Louisville basketball hopes age won’t define maturity in Year 2 of Kenny Payne’s rebuild

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — JJ Traynor wouldn’t have believed you.

Four years ago, if you had told the 6-foot-8 Bardstown native when he committed to the Louisville men’s basketball team he would attend ACC Tipoff on Wednesday as the last senior standing from U of L’s 2020 recruiting class — playing for Kenny Payne, not Chris Mack — it would have sounded as far-fetched as the Cardinals spiraling from 24 wins during the 2019-20 season to a school-record 28 losses in 2022-23.

“It’s been a roller coaster, for sure,” Traynor said.

That’s life in the NCAA transfer portal era.

More than 1,800 Division I men’s basketball players entered the portal during the offseason, according to one report from mid-August. It, coupled with an extra year of eligibility granted to athletes whose careers were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, has made college hoops an old(er) man’s game.

See the 2023 Final Four field for proof.

Each team had an experience rating of 2.09 or better on KenPom.com, which assigns players numerical values (zero for freshmen, one for sophomores, two for juniors, etc.) based on how many years they’ve clocked 10% or more of their team’s minutes. When UConn (2.25) and San Diego State (2.96) tipped off in the national championship game, there was just one freshman on the court.

The portal made it possible by giving coaches the ability to inject experience into their rotations.

Then, there’s Louisville, with its eight newcomers, five of whom haven’t played against DI competition, and Traynor as its lone senior heading into 2023-24.

U of L (1.32) ranks 12th out of 15 ACC teams in statistician Bart Torvik’s projected effective experience metric, which differs from KenPom in that it counts years not by minutes but by players logging appearances in 10 or more games. This after Payne often lamented a lack of it during the worst season in modern program history — U of L was 336th out of 363 DI programs on KenPom with an experience rating of 0.90 — then had four upperclassmen hit the…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/louisville-basketball-hopes-age-wont-090127344.html

Author : The Courier Journal

Publish date : 2023-10-27 09:01:27

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