Mo Diarra has left the building
Basketball News & Notes:
- ACC Tipoff – The ACC basketball media days are Tuesday – Thursday of this week. The Wolfpack’s day is Wednesday. It will be broadcast on ACCN, but no specific times by team have been announced yet. Coach Keatts is taking Jayden Taylor and Michael O’Connell with him. Coach Moore is taking Aziaha James and Saniya Rivers. This will be our first team updates since the official start of practice a couple of weeks ago. Looking forward to it.
- Speaking of Michael O’Connell – Jon Rothstein singled him out as one of the nation’s 16 “Glue Guys” for the upcoming season. Kudos to Rothstein for stating the blindingly obvious.
- House v NCAA $2.8B settlement proposal – The settlement proposal has taken a step forward. The judge has preliminarily approved the proposal. (basically revenue sharing at the university level) In two weeks the process to notify the eligible student-athletes what they could receive begins, which opens the doors for settlement opponents to make themselves heard. The window for responses/concerns/criticisms will remain open until April, after which the settlement proposal could be accepted and finalized by the judge. The schools could start cutting checks as soon as July.
- NCAA D1 Council meeting – They have three major meetings a year, this week is one. The one applicable thing on their agenda is adding an academic progress requirement for transfers. Of late, academics have taken a backseat to NIL and easy transfers, so – depending on how/if implemented – sounds like a positive step. The execution will be interesting.
- ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips has been appointed to the NCAA Board of Governors and will chair the Finance and Audit Committee as well as serve as a member of the Executive Committee. So what, you ask? Good question.
Season Previews:
This is the third in a series of weekly articles leading up to opening night against USC Upstate on November 4. (Banners will go up!)
- Full Schedule Released – Taking a look at new Wolfpack committment Mikey Wilkins; New schedule released; Analyzing the OOC schedule
- Re-introducing the ‘24-’25 players – Breakdown on all 13 players
- What about rebounding? – This team should be much, much better.
- The ‘24-’25 Offense
- The ‘24-’25 Defense
- Who’s going to be the X-Factor this season?
As you can see in the table above, last season, rebounding was not a team strength. ESPN listed us as 174th in the country. We won the rebounding battle in 21 (of 41) games and lost six of those 21 games. UNC averaged 41.1, we only topped that total six times all season. We only won the rebounding in two Q1 games, in a loss at Wake (Mo 12 reb) and a win against Marquette (Mo 15 reb). Definitely an area in which we need to improve.
Mo Diarra was a very good rebounder for us, in fact you’d have to go ‘all the way’ back to Dereon Seabron (8.2 rpg) (’21-‘22) to find a better per game average. But other than Dereon, Mo was the best of Coach Keatts’ tenure – and it seemed like he was just reaching his potential. Mo averaged 7.8 RPG, he had 14 games with 10+ boards, he had 7 double-doubles, and broke Tim Duncan’s 20+ year old record of most rebounds in the ACC Tournament with 60. Losing Mo hurt, he leaves huge shoes to fill.
In his July presser, Coach Keatts explained that a contributing factor as to why Mo’s numbers (10th in ACC) were so good reflected the fact that he wasn’t really competing with DJ Burns (42nd in ACC) for rebounds.
“What I mean by that is both Ben (36th in ACC) and Brandon (5th in ACC) you would say are better rebounders. [than DJB] Mike James (29th in ACC) can rebound. Dennis Parker can rebound the basketball. Dontrez Styles (18th in BE) can rebound the basketball. Paul McNeil. We’re talking about all guys that are 6-5. This team will rebound more by committee than anything.”
Comparing Our Top Six Rebounders – If you look at the top six rebounders per game on last season’s team, they total 26.7 rebounds per game:
- Diarra – 7.8
- Middlebrooks – 4.4
- Burns – 4.0
- Taylor – 3.6
- Horne – 3.5
- O’Connell – 3.4
Obviously, three of those top six are returning. Using last season’s stats, if you project this season’s top six rebounders, they total 30.6 (+3.9) rebounds per game. Not an unreasonable projection, these guys should average a similar number of minutes this season:
- Huntley-Hatfield – 8.4
- Dontrez Styles – 5.8
- Mike James – 5
- Ben Middlebrooks – 4.4
- Jayden Taylor – 3.6
- Michael O’Connell – 3.4
Note Ben Middlebrooks’ numbers – He only averaged 16.3 minutes per game, but he pulled almost as many offensive rebounds as Huntley-Hatfield who averaged 30.8 minutes per game. His total rebounds ranks just behind Styles who averaged 33.5 minutes per game. His rebounds per minute is second only to Huntley-Hatfield. ‘24-’25, the season of Big Ben!
Plus three new guys – Three guys I did not include in the anticipated ‘top six’ above could make a big difference. Yet to be determined how their numbers will translate to the ACC; Ismaël Diouf averaged 6.2 rpg at Laval University (Quebec), Marcus Hill averaged 5 rpg. at Bowling Green, and Paul McNeil averaged 9.5 rpg. in high school.
Playing With The Numbers – In fact, just for fun, if you take that ‘top six’ analysis a bit further and add up last season’s rebounding numbers for the entire ’24-’25 roster, excluding freshmen, and compare to the Wolfpack ‘23-’24 roster you see our team rebound total would increase by 10.5 per game. That would never happen – not enough minutes or rebounds to go around; however, we definitely do appear to have more good rebounders this season. And if we could improve on last season’s team average by just 3 rebounds per game, we’d have finished ranked second in the ACC behind UNC. UNC was 7th in the country in total rebounds per game.
Rebounding projects to be a team strength this coming season.