Florida State basketball ranked No. 21 to start the season

Florida State Seminoles basketball is starting off the season as the No. 21 team in the country, according to the recently released AP preseason poll.

The Seminoles are coming off the first regular season ACC title in school history, as well as its second conference tournament title (though the latter was by default, due to the tournament being cancelled.) With two potential lottery picks in Devin Vassell and Patrick Williams, FSU was looked at as a potential darkhorse for a deep run in the eventually-cancelled NCAA Tournament.

FSU has been preparing for the 2020-21 season as best as it can in the confusion surrounding the beginning.

“What I did, because I didn’t know exactly when the season was going to start, how many games we were going to be able to play, exactly when we would be able to (practice), we worked strictly on offense,” head coach Leonard Hamilton said in September.

“We haven’t had a lot of physical contact. I elected not to extend ourselves that much during this period of uncertainty. With new guys coming in the program, we wanted them to understand spacing, understand the ball movement, player movement.“Sometimes when you’re working on too many things with a limited amount of time, you work on things, but you don’t really accomplish anything. We have been strictly focused on trying to improve our ball movement, ball reversal, spacing and trying to make sure our new guys understand our system. We’ll start working on some defense here before long, but defense, because of rules and the way we execute, the way we teach it, I think we’ll be fine. I just want to make sure that we get in sync from an offensive standpoint.”