Atlantic 10 Basketball: Way-too-early power rankings for 2020-21 season

Tier 4: La Salle Explorers

I view La Salle like I do George Mason – high floor, low ceiling. They are probably the safest bet of all the teams in this tier to get out of the play-in-game in Brooklyn, but with how talented the top half of the league is, it’s tough to see the Explorers finishing much higher than 9th in a best-case scenario.

Ashley Howard is a good coach as far as getting the most out of his players; the problem is, his best players just aren’t able to stack up with the star cores of the league’s top teams. David Beatty, Ayinde Hikim, Sherif Kenney and Scott Spencer are all solid, and the return of Jack Clark should help to mitigate the departure of Ed Croswell (transfer to Providence), but it will be tough to keep up with the rest of the league if they aren’t absolutely stifling on the defensive end. That could end up being exactly what happens, and maybe they’ll find their way to some 55-48 type of victories against teams they weren’t supposed to beat, but they were just 10th in the A10 in defensive efficiency during conference play last season.

One factor that could possibly get the Explorers over the hump is a decent Freshman class – watch out for Jhamir Brickus as a pure scorer out of the backcourt and big man Tegra Izay as a strong interior defender. If those two and/or Anwarr Gill can step up and be another reliable scoring option, that would go a long way towards spacing the floor and allowing guys like Spencer to operate from beyond the arc.

The bottom line here: don’t be absolutely shocked if the Explorers end up proving me wrong by stepping off the bus in Brooklyn as a 6-seed, but don’t view that as a likely scenario for the time being either.