Value Add Basketball Cards for 10 Marquette Players and 5 Other Big East Teams

Below are the projected player cards for Marquette and five other Big East teams included in the 68 team in the Value Add Basketball Game. After learning of the Covid-19 season shutdown while in Madison Square Garden in March I spent the next few days calculating player cards for 100 teams I thought would have made the NIT or NCAA tournament to add to my 100 all-time great teams (where Bill Walton's UCLA had defeated Michael Jordan's UNC for the all-time title).

This week I updated the game by choosing 68 of those teams who looked strong this season. I kept the cards for all players who had a card last year (whether on the same team or moving to a new team). The layout sets up to just have 10 players per team, so sorry for the MU and other players I left off. The calculations sort the players into 5 starters and 5 bench players, so do not take the line-up listed for MU as my opinion or suggesting the line-up Wojo put on the court these first couple of games was anything less than fantastic.

I took players who were on this ESPN roster, however I noticed some of the JUCO transfers and transfers who had sat out a season (e.g. Sam Hauser with UVa) were not listed on the ESPN roster, so we added players from the Top 100 JUCO rankings as well as Jeff Goodman's rankings from 2019 tracking the key transfers who sat out the 2020 season but planned to play this season. 

We did not go beyond those three steps to verify if players were sitting out this year due to Covid, were injured, etc., but we hope this gives a somewhat realistic play for what would have happened this season without the interruptions Covid-19 may cause. However, projecting player cards for college players is obviously not an exact science, so the top 150 freshman basically got a card that matched an equal freshman from last year at the same position (e.g. the 25th highest ranked freshman PG gets a card roughly equal to the 25th best freshman PG last year). You can pull up the cards for the non-Big Esat teams in this blog.

If someone actually wants to play a game, click on the image to open it in a separate screen, then print that sheet. The top line for each team are the suggested starting players left to right from 1 (point guard) to 5 (center), but you can rotate players in any order you want. Each player has an endurance figure of between 7 and 44 to indicate the maximum number of possessions he should play in the game. In addition to using these instructions, you will need to print out the scoresheet at the bottom of his blog. The game continues to be my most widely read blog with 43,300 clicks, and the game is free.

To look at the team's player cards, you should click on each image and then click to open the image in a new tab, where the players and their numbers should all be clear and easy to read.

Big East teams included

Connecticut 2021

Creighton 2021

Marquette 2021

Providence 2021

Seton Hall 2021

Villanova 2021