The glass has to be half full. It must with nary a game yet played. For such, over the next few days, I’ll be posting why each of the conference’s twelve teams have reasons to be optimistic.
- The League – The Herbivore went out and reloaded his coaching staff with NBA veterans Eric Musselman and Larry Greer. Time will tell if the move pays off but any time you can get some NBA minds in your locker room and on your bench it can’t be terrible.
- Eric Gordon – OK, if the Eric Gordon was on this team there would be a lot more hype surrounding their season. But they do have his little brother, Evan, who transfers in from Liberty where he averaged 14/3/2 before departing. He’ll play Robin to…
- Pace – Herb Sendek has vowed to make his offense move faster. Why? Because usually it doesn’t, ranking at 281, 296, and 326 in adjusted tempo the last three seasons.
- 80/5 – That’s the dollar amount (in millions) over years the Houston Rockets will pay former Sun Devil, James Harden. That is so much dollars.
- London – There were two Sun Devils who played basketball in the summer games, Harden and Ike Diogu (Nigeria). Won’t lie to you, that’s pretty cool.
- Toreros – No one knows what happened in the super-secret scrimmage the Devils had against USD and maybe we should keep it that way.
- Utah – Little did we know – or perhaps the writing had been on the wall, but still – that adding the twelfth winningest basketball program in college history (as measured by most wins) would likely keep the Devils out of the cellar (excluding USC’s 2011-12 anomaly) for two consecutive years. Utah was bad last year and likely won’t be much better this year. Also, you can’t tell me you’re not surprised to hear that Utah’s won the twelfth most games in college hoops history. Impressive.