Basketball Summer Preview Series: Roster Turnover

Hey, look!  A basketball post!  It's just less than a week away from the official start of summer, and I'm already back to basketball on the brain.  I believe this is what the late, great Barry White was singing about on the Space Jam soundtrack.   

The upcoming season may prove to be one of the most interesting/important in recent memory as the CU mens basketball program tries to carry over the momentum built by last year's NIT warriors.   Periodically throughout the summer I will be posting parts of a preview series  to keep the basketball flame alive while everyone else is gearing up for football.  Hopefully this will keep my start-of-the-season preview post from ballooning into 30,000 words.

First up: Roster turnover




I hate to spoil the surprise, but every basketball preview this fall, regardless of how well acquainted the author is with the program, will include consternation over the graduation/departure of a large majority of the production from last year's squad.  Roster turnover is just a fact of life in collegiate sports, but coming off of one of the most successful years in CU basketball history the Buffs will have to recover from the loss of an over-sized level of production while facing increased expectations from a fan base now aware of their presence.

In fact, despite only taking up 33% of the roster, the departures of seniors Cory Higgins, Levi Knutson, Marcus Relphorde, and Trent Beckley combined with the NBA leap of super-sophomore Alec Burks add up to a 60% loss in minutes, 75% loss in points, 48% loss in rebounds, and 63% loss in assists from last year's roster.  How CU goes about replacing those numbers will make or break the next few years.

Al may have said goodbye to Dear Old CU, but the beat goes on.

There is a danger here.  Over the past decade the CU basketball program went through a few periods of heavy roster turnover, and poor handling of the situation almost ruined the program.  Losing that much production can feel like falling off a cliff, but it doesn't have to be.  As a history major I love to use historical examples to inform my future projections, and we can look into recent Buff history to get a good idea of how the program will be able to cope with the rather large loss of production.  Today I'll look at why heavy roster turnover in the past decade lead to big problems for the program, and use that knowledge to inform how I expect the current roster turnover will affect the upcoming season.
  
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We begin the tale in the summer of 2004.  Much like this past season, the '03-'04 squad featured three high-profile senior contributors (Lamar Harris, Blair Wilson, and Michel Morandais), a low-profile senior role player (Amadou Doumboya), and a high-profile underclassman jumping to the NBA (Big David Harrison).  Besides the glaring lack of a run in the NIT, it's about as close a facsimile to this year's situation as can be expected.  Hell, that season even featured a disappointment on Selection Sunday as the Richmond Spiders took the final at-large spot from CU (The Spiders beat CU in Boulder that season, and deserved to leap-frog the Buffs into the Dance).

Big Dave had some terrific years in Boulder, but his departure but Coach Patton in a bind to find replacements.

Statistically, that '03-'04 squad lost 63% of minutes, 71% of points, 66% of rebounds, and 54% of assists to graduation and the NBA Draft.  (Those top line numbers of minutes and points lost are eerily similar to those from last year's squad.) Coach Ricardo Patton, on a continuing push to justify his employment at a school that largely tries to ignore basketball, chose to rely heavily on JuCo and transfer players to fill the roster gap and aim for a quick rebuilding process the following season.

Out of the 6 newcomers to the program that fall only two were freshman (Richard Roby and Marcus King-Stockton), and the group joined a roster that was already weighted towards the 2006 graduating class.  In fact there was only one senior in 2005, reserve walk-on Mac Mattingly, and Coach Patton gambled heavily on the fact that an astonishing 10 juniors on the roster would be enough to carry him to success and a new contract over the next two seasons.  Obviously, Roby and his all-time scoring record (tied with Higgins) was a jewel of a pick-up, but this class can best be remembered for setting the program up for a double-digit senior exodus in '06. 

There was reason for immediate concern, however, as attendance dropped off by nearly 1,400 (almost 25%) per game in '04-'05.  Even with the exciting play of the young Roby to entice them, people stayed away from the CEC in droves.  Additionally, despite the electric play of Roby, who lead the team is scoring that year, the roster turnover in 2004 translated into a 2.6 point/game and 3% shooting drop the following year.  Combined with a 3.2 point/game and 2% shooting increase for opponents, the Buffs struggled to stay near .500 down the stretch before finishing 14-16 (4-12) on the year.

That attendance drop-off may be a scary sight, but the production drop off is not that bad.  In fact, those numbers are pretty manageable with some luck and a good coaching staff.  It's certainly not indicative of a team destined for the post season, but it set the Buffs up for sizable gains in '05-'06.

Seeing the results, I definitely understand Coach Patton's reasoning behind recruiting a class heavy on JuCo's here, but I'm not sure a big-picture view of the roster would warrant such a front-loading of the programs roster.  Had I been blogging in these days I would've been howling, as a year of severely diminished returns may have been preferable to what lay ahead.

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Coach Patton's penultimate season in Boulder featured some success on the court, but the glaring roster hole soon to be created by 10 departing seniors had many rightly nervous about the future.  The '05-'06 squad won 20 games and appeared in the NIT by combining the burgeoning talents of Richard Roby, Marcus Hall, and Dominique Coleman with the massive senior class.  The group of ten seniors, featuring Lamont Arrington, Julius Ashby, Billy Boidock, Chris Copeland, Glean Eddy, Martane Freeman, Antoine McGee, Jason Obazuaye, Andy Osborn, and Scott Senger, all said their final good-byes to the CEC in March of '06 having gotten the Buffs back into the post-season.  (Talk about a deep bench filled with veteran experience; I've always wondered why they weren't able to win more games with that group.  Not necessarily talented, but there was a lot of them.)

Cope highlighted the massive 10-person 2006 graduating class.

Obviously with 10 guys leaving the program, there was a lot of shakeup in store for the roster, but it's on a completely different level from what the program is currently experiencing.  The '11-'12 squad only has to find 5 replacement bodies instead of 10.  Additionally, those 10 seniors had a surprisingly muted impact on the success of the team that they were leaving.  While making up 2/3rds of the roster, they only accounted for barely over 50% of team production.  All told, they took 45% of assists, and 57% of minutes, points, and rebounds with them as they left the program. 

It was at this point that the program was at a crossroads.  Coach Patton could've used JuCo's and transfers to balance out the roster to erase the roster imbalance that lead to a double-digit senior class, but instead he  decided to fill the massive roster gap with an equally oversized group of freshmen.  Specifically ten freshmen, including the doomed CU careers of Kal Bay, James Inge, Jeremy Williams, Sean Kowal, Marc Van Burck, and Xavier Silas, joined transfer Jermyl Jackson-Wilson in attempting to replace the departed '06 senior class.  Only Wilson, Dwight Thorne and Trent Beckley would finish their careers in Black and Gold as the coaching shift to Jeff Bzdelik precipitated in all but two of the '06 freshman leaving the program prior to the '08-'09 season.

Without a berth in the NCAA Tournament to leverage for a contract extension, Coach Patton could see the writing on the wall and announced that '06-'07 would be his final year in Boulder.  This caused the resulting season to fly apart at the seams before it even got out of the blocks.  Combined with the magnitude of the roster turnover, the cloud of Patton's departure ended up making the '06-'07 season interesting only in a "can't turn away from a car wreck" sense, and set the table for a 4-year rebuilding process.

As it was, the freshman-heavy '06-'07 squad stumbled their way to a 7-20 (3-13) record as they literally fought through the zombie season of Coach Patton's tenure in Boulder.  The scary thing is that it could've been worse. Richard Roby spent the 2006 off-season considering whether or not to turn pro; had Roby left early, it would've been a disaster. With him still on the roster, the realities of handing the reins over to 10 freshmen was merely crippling. 

Had Roby not been here, the Buffs would've really struggled.

While many of the losses that season can be rightfully attributed to the lack of upper-class leadership, the awkward coaching situation definitely had its effect as well, culminating in a bizarre wreck of a season that was as captivating as it was painful to watch. It took the entirety of Jeff Bzdelik's three years in Boulder to dig out of the resulting imbalance.  The lesson to be learned here is two-fold.  One, don't allow an essentially headless program to blindly cast about in a basketball season, and two, don't allow your roster to ever contain 2/3rds freshmen.  Definitely good points to understand.

The issue didn't arise overnight, and was the culmination of a rash decision combined with a failure to correct it when the opportunity arose.  All told, Patton's roster gamble cost the program three straight Big XII basement finishes, and an overall record of 28-62 from '06-'09. 

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But things got better.  Four straight years of roster reconstruction lead to a 24-14 record last season, and an appearance in the NIT final four.  Maybe not the heights of the basketball world, but, considering where the program was not to long ago, an achievement worth saluting.  But, once again, the program is at a crossroads.

Last season was one of the most exciting years in CU basketball history, and to expect anything other than a drop off would seem to be grasping at straws.  It seems the trick here is to avoid chasing quick victories and big crowds; it takes nuanced patience to build a sustainable roster.  While short term post-Big Dave rebuilding only took a season, even with the great Richard Roby CU began to crater in '06-'07 due to the roster imbalance created with the '04 class.  The solution is a balanced group of newcomers, without overemphasizing one graduating class over another.

It strikes me that Coach Tad Boyle has acquitted himself well here.  He had a veteran scorer ready in the wings (Carlon Brown), found a trio of exciting freshmen (Dinwiddie, Caine, and Booker) to input youth and balance into the roster, and convinced a intriguing JuCo wing (Jeremy Adams) to add another scoring threat.  The result is that the roster for next year will be decently balanced (albeit slightly underclassmen heavy as 8 of 13 players are either a freshman or a sophomore) while still featuring some reasonable replacements for those that left after last season.

JuCo transfer Jeremy Adams not only adds talent to the roster, but helps to balance it as well.

I'm not expecting to find the next Richard Roby in this year's class, but a combination of Brown, Adams and the freshman trio could reasonably be expected to at least equal, if not outright exceed, the combined performance of the 2004 newcomers.  Accordingly, I would have to expect a similar team-wide drop similar to the one seen in '04-'05.  While that may sound daunting, I think the drop-off will be manageable.  I'm comfortable with .500 being a baseline expectation for next season, with a decent probability of something better should things go well.  The good news is that, with the roster slightly weighted towards underclassmen, its safe to expect the program will get back to a high level of success as early as '12-'13.  As long as the program avoids going hell bent for freshmen at that point, we should see steady waves of success as the program only grows stronger.

Next Part: I'll take a closer look at the new comers, and try to predict the roles each will play next season.