MBB Recruiting: 2016 5* F TJ Leaf decommits from Arizona; Michigan reaching out
Per multiple reports, 2016 5* forward TJ Leaf decommitted from Arizona last night. The 6'9" big man had significant interest in Michigan and was offered by Beilein. He also has family ties to Indiana and was strongly considering the Hoosiers before eventually picking the Wildcats.
Apparently Michigan made contact last night, but 247's Crystal Ball has seen a run on UCLA which makes sense given his apparent (if unstated) desire to stay on the West Coast.
He's already started trending to UCLA... I am just goint to continue liking our marry gang of 3* guys exceeding expectations every year. After Jalen Brown I've become extremely jaded.
I am also in the jaded camp. I always expect the worst when it comes to bball recruiting. I know it is wrong, but I've been hurt too many times.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:23 AM ^
I will never understand bball recruiting. I gloss over the bball recruiting posts the most. Until they are actually enrolled and on campus, I will not get excited. What are we like batting .025 over the past 2 years? Seems like it!
August 7th, 2015 at 10:33 AM ^
Speaking for myself, basketball posts are the only recruiting ones I DON'T gloss over. It's less crap-shooty than football and every individual has a much better chance to impact the squad just based on the numbers game. I remember a couple months ago someone asked who would you rather have, Jaylen Brown or Rashan Gary. I thought the people answering Gary were absolutely nuts!
Do you like the marry gang of 3* more than the feeling of a Final Four? Because we're probably going to need to mix in a couple serious talents that lives up to billing to get back there.
Can we stop? There are more 4 stars on the roster than 3 stars. Pretending Beilein can't recruit is a tired meme.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:28 AM ^
He recruited just fine until the point everyone expected recruiting to hit another level (after the title game run and first round draft selections). The four stars have dried up after the Walton-Irvin-Donnal class (all signed before the aforementioned run), save for Chatman who has to come with a caveat at the moment after his alarming freshman season.
I'm not saying Beilein can't recruit. He has done well there in the past. But he's been on a cold streak the last two years for which the timing is fairly inexplicable given how attractive the program should be.
August 7th, 2015 at 11:01 AM ^
The last 2 years:
2014: 2 4-star recruits and 3 3-star recruits
2015: 1 4-star recruit
Nothing has dried up. If you want to fault Beilein for not getting a big mess of 4-stars in 2014, that's fine I guess, but it's kind of dumb.
August 7th, 2015 at 11:28 AM ^
Calling Teske and Wilson four-star recruits is a little dubious in my book. Yeah, technically based on the too wide net cast by recruiting services for what makes that distinction in basketball. Top 50-ish (or close to it) are what I see as a four-star player.
To put it in perspective, Rivals has 108 basketball players in the class that they give 4-stars to. Basketball has 13 scholarships, football has 85, meaning for every scholarship basketball player there are 6.5 football players. 108 x 6.5 = 706. Rivals does not have 706 four-star listings in football.
August 7th, 2015 at 11:59 AM ^
Only top 50 is good enough to be 4-stars? More than half of the top 50 are 5-star recruits. If you are going to use your arbitrary star-rankings instead of the commonly accepted ones you need to mention that in your post.
In any case, I don't expect Beilein to get a top-50 guy every single year because there are more than 300 teams in D1, dozens of them with equivalent or better resources and traditions than UM. One final four run isn't turning us into Duke. Anyone who expected that run to net us a 5-star every year was delusional.
The 4-stars I was referring to were DJ Wilson and Moritz Wagner by the way. Jon Teske is yet another 4-star recruit in the 2016 class, but he didn't fall within the "last 2 years" guideline that you mentioned. It's also likely that Austin Davis will wind up consensus 4-star by the end of his recruitment(he's already 4-star on 24/7).
I do not buy that there has been a significant drop in recruiting since 2012. Two or three 4/5-star types plus a sprinkling of 3-stars resulting in a top-25 class has been the consistent outcome, and will continue with 2016 and likely beyond. This is good enough to be a contender in the B1G and obtain a desirable seed in the tournament most years. This is all a non-blueblood basketball program can reasonably ask.
I honestly can't believe Beilein is able to recruit at the level he already does, let alone improving. 2012 is widely regarded as the best UM recruiting class in decades, and now Beilein is being chided for not being able to replicate it annually. Michigan's transition from smoldering crater to obsolescence to perennial B1G contender has been staggering.
You say that a yearly 5-star player isn't the expection, but that is almost literally the only way his classes could get any better. That's the Kentucky/UNC/Duke tier of top 10 classes every single year. Michigan is likely never going to get there and a few draft picks + a couple tournament runs certainly isn't going to do the job. Making the tournament and getting a player drafted are not novelties to a 5-star player.
I saw that you were pretty disingenuous with how you listed rankings, specifially listing anyone below #100 as NR for some reason. It's also not useful at all to list the rankings of classes that aren't even completed yet.
My point is unchanged. 2012 was the outlier class. 2013 was not that different than 2014 in terms of rankings and 2015 only had one player due to roster limitations, and even that player was a top-100 4-star equivalent. 2016 will land in the same top 25 range(currently 21) or better.
We have been recruiting at a top 25 level for several years in a row. One final four and a handful of draft picks were never going to put us with the Dukes of the world. We shouldn't be disappointed that Beilein can't do a top 10 class like 2012 every year, it's incredible that he was able to do it once.
It is incredible. Michigan hadn't been relevant in basketball since before the 2012 recruits were born, and any tradition they might have remembered was marred by scandal.
Crisler got wonderful reviews for its renovation, but people don't talk about it in hushed tones like Rupp or Cameron Indoor or Phog Allen.
Michigan does offer one of the stronger degrees among major CBB, but if I'm a 5-star like the guys you think Beilein should be pulling down regularly, I don't care. I'll get to the league, get paid, and if I want to go to school, then I'll use my giant pile of money to go wherever I want.
Michigan has the recruiting advantages of a top-25 school, but not a top-10 school. Beilein has been, if anything, overachieving on the recruiting trail.
August 8th, 2015 at 10:21 AM ^
August 7th, 2015 at 12:16 PM ^
August 7th, 2015 at 12:46 PM ^
Attractiveness of a program and recent success don't always translate for basketball recruiting. I mean, UCLA went to three straight FF and one title game and then had a real problem getting and developing talent under Howland. And that's UCLA - about as blue-blood a team you can be in college basketball.
Michigan is recruiting perfectly fine; Beilein is never going to be the type of guy to rope in numerous 5* talent, especially if it is true that certain apparel providers hold sway over kids. But people are knocking this "plateau" of high 3/low 4* recruits with an occassional top-50 recruit as some terrible fall for UM. I lived through the post-Martin years with Amaker and Ellerbe; this isn't close to the talent deficit you saw during that time.
You're both right in a way. It's not about stars/rankings as much as it's about priorities. There are guys that Beilein identifies early, prioritizes, and pursues aggressively. Sometimes they are 5 stars, sometimes they are 3 stars. Their rankings on the site are really secondary because they may be 3-star unknowns (e.g., Robinson, Hardaway) or they may already be highly ranked (e.g., Leaf, Battle, Morris, McGary).
In 2012 and 2013 Beilein targeted guys early on and got his fair share of those priority guys. In 2014 and 2015 he did not (except maybe Chatman, who had a quiet recruitment for how high his ranking was).
THAT is the key distinction in my mind. Is Beilein getting the guys HE targeted. So Teske maybe isn't a 5-star and Winston is -- so what? Both were priorities for this staff in the '16 class. They may not be "5-stars" but they are Beilien Tier 1 Priorities - and that matters more. In 2014 guys like Booker and Tate were Tier 1 Priorities and Michigan didn't land them. In '16 Battle and Langford and Leaf were priority guys the staff did not land. Watson was a guy they grabbed after that. He could be a better player but he's a Tier 2 Priority or Plan B - clearly they wanted Langford and Battle more. Not landing those guys is a recruiting failure of sorts. One they seemed to have recovered for reasonably.
What you Don't want to see is the late in the year flyer because those guys mean Tiers 1-4 have been exhausted and you're on to Plan E. and yes, that's how we got Spike and Caris, because our staff is awesome, but they still reflect failures on the recruiting front becaue BEILEIN himself would have take a dozen guys ahead of them if he had been successful earlier in the recruiting cycle.
So the point here is that you can't just look at stars when evaluating our recruiting. And of course, winning at recruiting is secondary to winning on the court.
The whole Jaylen Brown situation that people keep referencing is unusual. He was a 5-star guy that Michigan went after late and not indicitive of their usual strategy. It was a surprise they got as close as they did.
I like Michigan teams, no matter their composition of STARZ... and I think we have done just fine in recent years with the not so shabby talent that we have. It was more of a play-on with the nature of this board when it comes to MBB recruiting. Also, I am seriously jaded after Jaylen Brown. In Belein I trust.
I probably didn't have enough coffee this morning, because when I first read the sentence "...marry gang of 3* guys ...", I had to go "Huh?"
Then I realized, "Oh ... he meant 'merry.'" Because otherwise it sounded like homosexual polygamy, and that's info you don't usually find in recruiting news.
My bad.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:34 AM ^
I blame my lack of coffee for the misspelling of "marry" and also "Jalen" - let me rectify this now... "merry" and "Jaylen".
August 7th, 2015 at 11:29 AM ^
We went 16-16 last year
August 7th, 2015 at 11:48 AM ^
I'm not entirely sure that's fair. I think having Caris and Walton out for the majority of the year had quite a bit to do with that record. In the terms of exceeding expectations you can't tell me by the end of the year you got excited about what Dawkins and MAAR were able to do - 2 3* guys that nobody expected much from if anything this season.
I honestly wish that I hadn't seen this topic on the board. Even though I know he isnt coming here Im still going to be disappointed when I see him pick UCLA or whomever.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:04 AM ^
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Means we get all the stars right?
/s
Indiana, really. Even though he is a RoH (relative of Harbaugh), has no one told him of the annual house Crean-ing that goes on down in Bloomington?
we should just bring in 10 freshman in 2016, and let the current players battle it out for the remaining spots. Man, Beilien be cruitin. I think he took the Battle thing a little personally and now he wants ALL the players.
I'm not upset at Brown or Battle. Those kids are entirely within their rights to go wherever they want to go to school. But recruiting is so damn unpredictable that it's not worth getting all worked up about.
I just trust that whoever Beilein brings in, whether they're a consensus 5 star or another under the radar prospect, Beilein sees potential in them, and will get the absolute most out of them over their career here.
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I want to play for Beezer
UCLA but hopefully Michigan can get consideration.
crystal balls mean nothing in basketball recruiting. According to those crystal balls, Jaylen Brown would be in Ann Arbor this fall.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:11 AM ^
but seems like a bit of a longshot
August 7th, 2015 at 10:17 AM ^
Fun fact: His older brother was a Div 2 All American shooting gaurd at Azusa Pacific University last year (where I played about a decade ago) and was one of the most fun D2 players to watch I've ever seen. I know this is a "Cool story bro" but it would be very fun for me to root for TJ at Michigan after rooting for Troy the last few years at my alma mater. Heres to hoping we still have a shot.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:24 AM ^
August 7th, 2015 at 10:35 AM ^
At this point I'd like to see us focussing on getting a premier PG and calling it done.
August 7th, 2015 at 10:40 AM ^
TJ will go to UCLA, no need to waste your time on him.