Author:
Bison137
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Date Posted: 22:49:42 12/04/05 Sun
I agree 100%. It should be a more balanced league next year as the Bison lose two key players and H.C. also loses two starters, including all-everything Kevin Hamilton. The one other squad that gets hurt is Lehigh, who loses 3 of their top 6 players at the moment(although none is very good) and also loses Joe Knight, who would be their leading scorer this year if the NCAA can be convinced to allow internet courses in basket-weaving to count for full credit. They do have what appears to be a good recruiting class coming in, however, which should let them compete at a decent level. American will return everyone (plus who knows what transfers are in the pipeline), Navy will only graduate 1 important player, and Army will return all 10 of their players who are seeing 10+ minutes PPG.
I think, however, that the Bison will still be the dominant team. Sure, Lee and Bettencourt are great players, but I think there are pretty good replacements lined up. Griffin had an impressive freshman year and, per minute, his production was actually very similar to Bettencourt (although their roles were a bit different). Giving Griffin the same 32.2 mpg as Bettencourt, their 2004-05 stats look like this:
Pts,Reb,.Ast,TO,.Stl,PPG,...FG%,.3PT%,.FT%
Bettencourt - 417, 97, 79, 77, 55, 12.6, .356, .353. .888
Griffin.... - 389,102, 87, 71, 53, 11.8, .421, .395, .839
I didn't see enough of them to compare them defensively, but overall it appears that Griffin may be able to fill the void pretty well. Also, Vegotsky is supposed to be a great pure shooter.
As far as Lee goes, there will definitely be some falloff but some combination of Brown, Clark, Behan, and maybe Evans/Tyree can hopefully do the job. Definitely need some development from Mastropaolo offensively however.
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