SEC Basketball: Preseason power rankings for 2019-20 season

Auburn will be heading into the 2019-20 season coming off the best year in program history, a year in which they held a share of the SEC Regular Season title, won the SEC Tournament and even made the Final Four for the first time in school history.

What this means is that the SEC and Auburn in-particular have a new bar to reach. Auburn was fantastic last season winning a total of 30 games and being feared by teams across the nation.

So what does this mean for them heading into next season? Unfortunately for the Tigers, they will be without their top three scorers from the 2018-19 season heading into next year. With Bryce Brown, Jared Harper and Chuma Okeke all gone, Auburn will be a new look team.

They won’t be the same team that scored 79.4 points per game and assisted on over 14 per game because the majority of their scoring will be coming from new places. One player that might heavily contribute for the Tigers will be Isaac Okoro who was the 40th ranked player by ESPN in the Class of 2019.

Okoro was the only player from the Top-100 who is headed to Auburn, Alabama to play with the Tigers next season, so where will the rest of the scoring come?

That would be Samir Doughty, also known as Auburn’s fourth-leading scorer from last season. With an average of 7.3 points, 3.5 rebounds and 1.7 assists per game, Doughty was a large part of the Tigers offense and he will undoubtedly be that once again next year.

Without the three main scorers ahead of him in Harper, Bowen and Okeke, Doughty will be forced to step up and be a larger part of the game for Auburn.

But is Doughty paired with Okoro going to be enough to even come close to the bar Auburn set for themselves last year? More than likely it won’t be, last year’s team was several years in the making and they knew how to play with each other and their leading scorers had been so for a couple seasons.

Next year, Auburn’s top players will be stepping into roles they haven’t yet played and for this reason Auburn will struggle a bit compared to last year. However, even though Auburn won’t nearly be the team they were last year, they won’t be tested in the slightest until conference play starts.

With their hardest games coming against potentially Wisconsin, NC State (a bottom-five team in the ACC) and Iowa State, the Tigers shouldn’t have much of a problem against non-conference opponents.

Because of this they will hold a 12-0 record heading into SEC play and then they will get another non-conference win as apart of the SEC/XII challenge for a total of 13 wins and no losses against non-conference teams.

SEC opponents, on the other hand, will be a different story as the Tigers will finish the regular season with 10 wins and eight losses against SEC teams. This will be a slight step down from their mark of 11 wins and seven losses in the SEC last season, but still not bad nonetheless.

As for who will be the best player on this 24 win, eight loss Auburn Tiger team, that will be Samir Doughty. You should expect Doughty to step up in a large way without the lights of Bryce Brown, Jared Harper and Chuma Okeke.

Doughty will be the player Bruce Pearl needs him to be and because of it the Tigers will be successful and make yet another NCAA Tournament in hopes of heading back to the Final Four.