Not surprised to see us picked at 9, think we finish higher at 6-7. Losing Kari hurts (and just as I finally became confident in my spelling of Hafnarfjordur without need of a double check), but Isabell and Harper seem to be good fits for what Spiker wants to do and they're multi-dimensional in that they'll drive to the hoop and draw fouls to go with a 3 point shot. Kari took close to 75% of his shots behind the arc. I'd love to have a sharp shooter, and mentioned Kari as the player I was most intrigued by to Spiker during his introductory meet and greet for that reason, but Kurk was not too far behind Kari and Sammy and Troy have shown they can hit in the past.

I know Isabell has gotten the podcast love, but I'm really intrigued, and mentioned this on Twitter to former The Triangle hoops reporter Adam Hermann after the introduction to his new DU hoops blog fifteenthirtyeight.wordpress.com, by Troy Harper. His two years at Campbell saw him attempt about 45% of his shots beyond the arc, but he still gets foul shots on 55%+ of his shot attempts. He saw his 3G% fall from 38% as a freshman to 28.5% as a sophomore, but saw his FT% increase from 61% to 78% in same time frame. If he can get those aligned and Isabell shows as well as he's been spoken of, the loss of Kari shouldn't hurt.

Still a bit concerned with what we have in the bigs. Austin made a huge leap last year when he was on the court, but he still fouls too much and everybody else are question marks. Hopefully the driving abilities of Kurk, Troy and Tramaine will help provide easier hoops for the big guys and it won't be a huge issue. I'm ready to get things going, excited to see what year two brings. This team's first year post Bru ran at the second fastest tempo of a Spiker run team and KenPom is expecting that to bump up another 5 possessions per game. Buckle up, the Dragons are taxiing to the runway!