Louisville basketball: Final takeaways from Cards clash with Bellarmine

Outside of Samuell Williamson, the freshmen have a way to go

Chris Mack’s first recruiting class as the coach at Louisville has come in with extremely high expectations, but last night showed that this group is incredibly young and not totally ready yet. Samuell Williamson was the only exception, and the five star McDonald’s All American looks like a superstar in the making in the Ville.

He scored 17 points on 46 percent shooting, hit two of his four attempts from beyond the arc, and drained all three of his free throw attempts. The lanky 6’7 freshman looks like he’ll be an incredible rebounder as well, grabbing 9 rebounds, 5 of which came on the offensive end. He’s going to be huge for the Cardinals this season and he might’ve earned a starting spot for the season opener. The other freshman looked completely lost out there. Jae’lyn Withers gets excused from this because he only played a minute, but every other freshman didn’t quite look ready. Aidan Igiehon got called for three fouls in only 7 minutes of action, and he got hounded by plenty of Knights defenders on his one look in the paint.

The good thing for the “Irish Hulk” is that he won’t face many big men like the ones he faced tonight, who were consistently floating around the perimeter like Coach Mack said. Quinn Slazinski needs to be faster and able to play with some of the more athletic forwards in the ACC, but that’ll come with time as he finds his role on this team. Josh Nickelberry played some key minutes as well, but only took one shot and it was an airball from deep. He looked a bit nervous out there, and he’ll get accustomed to his role sooner rather than later.