Random Wednesday afternoon basketball notes and thoughts

[Harry]

Over the last couple of days, I have had a chance to catch up with UNT’s new basketball coaches Tony Benford and Mike Petersen and picked up some extra tidbits and thoughts to put on the blog.

I spent a few minutes with Benford to start on a profile (it’s just something you do with a new coach in a major sport like men’s basketball) and also talked with Petersen after he added Cayla Petree to his staff.

Benford spoke a little about this on his interview on TXA 21 last night, but he also mentioned to me how important this upcoming recruiting class will be for UNT’s future. He called it the biggest and most important class for UNT going forward.

It’s a good point, one I had not thought a lot about.

The assumption is that Tony Mitchell is headed to the NBA after this year, but you also have to figure in that Roger Franklin, Jacob Holmen, Justin Patton, NIko Stojkovic and Brandan Walton will be seniors this year.

That is a whole lot of talent to replace in one shot. UNT will have a six-man recruiting class this next year, and the staff is getting off to a bit of a late start considering the assistant coaches have just arrived.

New LSU head coach Johnny Jones, the guy who built UNT from a disaster of a program into a consistent winner, laid the foundation with a lot of players that Benford and his staff can build around. Benford said he has been impressed with the quality of the players he inherited not only in terms of their basketball talent, but also in the type of people they are. That has made the transition easier.

But there is still a lot of work to do.

Read more: http://meangreenblog.dentonrc.com/2012/06/random-wednesday-afternoon-basketball-notes-and-thoughts.html/