Portal Season: Purdue Boilermakers Basketball. The new look boilers

Alright, basketball fans, we’re back with another look at the rosters. With 18 teams in the B1G this season, plus a round of Yahtzee to determine the rosters, it’s hard to keep track of who’s on a team. Yet we do our best here at OTE, especially for you.

Today on the list are the Terps, best known for disappointing everyone last season.

Happy trails

• The big loss is point guard Jahmir Youngwho led the team in most things last year
• Fellow fifth-year senior Donta Scott is also outdated. One of the few who played for the same team for five years. That’s more than 30 points per game between Young and Scott.
• Then we take the Randos to the Portal. Jamie Keizer the most played and goes to Butler. Also be gone Noah Batchelor (Buffalo), JAhnathan Lamothe (North Carolina A&T), Caelum Swanton-Rodger (uh, UI estimate TBD), and Mady Traore (Also alum to be determined).

BoilerUp89: A lot of production is being lost as Young and Scott graduate. Remember, Young was all B1G first team last season despite Maryland’s team woes.

Stay where you are

• The big name is in the middle Julian Reesewho returns for his actual senior year and is a plus scorer and shot blocker inside.
• Former Hoosier Jordan Geronimo also returns to his position, grabs offensive rebounds and dunks them. He is joined by sniper and fifth-year senior Jahari Lang.
• Freshmen from last year DeShawn Harris-Smith this year there is a lot to lean on. He played a lot of minutes last year without great results, but he was a freshman. Returns are also redshirt frosh Braden Pierce.

Noobs

• Jahmir Young’s replacement responsibility falls to a junior transfer Ja’Kobi Gillespie from Belmont. He averaged 17 with 4 assists last season and was a pest defensively.
• There’s also a second-year guard coming up Rodney Rice, formerly a four-star frosh at Virginia Tech. He didn’t play much for the Hokies last year.
• COVID guys? Yes. Maryland imports fifth-year senior Selton Miguel from South Florida. He likes to shoot and was pretty good from three, but pretty bad from two.
• Big man Tafara Gapare joins his third team in three years, formerly of Georgia Tech and UMass. Was once a four-star prospect.
• Guard Chance Stevens is actually a 2023 signing from Loyola Marymount, but didn’t play last year due to injury. I think he’s still in the mix. They just added it too Jaylon Young from Memphis, who retired from Vermont.
• Two freshmen, including a five-star big man Dirk Koningin and three-star watch Malachi Palmer.

Larry31: Maryland basketball sucked last year. The general consensus from fans across multiple websites is that last year’s season was a huge pile because Willard is bad at coaching. I strongly disagree with this story. According to Kenpom, Maryland’s defense was a top-10 defense for most of the season. It finished in 14th place. A bad coach doesn’t have an elite defense because of luck. That’s good coaching.

Unfortunately, Maryland’s offense was ranked 155th by Kenpom. Rotten. The unwatchable offense was due to terrible roster construction. Willard relied on two freshman guards to carry a huge load offensively. Jamie Kaiser and Deshawn Harris-Smith failed miserably at three-point shooting, as did virtually the entire roster. They executed a good offensive plan and took many, many wide open threes and missed a large majority of them.

Hakim Hart left Maryland to play for a very well-funded but not very good Villanova team, where he played significantly fewer minutes. If he had stayed at Maryland, he would have been Maryland’s three-point shooter. He was Maryland’s most efficient offensive player in the 2022-2023 season. And he is a very good defensive player. Such is life in the NIL era.

The good news is that the NIL situation in Maryland has improved significantly. Five-star center Derik Queen would live up to the hype: very good court awareness, very capable passer and can stretch the defense with a consistent jumper. His presence should take the load off JuJu Reese.

Maryland has brought in a lot of talent through the portal. Belmont transfer Jakobi Gillespie is the top-rated transfer guard. Apparently there won’t be a major setback from the now departed Jahmir Young. Other transfer guards include: Rodney Rice (very talented but injury prone and lacking experience), Chance Stephens (transfer from Loyola Marymount who missed last season due to injury) and Selton Miguel (transfer from USF who is currently playing very well for the Angolan Olympic Games). team). Rice can be prone to injury. Chance Stephens apparently looks good and was brought in specifically to help fill the very large outside shooting void, but is unproven at the P-6 level. Selton Manuel seems to be the most impactful transfer behind Jakobi Gillespie at the moment. In short: this selection has the potential to be very good. This roster is deep and talented. But the one issue that crippled last year’s team, other than shooting, has not yet been definitively addressed.

BoilerUp89: Are you a good coach if your offenses are generally mediocre? In seventeen seasons as a D1 head coach, Willard has only had three offenses in the top 50. I have to admit, Willard is a good defensive coach. Just like Fran McCaffery is a good offensive coach. However, that doesn’t make Willard a good coach in general. You need to be skilled on both sides of the ball or at least have an assistant who can coach the other side of the ball.

As for this year’s Maryland selection, Queen is the top center prospect coming to the Big Ten this year. He doesn’t have high-level athleticism, but is a very skilled center. I wonder how Queen and Reese play together (neither are good outside shooters), but the duo should at least mean that Maryland has 40 minutes of above-average mid game.

Miguel has worked very hard to improve his three-point shooting from what it was at Kansas State (23% and 20.5% in his two seasons there), and was a blistering 71 of 182 (39%) for the Bulls last year . He will sometimes try to do a little too much alone. Last season, he led USF in two-point attempts (222) despite making just 42.8% of them.

I’m a big fan of most Missouri Valley players and Ja’Kobi Gillespie is no exception. A strong argument can be made that he was unfairly left out of the all-MVC 1st team last season. Gillespie can score from just about anywhere and is excellent at setting up teammates for their own shots. He’ll have to adjust to the physicality of the Big Ten (Gillespie is 6-foot-4, 180 pounds), but he has good potential. Hopefully, Maryland fans don’t expect him to simply step into a carbon copy of what Jahmir Young was able to accomplish.

The rest of the transfers are a collection of guys looking for a fresh start after things didn’t work out for them. Two of the transfers/holdovers at the guard and wing positions will need to develop into useful pieces for this Terps team to make any serious moves this season.

One final note. I’ll save most of my displeasure with Maryland’s basketball schedule for the fall when I review the entire Big Ten team non-conference roster, but the opponents Willard has selected for the Terrapins (Maryland is the only B1G schedule that has been completed) show a complete lack of confidence in this year’s team to be competitive at the start of the season. Make of that what you will.