2016-17 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Preview: #2 Sacar Anim

The 2016-17 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let's get into the Marquette basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. We'll be going through the players one by one: First the freshmen, moving on to the two transfer players, and then wrapping up with the returning players, going in order of average minutes played per game last season.

We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories:

• Reasonable Expectations
• Why You Should Get Excited
• Potential Pitfalls

With that out of the way, we move on from the newcomers and into the returning players with today’s entry......

Sacar Anim

Sophomore - #2 - Guard/Forward - 6’5” - 205 lb.

Here’s where we are on trying to find things to talk about regarding Sacar Anim: I looked at his Player Review from the end of last season to find a launching point and was reminded that I wrote 269 words that ended with “We just didn't see much of anything from Anim this season on the court to talk about, y'know?”

Crap.

Reasonable Expectations

Well, there’s pretty much nowhere for Anim to go this season but up. He appeared in just 17 games and played a grand total of 83 minutes last year. If head coach Steve Wojciechowski wants to play an up and down lighting quick attacking style, then it stands to reason that Anim will get a bit more burn as the coaching staff attempts to keep everybody as fresh as possible as games and the season overall goes on.

I don’t think I can really put a bar of expectation on him much higher than “he’ll play more minutes than as a freshman.” That seems like it’d be patently unfair.

Why You Should Get Excited

You don’t score 32 points in the state championship game to win your high school’s fourth straight state title en route to being named the state player of the year by the Associated Press by being a chump.

Last year, Anim got caught up in a bit of a numbers game, as there were too many guards and wings for him to get minutes out there and Henry Ellenson was going to play all the power forward minutes he could get his hands on. This year’s roster is pretty much the same, except now there’s more guards and wings and no Henry. Someone’s gotta step up and defend those slightly bigger guys on the opposition, and why can’t it be Anim?

By the way: he shot 6-12 on two pointers and 2-5 on threes. Small sample size, I know. But if Anim could match those numbers in bigger minutes and attempts? Hoooooooooooo boy.

Potential Pitfalls

As mentioned above, Wojo wants to play up and down this year. Specifically, he’s said he wants to go nine or ten players deep on a regular basis.

There’s 12 guys on the roster.

Anim is one of two returning guys that played less than 20 minutes a game last season, and the other one is noted backup center Matt Heldt who will assuredly get more burn this season. Andrew Rowsey and Katin Reinhardt didn’t transfer to Marquette to look snazzy in their warmups on the bench. Wojo has said he expects big things from Sam Hauser this season.

That would, by my estimation, make Markus Howard and Sacar Anim #11 and #12 in the rotation in whatever order you want, and I would expect Howard to play more than Anim if you were going to make me pick a side on that issue.