BC ... thoughts on the future

We have some great recruits coming in next year who will give us some depth at positions where we need it.

Shaq – Shaq gives us the true center we have been missing. He is a HUGE interior presense who, when combined with Len at the 4, will clog up the entire interior for the opposing team. This is the drawback, which many seem to overlook when they think of Shaq because everyone looks at his size and salivates. As terpfan pointed out, he has only been playing organized basketball for a few years after coming to the US from the Bahamas. I’m not knocking his game at all, but he will probably need his entire freshman year to learn the system and what his role is in it. Dude is also massive, he’ll probably get 20 or so minutes a game, a la Jordan Williams freshman year, and need the off-season between his freshman and sophomore years to lose some weight.

Layman – Layman is a huge wing player, who has reportedly grown to 6’9". But make no mistake, he is more of a 2 than a 4, he is a true wing player who has no business on the inside trying to be a 4. Laymans recruiting reports show that he has a “feathery” touch from the 3, which this team desperately needs. If all that Layman does next year is play as a situational player who comes in to drain some shots from the outside while he acclamtes to College ball, we should all be happy. He is putting up huge numbers, both points and rebounding, in his high school league, but he is most definitely playing against inferior talent when doing it. As with Nick Faust, we need to temper our expectations a bit and let him translate his game to this level.

Seth Allen – Seth at this point is a bit of a mystery. Turge recruited him as a PG, I believe with the expectation that he was going to be playing the 1 throughout the summer AAU circuit and his senior year of high school to develop his skills more. Injuries happen, but it has limited his development there, so your guess is as good as ours if Seth is going to still play the Point. In high school and AAU, he was a 2 guard who had a nice 3 point range (you can youtube the videos), so that is something we need as well. The reports from the John Wall Breakout Camp was that he could score at will, so that is always nice to see. I’m thinking he will be more of a backup 2 guard more than running the point, but that all depends on if Turge finds a PG late in the 2012 class from the JUCO ranks. I think at this point it is safe to say we’ll be waiting for 2013 for that true PG we desperately need.

So….we’re a young team. People can have lofty expectations, we’re all guilty of it, but there is a point when we need to look at the reality of it. We’re giving 3 freshman major minutes this year, and I’m going to go ahead and count Parker as a freshman and say he is getting some bigger minutes too. You can’t hardly say he got any experience as a freshman with Gary, and probably should of been redshirted.

It’ll be the same next year, with Cleare, Layman, Allen and (insert random guards name we’ll recruit here). They’ll need to mature, but 2013 is the year we’ll really breakout. We’ll have the experience then, and we’ll (hopefully) have the true PG we actually need.

That is my Monday morning write up…and not even sure how I got the energy for that.

Tim Duncan, maybe? same resume, same neighborhood, you just never know.

I particularly like when Faust and Parker were on the floor at the same time, they seemed to be on the same page with each other. They fueled the attempted comeback before Duke put them away for good.

In case people were worried about losing height by putting Parker in the lineup, he is as tall as Padgett. If you don’t think so, you should of looked closer during the Duke game when they had a closeup of the both of them standing next to each other. Parker can jump out of the gym, so it isn’t too much of a loss. Padgett is good for cleanup on the offensive boards but he is not a player who wants the ball to try to score, he just travels.

Just because he said it right?

If you’ve been to a game, why don’t you offer up some insight instead of blasting off on people. The only thing we can speculate on his scouting reports, highlight videos and stats. He appears to be a scoring PG at best (best being a PG), so prove us wrong. If you’ve been to the games, tell us how he has played. From all the reports from recruiting analysts, who attend games, he is a 2 guard. Tell us what you saw that was different so we have something else to compare to.