I guess whenever I hear people saying that we need some unidentified scoring threats from the portal, my main reaction is to ask for specifics on what players they think are gettable and why they are better than our core group. And specifically, who should these new players replace? Because half the time, it's people suggesting the likes of Ronnie Porter and Gracie Merkle, who only stood out because they played on bad teams and would perform much worse on a team with talented players (that still need lots of practice and coaching) like ours .
Yes, I did. They beat multiple good teams this year without their best player. It's hard to pick up the pieces when the player other teams focus most heavily on guarding is completely neutralized. They've done better this year at playing without Braun, and with her next year, more of the pieces will click. This team also started from rock bottom last year, with a bunch of freshman and some older players who played under a less than ideal coach and probably learned some bad habits. It's a huge undertaking to rebuild and reteach.
The coaches probably aren't going to recruit what you would consider scoring threats. There just aren't a ton of gettable players floating around that are better than the group we've got, and even those that are gettable have their own imperfections. Seeing the decisions that were made in the portal last year, it seems like the coaches believe in their core set of players and just feel they need to tweak things a bit here and there with some targeted transfers who aren't super flashy.
To get higher profile players (who would probably highly prefer they start), they'd need to fork out a lot more money and playing time, and to do so is risky because that means blowing up the system and team dynamics you worked to build for two years. Other than the super teams like South Carolina, Tennessee, UCLA, etc., most teams also only really depend on between 7 and 9 core players through conference play, then have a small handful of bench players they never play. So getting higher profile players in the portal would require kicking some really talented Gophers off the team.
