Ben Johnson's Gophers picked to finish 14th in the unofficial Big Ten men's hoops preseason media poll

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GopherVotary said:
No doubt you get plenty of opportunity to be glad.
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From March 22nd:

TheBarnyard said:
Wow, what a disappointing hire. Is there anyone on the board that is happy with this hire???
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GopherVotary said:
I am! Great news!
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GOPHERS HIRING BEN JOHNSON

Very surprising hire. Ben was a very good local recruiter for us, but does he have what it takes to manage a Big Ten program? High risk hire by Coyle.
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Really pissed me off when people immediately started the "diversity hire" and "Gabel hired him, not Coyle," B.S. I was disappointed but in the camp of, "Why not give it a shot if it means better results recruiting locally?" But I think I also was narrow-minded in not thinking Johnson might also be able to coach, in addition to recruiting locally. After an earlier game, I posted something like "Wait until we run into some size or wait until BIG coaches start pressing us." Well, it was night and day difference between how they handled the press yesterday and how Pitino's team generally did against a press. We had the one bad turnover, but several times it was clinical how they brought the ball up against the set up press. They knew exactly where to go with the first two or three passes. Also, nobody close to Michigan's big guy in size but he didn't hurt us that much. Curry has a chance to become on of my Five Favorite Gophers the way this is going. Um ... I already have more than five.
 






MNVCGUY said:
Interesting reading the posts in this thread in the context of what has happened so far. Good stuff.
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True:
What was your prediction for the season?

I have been happily way off. These transfer players have more taken than I thought + the team plays as a unit that helps them as a unit be greater than their combined talent.


I really think P Willis playing this well speaks to how much better Johnson has these guys playing as a team than Pitino ever did apart from the second half of 2016-17
 

Some guy said:
True:
What was your prediction for the season?

I have been happily way off. These transfer players have more taken than I thought + the team plays as a unit that helps them as a unit be greater than their combined talent.


I really think P Willis playing this well speaks to how much better Johnson has these guys playing as a team than Pitino ever did apart from the second half of 2016-17
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I expected the team to play hard but when Fox and Ihnen went down I figured they would have a really tough time keeping teams from dominating them down low and would really struggle to win games.

Team has blown away any expectations I had for this season. Still think injuries will derail things eventually but if they can stay healthy this will be a solid team which is way better than the dumpster fire it looked like it could have been on paper this year.

Awesome to see a bunch of guys from lower level schools really taking advantage of this opportunity to play in the Big Ten and running with it. Will be interesting to see how the conference season plays out.

Can totally understand why this team was picked to finish dead last in the conference. However, if they stay healthy and keep playing really solid team basketball they will outperform that prediction by a lot and probably finish somewhere in the middle of the pack.
 

thought it was interesting in the last game - BTN put up a graphic showing the pre-season media predictions. there were 28 voters - 2 for each B1G team.

Of the 28 voters, 2 had the Gophers in 12th place
1 voter had the Gophers in 13th place
and 25 voters had the Gophers in 14th (aka last) place.

obviously, they did not identify who voted. But it would interesting to know who voted the Gophers 12th - was it the 2 MN voters or was it someone covering another school?
 

Mulligan said:
Ya, that hire based on optics looks to be working out. Gabel sure knew what she was doing.
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Gabel is the best AD! There's no doubt she had a ton of say in this but it's working. I am thrilled with what Ben is doing.
 


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