Welcome to the latest edition of Talking Hoops With Ted Sarandis. The NBA Draft is in the books, and we spend a good deal of time looking back on it to get us going.
The NBA Draft gets us going, and it’s not the first take on Hoopville about it. We talk about surprises such as Trae Young going as high as he did and the fall of Michael Porter Jr. and Robert Williams, as well as why Jerome Robinson apparently rose up to the lottery. We also look at other storylines that include a couple of redshirt juniors going in the first round.
The next subject is the recent news that Reid Travis will transfer to Kentucky and be eligible immediately as a graduate transfer. This boosts the Wildcats noticeably in a lot of early top 25 rankings, including ours, and it also spurs us to look at how some other teams shape up based on off-season transactions to date.
From there, we go on to the story of UConn firing Kevin Ollie for cause, which has had new developments. The school is now alleging a series of major violations, although the ones they have cited thus far are not major ones save for one that is not getting much mention, which is that Ollie allegedly paid thousands of dollars to a recruit’s mother. Since that is not being talked about much, one has to think there is not much smoke there, because such a payment would indeed be a major violation.
Our final big subject is a look inside recent news that major changes may be coming to the recruiting calendar and the structure. Both NBC Sports and Adam Zagoria have reported in this, also building on news from a podcast by Jeff Goodman that touched on this. The changes would be dramatic, but there is likely to be legal action if they are pushed through, so a lot remains to be seen. We express some skepticism that these changes would really make things better if they do come to fruition.
Finally, we briefly talk about other coaching news, including all Division I vacancies being filled by now, with a few being interim head coaches for next season.
We hope you enjoy the podcast and share it with your fellow college basketball fans. Be sure to check out our continuing series of conference post-mortems from the 2017-18 season and much more, including more podcasts, here on Hoopville.
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