Jaelin Llewellyn's Rank Among College Basketball Transfers
The Michigan basketball roster is still in some limbo, as we wait for final decisions from Caleb Houstan and Moussa Diabate, but a few things are set. Hunter Dickinson will be back as a junior, Frankie Collins, Zeb Jackson and Brandon Johns Jr. are all going to playing somewhere else and veteran guard Jaelin Llewellyn will be on the roster as a graduate transfer from Princeton. Llewellyn may have unintentionally pushed Collins out but that's in the past. Now, it's time to look forward and figure out exactly what Llewellyn brings to the table.
At 6-2, 185 pounds he's got pretty good size for the position and has the kind of frame and build that allows him to be very fast in the open court and very bouncy when finishing at the rim. While at Princeton, Llewellyn developed into a legitimate scorer in the Ivy League with in-the-gym range as a three-point shooter. Last season, he joined the 1,000-Point Club in Princeton's 93-70 win at Penn on Mar. 5. Over the course of the entire season he finished fifth in the Ivy League in points per game with 15.7 and his 2.3 three-pointers per game ranked seventh in the Ivy League. In terms of consistency, he ranked eighth in the Ivy League in three-point percentage at 38.6%.
Those kinds of shooting marks and scoring totals lead me to believe that he's going to be a very welcome addition to the Michigan basketball program. ESPN staff writer Jeff Borzello doesn't quite seem to see it that way. He doesn't necessarily have anything negative to say about Llewellyn, but he ranked him all the way down at No. 64 when comparing him to his peers.
Because of Llewellyn's ability to score and shoot the ball from the outside, I think this is just far too low. When you consider how much he'll likely play, who he'll be playing with and for, I just see him having a much bigger impact than a lot of players ranked ahead of him on Borzello's list, which you can see here ($).