Frankie Hughes can shoot the ball, which gives him a clear path to playing time at Missouri

In 2015-16, the Missouri Tigers shot 29.3 percent from three-point range in SEC play.

That’s a problem. Obviously there’s a lot more to having a good offense than just shooting the rock well -- it doesn’t hurt to take care of the ball, rebound well, or have a scoring threat in the post — but having players who are threats to score from 20 feet and beyond can open up a lot of things in the offense.

And that’s where Frankie Hughes comes in. Hughes, a 6’4”, 187-pound shooting guard out of Cleveland, Ohio, is a shooter of the kind Missouri really hasn’t had much of in Kim Anderson’s two years. After signing with Louisville in the early signing period, Hughes decommitted in March and later joined his high school teammate Willie Jackson at Mizzou.

247 Sports rates Hughes as a three-star recruit (#202 nationally.) Rivals and ESPN also consider him a three-star recruit, and ESPN rates him the #56 shooting guard in the country. But perhaps the fact that he was recruited by Louisville is as informative as the three-star rating; Louisville is not a program that needs to pluck random three-star recruits to fill out its roster.

Hughes’ jump shot is nice and he does have some ability to drive the lane. Obviously, there aren’t a lot of road blocks to getting playing time on an inexperienced Missouri team, so it’s really more a question of how effective he will be than whether he’ll play.

How does he fit onto Missouri’s roster? Last year Missouri had a couple of freshman guards who showed potential (Terrence Phillips and K.J. Walton), but other than that, Mizzou just has juco transfer Jordan Geist and fellow sophomore Cullen VanLeer (who struggled with his shot as a freshman) in the backcourt. In other words, unless Hughes is injured or vastly underperforms, he’ll get playing time as a freshman.