The team has only one other frontcourt player: 6-foot-9 redshirt freshman Drey Carter, who played guard in high school. He’s listed at just 190 pounds, which is 35 fewer than the 6-9 Braun and 45 less the 6-8 Noel.
Even 6-3 wing Alex Huibregtse weighs more at 195.
“Primarily, we have three big kids who can play the 4 and 5. To think they’ll all stay healthy the entire year is a big ask,” Nagy said.
“We’re probably going to have to learn to play small.”
Nagy will give Noel and Braun as many minutes as they can handle. They averaged 29.1 and 20.8, respectively, last season, and their workload is expected to rise.
Noel had by far the leading shooting percentage in the league at 60.9 (the next-best mark was 52.5). He also was third in rebounding in his debut season at 8.7 per game while averaging 13.0 points.
The HL freshman of the year battled mononucleosis and an undisclosed injury in the offseason — which hasn’t helped Nagy’s skittishness — but the Chillicothe product has been going full tilt in preseason practice.
“The only thing that was holding him back was his confidence level, but that’s grown. He thinks he’s a player now. We expect good things,” Nagy said.
He’s only a sophomore but is in his fourth year in the program after redshirting twice with knee problems. And he’s developed some skills he didn’t have in high school — like 3-point shooting.
He made 15 of 42 for 35.7%, which isn’t far behind the clip of two of the team’s top snipers, Trey Calvin (39.0) and Huibregste (39.3).
“He shoots the ball really well,” Nagy said. “We expect that number to go up — both his percentage and probably the number he takes.”
Braun, a junior from Springboro, was the team’s third-leading scorer (9.4) and second-leading rebounder (4.9).
“He’s had a great summer. I’d say of all our guys, he’s made the biggest jump — not necessarily basketball-wise, though it will help him basketball-wise, but in his maturity and allowing us to coach him,” Nagy said.
“He’s made such a big jump in that area. And our whole team is going to benefit from it.”
Like Noel, Braun shot 60.9% from the field (he didn’t have enough attempts to qualify for league stats). And he shot 52.5% in 2021-22 while making the HL all-freshman team.
He’s a master at drawing contact. Only Calvin, who took 111 free throws and shot 88.3%, had more attempts for Wright State than Braun’s 91 last season.
But the center is hitting only 53.3% in his career.
“He’s shooting them much better (in practice),” Nagy said. “But it’s one thing to stand there and shoot them, and it’s another to shoot them in the game. There’s some humps he’s going to have to get over.”
Braun’s predecessor at the 5 spot, Loudon Love, a two-time league player of the year, managed to do just that. He shot 57.7% his first three years before hitting 67.0 as a senior.
Nagy knows drawing too much attention to it can be counter-productive, but as he pointed out: “Unless he does what I do, which is not read anything or look at anything, he’s going to see some of that. Some people are going to talk about those things.
“He knows it’s big — he gets fouled a lot — so it’s going to be important for us and for him.”
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