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.
OttoinGrotto
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No. You're wrong.
Nope. You’re wrong. Where do we go from here?
OttoinGrotto
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We go with you being wrong because people like me more.
That’s actually a good point. Crap
DoctorBombay
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The revised history in this post is laughable.
JG3 and Buddy were without a doubt, the worst top-of-the-2-3 Zone guard combo in SU history. Kadary was a much better defender than either of them. Maybe you can revert to your beloved "stats" and prove me wrong, but the eye test was obvious to anyone watching.
JB decided that in order to have Buddy at the 2, he needed to choose either JG3 or Kadary at the point, and in his learned opinion, he settled on a sophomore Girard, even if it meant having him play out of his natural position.
And obtw, this wasn't the first time- I remember Stevie Thompson and Todd Burgen forcefed at PG, and even an undersized Red Bruin playing out of position at the 4, so in fairness to JB, this was not unusual. Problem was that his prior teams had significantly better talent, and he could get away with doing that.
In choosing JG as the PG over a pure 6'6 PG in Kadary, JB made it almost inevitable that KR would go elsewhere. And FYI, Kadary was an All-BE performer at Seton Hall so the tripe about his not doing much more than he would have done here, is again, revisionist history to support a flawed and biased perspective. JMHO
