During that period, Girard should have been backing up Kadary and Buddy. By far, Kadary was the superior point guard, even with him being overweight and lacking the ability to shoot at a high percentage. The Buddy years is when the program really started to fall off a cliff.
Kadary Richmond: Wizards G League
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sufandu
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The out of shape stuff is half on JB. Remember what P did with football players when they didn't pass the preseason conditoning tests? They did extra conditoning. We all know JB didn't use all alotted practice time. If a guy(s) was out of shape, when everone else was done with practice, that guy could have stayed for the balance of practice with the head man and run suicides. A month or two of that would have had him in shape for conference play. I get that JB believed in treating players like adults, but not all 18 year olds are ready for that, and riding the pine isn't the only, or always the fastest, way to teach lessons.
Also, Girard being out of shape the last 2 years at SU, didn’t prevent him from playing major minutes.
Positionally, he was not a plus defender in the zone, as most freshman are not. It was no mystery that that is what kept him from playing more. He had some physical traits that helped him recover at times, but the further we get away from that season, the less fans remember about the dribble drives he allowed and the passing lanes he did not jump. He was not putting the clamps on anybody. Girard, for being less physically gifted, was in position more often in the defense we ran, as one would expect from a sophomore.
Nobody is claiming Girard or Buddy were particularly good defenders, but it was clear that Kadary as a freshman was not an upgrade there. He would have been better as a sophomore and would have played more minutes, likely moving Buddy to more minutes at the 3, which I always saw as a better fit for him, since we didn’t need much physicality from that spot, and the extra ballhandler would have been nice.
Kadary did typical freshman things while flashing some ability. He could make some highlight plays but also made boneheaded turnovers and defensive mistakes that would get him yanked. That was par for the course for a long time, but somehow became an outsized issue that season because the frustrated fans needed something to point to.
The fact that Kadary didn’t do much more, if anything more, at Seton Hall than he did or would have done at SU is the most resounding evidence that he was not misused. He didn’t want to come off the bench behind the short, slow, white and he wanted to shoot threes.
