Welcome to Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. The off-season has begun in a sport that is now a 12-month-a-year operation, and a lot of news came on the day this was recorded, especially in the coaching ranks.
We first look back on the just-concluded 2016-17 season, with North Carolina winning the national championship a year after losing in the title game and also after the ACC had a great regular season but saw just one team – those same North Carolina Tar Heels – get to the second weekend.
In looking back, we also look at how South Carolina’s Final Four run was a big development for the SEC, which has faced the question of who they have besides Kentucky. Florida reached the Elite Eight and has had some great years, including a Final Four in 2013, and Texas A&M just had a couple of good years before slipping this season, but in all the SEC aside from Kentucky has been at best up and down.
Next up is recruiting, and Providence got a great pickup in Makai Ashton-Langford, a point guard whose teams have won a lot of games in the last year. The Worcester native helped Brewster Academy to a perfect season, and then was let out of his National Letter of Intent at UConn amidst a shakeup there. Providence had recruited him previously and capitalized, and they add a top prospect to a team that didn’t have a senior in their rotation this past season.
It’s early in the transfer game, but already the list is supposedly around 400 players. There is a long way to go in terms of outcomes with this, but already Memphis has taken a big hit with brothers K.J. and Dedric Lawson transferring to Kansas and Markel Crawford also transferring. Boston College is also taking a hit as glue guy A.J. Turner will transfer.
NBA Draft decisions are coming fast and furious, with Oregon guard Tyler Dorsey one of the latest to declare as we recorded this podcast. With that, Oregon now waits to see if Dillon Brooks will leave or return, and the Ducks are already losing Chris Boucher.
Finally, we talk about coaching changes, a big subject of the off-season although those moves have largely cooled off. However, on this day we got news that Steve Fisher is retiring, with Brian Dutcher taking over after being the coach-in-waiting, and also that Oral Roberts let Scott Sutton go. Sutton had a nice run about a decade ago, and he never jumped to a bigger job while the school changed conferences a couple of times and never got back to the winning ways they had with the likes of Caleb Green and Ken Tutt.
The coaching change most of note recently is Georgetown hiring Patrick Ewing, a move we talk about in some depth.
We hope you enjoy this podcast, and tune in again soon for more.
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