Bruce Pearl reveals reasonable expectations for Auburn men's basketball in 2022-23

On3 imageby:Nick Schultz09/21/22

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Last year, Auburn went from fifth in the SEC men’s basketball preseason poll to the league champion thanks to some first-round talent emerging. But Jabari Smith and Walker Kessler are gone, and Bruce Pearl knows that’ll impact expectations for the Tigers this season.

During an appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show, Pearl made his preseason poll prediction.

Pearl thinks Auburn will wind up middle of the pack when the league’s preseason poll comes out. He pointed to the departures of Smith and Kessler as his reasoning considering they became first-round NBA Draft picks. But he argued the Tigers added enough pieces to be competitive, especially considering they had the nation’s No. 15 recruiting class, according to the On3 Consensus Team Recruiting Ranking.

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“Last year, we were picked fifth and we wound up winning the league for the third time in five years. We’ve had a good run. Paul, I would expect us to be picked about fourth, fifth or sixth in the league, which is good,” Pearl said. “We’re a top-25 team, we lost two first-round guys, we lost the best front line in college basketball in Jabari Smith and Walker Kessler. I return my backcourt, I return a bunch of guys that worked really hard this summer to get better and then we brought in a couple of talented players to replace Jabari and Walker — Johni Broome and Yohan Traore, Chance Westry, Tre Donaldson. All newcomers that will join Wendell Green, who was a terrific point guard last year. … Our strength is we’ve got 10-12 guys who can really play.

“I don’t know who my greatest players are. We’ll find that out in the next month. I’ve got a pretty good idea. The schedule’s really tough. We play three games on the road — at West Virginia, at … Southern Cal and at Washington. I don’t know that there’s a Power 5 team that plays a tougher schedule right now this year than we do. It’ll prepare us for the league. And I’m really proud of the league. Really proud of where this league has come from.”

Traore was the biggest part of that recruiting class, coming in as a five-star recruit and the No. 23 player in the nation from the class of 2022, according to the On3 Consensus, a complete and equally weighted industry-generated average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies.