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Message: [QUOTE="billsin01, post: 62009, member: 837"] Fair enough. Your stance is certainly well-reasoned. I suppose I just see it differently. For one, I don't know that I will grant the point on Gray and Hibbert because any big man who's ever played the middle in the Big East has faced beasts and -- though I don't feel like looking up Etan's contemporaries b/c I'm lazy -- I'm sure Etan was up to the task for the most part. I also don't know exactly what I think of Hibbert in general -- the zone was going to be tough for him to exploit given his relative lack of quickness and range. But I agree, Mookie did a great job on both players. Secondly, I'm not entirely sure I agree with your argument that Watkins should get credit for playing on a team that otherwise wasn't great defensively. I mean, Etan was part of a couple of the best defensive teams we've put on the floor in the last 20 years. I tend to think he should get a pretty big part of the credit for that since he was voted BE Most Outstanding Defensive Player. I get what you're saying but I just don't know that I can really give Watkins extra points for that. And, finally, I agree with your general point on the varied roles for the man in the middle defensively in the zone but I have a tough time believing that we ever have a better defense than we do when we have an agile shot-blocker in the middle or a couple on the back line. Wes Johnson was basically terrible in the zone but he was disrupting none-the-less b/c he was long and blocked a ton of shots. So while I think Etan did a nice job of challenging the free throw area and still holding his own on the defensive glass, I just tend to weight shot-blocking ability far more heavily than any other quality for a big man in our zone. On that, I'm sure we disagree, which is fine. I get your point and I would say Mookie was an outstanding defensive center, but I have a very hard time putting him above Etan, IMO. [/QUOTE]

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