Dimitri Batten, Aaron Brown Included Among Top 100 Basketball Transfers
By Joe Micik
A recent Sports Illustrated piece included Boston College basketball transfer students Dimitri Batten and Aaron Brown in the top 100 of projected transfer scorers this upcoming season.
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The statistical prognostication, assembled by Dan Hanner and Luke Winn on Friday, calculated which basketball transfers eligible to play this season for their new teams would score the most points.
Dimitri Batten, a newcomer from Old Dominion, is forecast to score 6.8 points per game this season, making him 73rd on the list. Their evaluation of Batten had this to say:
"Dimitri Batten is projected to give Olivier Hanlan some scoring assistance at Boston College, but will Batten actually help the Eagles’ offense? He was an aggressive but inefficient scorer at Old Dominion last season, making just 28.7 percent of his threes and turning the ball over at a fairly high rate for a shooter.Miami’s Sheldon McClellan leads college hoops’ projected top transfers (Hanner; Winn)"
Anyone who watched Boston College last season knows that any help they get will be a good thing. Without having seen Jim Christian’s offense in action, we can only look back to what Steve Donahue did here, and undoubtedly, being a poor three-point shooter would have hurt that team, though there seemed to be plenty of it going around.
The thing that is of the most concern in that Dimitri Batten analysis is his propensity to turn the ball over. It should be said, however, that with 75 turnovers in 981 minutes played, he did not fork it over at the highest rate on Old Dominion, yet the team as a whole was slightly under water in turnover margin.
New Boston College addition Aaron Brown from Southern Mississippi — to be accurately called the Golden Eagles, unlike Boston College’s team — comes in at 87th with a projected 5.8 points per game. The strong forward was a 30-game starter for Southern Miss last season who was fourth on the team with 9.9 points per contest. He was the most successful three-point shooter on his team with 39.1 percent makes (43-for-110).
It is not worth going crazy over either one of these estimates, as they are fairly low on the list, but it gives us a bit of insight into what we might expect from these players this season. Both are forecast to score less than last year, but the compositions of their old and new teams are potentially quite different, not to mention the levels of opposing competition.