NCAA Basketball Recruiting: Ranking 10 contenders for top-50 Isaac Traudt

8. Creighton Bluejays

It’s been an amazing offseason for the Bluejays, landing the program’s four highest-rated recruits in history straight out of high school. That includes top-50 power forward Arthur Kaluma and top-100 shooting guard Trey Alexander. Although they’re replacing the entire starting lineup from the team that went to the Sweet 16, don’t expect a long-term rebuild for the program.

I may be underselling the local Creighton program for this local prospect but if both Kaluma and top-75 forward Mason Miller (who plays in a similar way to Traudt) is as good as advertised, there will be concerns as to how viable playing time will be out the gate. And that doesn’t even include the possibility of adding a frontcourt transfer next offseason.

7. Gonzaga Bulldogs

The Bulldogs just added this year’s top state of Nebraska prospect Hunter Sallis, ranked in the top-10 overall of the 2020 class. So why not get next year’s best player as well? Traudt has similar characteristics to the kinds of stretch forwards that succeeded in the past for Gonzaga and with No. 1 overall recruit Chet Holmgren only around for one year, he could find some playing time in 2022-23.

The issue here is that Gonzaga already has Ben Gregg, a former top-60 stretch forward that the team was so high on, he got minutes in games after joining the program midway after completing high school. He, along with Anton Watson, will likely get the power forward minutes in the future, leaving Traudt having to come off the bench for a while in Spokane.