I'm not optimistic enough to have made a post with this title, but the cupboard is certainly not as bare as it was when Fish came in. I'm concerned with the fact that both the team's forwards and one of its two centers are gone in a single offseason, the same one as Hall's graduation. (The fact that those F/Cs are just two guys says a lot about how basketball is played today, but protecting the rim is still important.) I am also concerned about how the players who remain will fit into what Sprinkle has said he wants to do on defense, but I'll get to that in a minute.
My written-in-pencil starting lineup for the regular season opener is Russell, Frey, Lassi, Ricketts, and Kirby. They are the five players who have proven they can play meaningful minutes on a Division I team.
A lot of people might look at my lineup and be worried about the offense. I am not worried about offense. I will admit that I don't know what an offense built around that group looks like. I assume it will look a lot different from this year's offense (either of them), but I'm not worried about it. For one thing, I don't worry. For another thing, it's usually not that hard for Division I players to score in a basketball game. There are lots of ways to put the ball in the hoop. Danny Sprinkle knows how to score points in the Big Sky Conference. I'm sure he'll have some ideas.
Where I'm a little more perplexed is defense. There are a LOT of things I like about the 1-3-1 defense (honestly, I love that defense. It's my favorite defense.) There are a lot of things I like about the 1-3-1 defense for most of the players on the Bobcats: it's a defense that really only uses one big (which is great 'cause that's how many we have), it's a defense that tends to produce a lot of fast-break points of of turnovers (which helps with the task of finding new ways to score with Hall gone), and it's a defense that has a spot where you can put Landen Ricketts and he's actually a decent fit.
Unfortunately, you need one guy to run it that the Bobcats really don't have: a player who can sprint back and forth across the baseline all day and still have the strength and stamina to fight for position underneath the basket. He doesn't necessarily have to be tall, but he does have to be pretty strong, pretty quick, and pretty fast, plus obviously elite stamina. It's a great place to put a defense-first player, because given how much energy that one guy expends playing defense, he won't have a lot left over for driving or running off a bunch of screens. Dennis Rodman would have loved that role. But long as he is an athlete and a tenacious nuisance like that, he can be 6'1". Even so, I don't see that guy in my lineup. I don't really see that guy anywhere on the roster.