odin · May 21, 2022

jplaYa said: ↑

Which exceed those who saw lots of playing time on the court for us last year.
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very technically true. he would have ranked 5th in scoring efficiency behind Ellis, Rojas, Gary, and JD.

yes, those were the actual rankings.

jplaYa · May 21, 2022

Odin said: ↑

very technically true. he would have ranked 5th in scoring efficiency behind Ellis, Rojas, Gary, and JD.

yes, those were the actual rankings.
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JD turnover deficiency rating has to lead all of college basketball.

DDB · May 21, 2022

We fixing to take a series from Arkansas? Never will understand this baseball team.

Stone Cold Steve Austin · May 21, 2022

DDB said: ↑

We fixing to take a series from Arkansas? Never will understand this baseball team.
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Arkansas baseball is one of sports’ biggest frauds

southlick · May 21, 2022

44 regional game win streak about to come to an end in softball

southlick · May 21, 2022

southlick · May 21, 2022

Anders fighting tonight

Capstone 88 · May 21, 2022

Z · May 21, 2022

Bohannon may have just saved his job.

Softball team going to fail to make it out of a regional?

southlick · May 21, 2022

LeVar Burton · May 21, 2022

Looks like Brad saved his job again this weekend…now go win the whole thing in Hoover

southlick · May 21, 2022

southlick · May 21, 2022

Joey Freshwater · May 22, 2022

Smh still.

Clown Baby · May 22, 2022

Hey @Z you like what you see

Smuggy · May 22, 2022

Portland ME kicks ass

gus_chiggins · May 22, 2022

BamaNug · May 22, 2022

Clown Baby said: ↑

Hey @Z you like what you see

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I want it

southlick · May 22, 2022

Looks like softball isn't going to make a super regional.

DDB · May 22, 2022

southlick said: ↑

Looks like softball isn't going to make a super regional.
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Fouts a senior?

southlick · May 22, 2022

DDB said: ↑

Fouts a senior?
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Should be, seems like she's been playing for 7 years.

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CHAMPS XVIII

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