Love for Flemming Jr.

[DoubleDeuce]

Predicting the Breakout player from each of the 32 conferences in College Basketball – Making the Madness

makingthemadness.com

Missouri Valley Conference:

Howard Fleming Jr Point Guard, Illinois State

Illinois State finished last in the Valley last season, finishing a disastrous 7-18 — to make the bad get worse, Illinois State lost a duo of transfers to the PAC-12, D.J. Horne (Arizona State), Dusan Mahorcic (Utah.) However, you can always find good in bad situations, and that’s what Dan Muller is looking at here with gifted sophomore Howard Fleming. You won’t find many points guards in the country who load up the stat-sheet in the manner Fleming does — during last season; Fleming brought down 7+ rebounds in eight games. Fleming’s scoring wasn’t overly inspiring the previous season, only 3.9 points on 3.6 shots per game, but his role wasn’t to score the basketball last season. Illinois State had two established scorers in the form of Antonio Reeves and D.J. Horne. Looking ahead to the 2021-22 season, as previously mentioned, Horne is off to Tempe, which naturally opens more scoring opportunities for Fleming to get involved, but improving his 22 percent from three is paramount to his potential breakout season.

 

[Adunk33]

It’ll be interesting to see how Howard is used this season. Was saw flashes last year when the game slowed down for him he could be a very good PG. I’m a big fan of a 6’5 pg. Now with Freeman coming in, who is also a pg, how do they split time? They play the position differently with Howard being more pass-first while Freeman drives and creates contact. I don’t think you can really move Freeman off the ball because that just leaves Fleming as your primary ball handler. Strong showed he can spot-play pg but does better off the ball. Seems to me like Fleming or Freeman, both starters with significant minutes for their teams last season, will be coming off the bench.