Kenny Anderson: "I wanted to go to Syracuse." | Page 4 | Syracusefan.com

Kenny Anderson: "I wanted to go to Syracuse."

Everybody remembers that Richmond game, and rightfully so. But it was the horrible collapse in the BET against Nova (blown 17 point lead) that resulted in us having to play Richmond. That 1991 team should have been a 1 seed.
that nova game we were in complete control. we were smashing nova, and than lost to Richmond. what an awful way to end the season
 
Cut the check.

I hope some of you in the recruiting threads understand that it isn't these kids making the decisions in some of these cases. Even if he wanted to go to SU and committed, his mother could have stopped it from happening by not signing the NLI.
I don't think he needs a parents signature if a kid is 18? Also, a kid can still attend a school without a NLI, he just isn't bound to it.
 
Kenny averaged 20.6 points, 5.5 rebounds, 8.1 assists, 2.3 steals his first year at GT. Those are insane numbers for a freshman in the 45 second shot clock era with fewer possessions.

The area where he would have helped us in 1990 is three point shooting. We simply had no pure shooters on that roster.
Were there fewer possessions? I feel like a lot of teams didn't hold the ball as long as teams do now despite the longer shot clock. Didn't we average around 90 that year?
 
Kenny averaged 20.6 points, 5.5 rebounds, 8.1 assists, 2.3 steals his first year at GT. Those are insane numbers for a freshman in the 45 second shot clock era with fewer possessions.

The area where he would have helped us in 1990 is three point shooting. We simply had no pure shooters on that roster.

I lived in the Atlanta area at the time so I saw most of their games on tv, It was so painful thinking "what if" each time. I just looked at this college stats and totally forgot he stayed there for 2 seasons. I thought for sure he was one and done but I guess only Marbury was.
 
Wow! Never knew that. Maybe we should be recruiting moms.

Of COURSE we should be recruiting moms. Hopefully, the staff already know that!
 
Edwards was awful. I still have nightmares about that game. Minnesota had NBA talents in Willie Burton [a versatile 6-7 wing who was a big time scorer], and 6-4 guard Kevin Lynch, who absolutely abused Edwards that game.

Ugh...

Sorry for the delay, only get a few mins here a day.

Don't buy your comment. Edwards only played 9 mins - he was not the problem. Sure Lynch and Newbern were much bigger at 6'-5" and 6'-4" respectively. Edwards was just 5'-10" and a Fr.

Mike Hopkins was 6'-5" and JB never put him in the game. Just check the mins column here and see the mismanagement.

Syracuse University Athletics - Minnesota 82, Syracuse 75
 
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Sorry for the delay, only get a few mins here a day.

Don't buy your comment. Edwards only played 9 mins - he was not the problem. Sure Lynch and Newbern were much bigger at 6'-5" and 6'-4" respectively. Edwards was just 5'-10" and a Fr.

Mike Hopkins was 6'-5" and JB never put him in the game. Just check the mins column here and see the mismanagement.

Syracuse University Athletics - Minnesota 82, Syracuse 75
Maybe Hop got Boehiemed for that game.
 
Sorry for the delay, only get a few mins here a day.

Don't buy your comment. Edwards only played 9 mins - he was not the problem. Sure Lynch and Newbern were much bigger at 6'-5" and 6'-4" respectively. Edwards was just 5'-10" and a Fr.

Mike Hopkins was 6'-5" and JB never put him in the game. Just check the mins column here and see the mismanagement.

Syracuse University Athletics - Minnesota 82, Syracuse 75

I'm hoping that you are not just basing that opinion on a box score. Because the reality is that Lynch abused Edwards by backing him into the lane and then hitting easy turnaround shots over him repeatedly, prompting Boeheim to pull him when it became evident that Minnesota's game plan was to attack / exploit the miniscule Edwards in the paint. THAT'S the reason that he only played 9 minutes. And Edwards playing 9 minutes absolutely WAS the problem, because we were forced to go without a point guard for 3/4 of the game, which got us completely out of synch offensively in a game where we trailed most of the game and could never get on track.

Hopkins being tall was irrelevant. He was a redshirt freshman who barely played that season -- that's why JB never put him in the game.

Not only did I have the misfortune of watching this game live, bringing about an unceremonious end to the careers of DC and Stevie, but I had to re-watch it back in 2014 after losing a bet with some of my Minneapolis friends, as a precursor to our game in that preseason tournament a few years back. Ugly. So the opinion I expressed earlier in the thread isn't based upon 27 year old recollections.
 
I'm hoping that you are not just basing that opinion on a box score. Because the reality is that Lynch abused Edwards by backing him into the lane and then hitting easy turnaround shots over him repeatedly, prompting Boeheim to pull him when it became evident that Minnesota's game plan was to attack / exploit the miniscule Edwards in the paint. THAT'S the reason that he only played 9 minutes. And Edwards playing 9 minutes absolutely WAS the problem, because we were forced to go without a point guard for 3/4 of the game, which got us completely out of synch offensively in a game where we trailed most of the game and could never get on track.

Hopkins being tall was irrelevant. He was a redshirt freshman who barely played that season -- that's why JB never put him in the game.

Not only did I have the misfortune of watching this game live, bringing about an unceremonious end to the careers of DC and Stevie, but I had to re-watch it back in 2014 after losing a bet with some of my Minneapolis friends, as a precursor to our game in that preseason tournament a few years back. Ugly. So the opinion I expressed earlier in the thread isn't based upon 27 year old recollections.

You have bad friends.
 
I'm hoping that you are not just basing that opinion on a box score. Because the reality is that Lynch abused Edwards by backing him into the lane and then hitting easy turnaround shots over him repeatedly, prompting Boeheim to pull him when it became evident that Minnesota's game plan was to attack / exploit the miniscule Edwards in the paint. THAT'S the reason that he only played 9 minutes. And Edwards playing 9 minutes absolutely WAS the problem, because we were forced to go without a point guard for 3/4 of the game, which got us completely out of synch offensively in a game where we trailed most of the game and could never get on track.

Hopkins being tall was irrelevant. He was a redshirt freshman who barely played that season -- that's why JB never put him in the game.

Not only did I have the misfortune of watching this game live, bringing about an unceremonious end to the careers of DC and Stevie, but I had to re-watch it back in 2014 after losing a bet with some of my Minneapolis friends, as a precursor to our game in that preseason tournament a few years back. Ugly. So the opinion I expressed earlier in the thread isn't based upon 27 year old recollections.

Well, your memory here will be a lot sharper than mine, having been at the game. I watched it again.

Your criticism of Edwards doesn't hold. He only played 9 mins in the 1st half and we were ahead by 4 at the half. He scored twice as many points as Johnson in half the time and as many as Ellis in a quarter of the time. Even with his difficulties, if he had played in the second half, we would have won. We desperately needed a PG. Thompson was super but no PG.

Scott had a horrendous game with only 18% shooting, yet played 25 mins. Manning on the other hand never got on the floor. Coleman (Sr.) was stuck at center for the whole game. We should have won that game going away. Terrible.
 
I still remember watching Kenny putting up 50+ in an Empire States game and making it look so easy - 1990 would have been a magical season with him at point. But I've also always wondered what that season would have been like if the General had redshirted his freshman year when he played sparingly behind Pearl - so many what coulda beens in Syracuse basketball history...
 
Well, your memory here will be a lot sharper than mine, having been at the game. I watched it again.

Your criticism of Edwards doesn't hold. He only played 9 mins in the 1st half and we were ahead by 4 at the half. He scored twice as many points as Johnson in half the time and as many as Ellis in a quarter of the time. Even with his difficulties, if he had played in the second half, we would have won. We desperately needed a PG. Thompson was super but no PG.

Scott had a horrendous game with only 18% shooting, yet played 25 mins. Manning on the other hand never got on the floor. Coleman (Sr.) was stuck at center for the whole game. We should have won that game going away. Terrible.

It absolutely DOES hold. There's a reason that Edwards only played 9 minutes and was relegated to the bench, despite scoring some points in a quick flurry. That reason is that he was being exploited defensively. Your attempt to deflect blame are misguided -- because you seem to be agreeing with my main point about the team suffering for not having a true lead guard out on the floor for most of the game. Which brings me full circle to the original point of the thread in that I wish we'd had a better guy manning that role, who Boeheim might have played more in this game or trusted more to play through difficulties. Someone like Kenny Anderson.
 
I'm hoping that you are not just basing that opinion on a box score. Because the reality is that Lynch abused Edwards by backing him into the lane and then hitting easy turnaround shots over him repeatedly, prompting Boeheim to pull him when it became evident that Minnesota's game plan was to attack / exploit the miniscule Edwards in the paint. THAT'S the reason that he only played 9 minutes. And Edwards playing 9 minutes absolutely WAS the problem, because we were forced to go without a point guard for 3/4 of the game, which got us completely out of synch offensively in a game where we trailed most of the game and could never get on track.

Hopkins being tall was irrelevant. He was a redshirt freshman who barely played that season -- that's why JB never put him in the game.

Not only did I have the misfortune of watching this game live, bringing about an unceremonious end to the careers of DC and Stevie, but I had to re-watch it back in 2014 after losing a bet with some of my Minneapolis friends, as a precursor to our game in that preseason tournament a few years back. Ugly. So the opinion I expressed earlier in the thread isn't based upon 27 year old recollections.

Don't disagree. But if Syracuse had shot free throws like a bunch of scholarship basketball players and not, well, Syracuse, and if Derrick Coleman had acted like a senior All-American and not Derrick Coleman, they'd have moved on.

(To put it in a different perspective, Minnesota shot twice as well on their guarded shots as Syracuse shot on their unguarded shots. Absurd, that team doesn't deserve to win a game like that.)
 
How is it that Micheal Edwards was all we had to fall back on when KA didn't come. At the height of the program and the Big East how did we not have someone waiting in the wings behind Douglas or a better plan B? Pretty mind boggling considering the recruiting run we had been on.
 
It absolutely DOES hold. There's a reason that Edwards only played 9 minutes and was relegated to the bench, despite scoring some points in a quick flurry. That reason is that he was being exploited defensively. Your attempt to deflect blame are misguided -- because you seem to be agreeing with my main point about the team suffering for not having a true lead guard out on the floor for most of the game. Which brings me full circle to the original point of the thread in that I wish we'd had a better guy manning that role, who Boeheim might have played more in this game or trusted more to play through difficulties. Someone like Kenny Anderson.
Also, LeRon Ellis played a ton of minutes at center. Coleman moved to power forward. For much of the season Ellis started at center. Late in the year JB put Tony Scott in at forward to try to get some shooting into the starting lineup. Richard Manning didn't play much because he was behind Ellis.
 
Don't disagree. But if Syracuse had shot free throws like a bunch of scholarship basketball players and not, well, Syracuse, and if Derrick Coleman had acted like a senior All-American and not Derrick Coleman, they'd have moved on.

(To put it in a different perspective, Minnesota shot twice as well on their guarded shots as Syracuse shot on their unguarded shots. Absurd, that team doesn't deserve to win a game like that.)

*Tony Scott was 3/16 from the field
*David Johnson missed a wide open layup in first half
*rumor was DC was all over New Orleans the night before the game
*and in that game on a 3v1 dc decided to throw the ball off the backboard in the first half for a dunk and we turned it over
awful
 
How is it that Micheal Edwards was all we had to fall back on when KA didn't come. At the height of the program and the Big East how did we not have someone waiting in the wings behind Douglas or a better plan B? Pretty mind boggling considering the recruiting run we had been on.


Bobby Hurley...
 
How is it that Micheal Edwards was all we had to fall back on when KA didn't come. At the height of the program and the Big East how did we not have someone waiting in the wings behind Douglas or a better plan B? Pretty mind boggling considering the recruiting run we had been on.

We slid all of our chips into the middle pursuing Kenny Anderson [sound familiar?], which was the right move, because Anderson was a phenom. My recollection is that our fall back options were Shaun Golden [who ended up at South Carolina] and Edwards, neither of whom were in the same plane of talent. We also were recruiting Jason Buchanon from Nottingham HS who ended up going to St. John's instead. Not that he was a world beater, but he was a cog on some pretty good St. John's teams, and would have been better than Edwards was.

I think the seeds for problems were actually sown years before, when we couldn't land players due to Sherman Douglas being such a great player. King Rice opted to go to UNC in lieu of sitting behind The General. And Earl Duncan and Sherm couldn't coexist. Too bad he transferred out -- would have been a natural stepping in for Sherm in 89-90. Oh well...
 
We slid all of our chips into the middle pursuing Kenny Anderson [sound familiar?], which was the right move, because Anderson was a phenom. My recollection is that our fall back options were Shaun Golden [who ended up at South Carolina] and Edwards, neither of whom were in the same plane of talent. We also were recruiting Jason Buchanon from Nottingham HS who ended up going to St. John's instead. Not that he was a world beater, but he was a cog on some pretty good St. John's teams, and would have been better than Edwards was.

I think the seeds for problems were actually sown years before, when we couldn't land players due to Sherman Douglas being such a great player. King Rice opted to go to UNC in lieu of sitting behind The General. And Earl Duncan and Sherm couldn't coexist. Too bad he transferred out -- would have been a natural stepping in for Sherm in 89-90. Oh well...

Yep, Earl Duncan's the forgotten guy here. Would've been a senior and a much stronger player than Edwards (who wasn't a bad high school prospect by any stretch, he just suffered from being undersized and not Kenny Anderson - kind of a proto-Kaleb Joseph in that he wasn't good enough to be a high-performing freshman).

But Duncan thanked SU for holding his hand during a Prop 48 year by getting fussy and transferring after his miss cemented the Rhode Island loss. Frustrating sequence of events.
 
We slid all of our chips into the middle pursuing Kenny Anderson [sound familiar?], which was the right move, because Anderson was a phenom. My recollection is that our fall back options were Shaun Golden [who ended up at South Carolina] and Edwards, neither of whom were in the same plane of talent. We also were recruiting Jason Buchanon from Nottingham HS who ended up going to St. John's instead. Not that he was a world beater, but he was a cog on some pretty good St. John's teams, and would have been better than Edwards was.

I think the seeds for problems were actually sown years before, when we couldn't land players due to Sherman Douglas being such a great player. King Rice opted to go to UNC in lieu of sitting behind The General. And Earl Duncan and Sherm couldn't coexist. Too bad he transferred out -- would have been a natural stepping in for Sherm in 89-90. Oh well...
I guess the second part is what puzzles me most. I get that a guy doesn't wanna sit for 3 years behind another guy, but it's puzzling we couldn't have had a solid freshman backup behind Sherm his senior year, especially in an era when it was common for non-blue chips to wait their turn, with the goal of recruiting over him with KA. Did the infamous JB short bench kill us?
 
I guess the second part is what puzzles me most. I get that a guy doesn't wanna sit for 3 years behind another guy, but it's puzzling we couldn't have had a solid freshman backup behind Sherm his senior year, especially in an era when it was common for non-blue chips to wait their turn, with the goal of recruiting over him with KA. Did the infamous JB short bench kill us?

And at the 2. Stevie Thompson is one of my all-time favorite Orangemen, but he did what Owens and Johnson and Coleman could do, but not what a functioning guard could. Kind of a redundant piece in the 1990 lineup, unfortunately - it was like a much, much more talented version of our 2016 team. As always, good guard play is important. Matt Roe and Duncan were necessary pieces for that team; when they left, it spelled trouble.
 
I guess the second part is what puzzles me most. I get that a guy doesn't wanna sit for 3 years behind another guy, but it's puzzling we couldn't have had a solid freshman backup behind Sherm his senior year, especially in an era when it was common for non-blue chips to wait their turn, with the goal of recruiting over him with KA. Did the infamous JB short bench kill us?

No doubt -- failing to line up even a merely adequate replacement for Sherman Douglas is what sunk that 89-90 team, which was loaded in just about every other respect.

Not sure about the short bench. But in an era where we were recruiting like gangbusters, our inability to fill The General's shoes was a big impediment the following year.

On a semi-related note, the following season we landed Adrian Autry, who was a highly touted point guard. Arrived a year too late, unfortunately, or we might have another title hanging in the rafters.
 
And at the 2. Stevie Thompson is one of my all-time favorite Orangemen, but he did what Owens and Johnson and Coleman could do, but not what a functioning guard could. Kind of a redundant piece in the 1990 lineup, unfortunately - it was like a much, much more talented version of our 2016 team. As always, good guard play is important. Matt Roe and Duncan were necessary pieces for that team; when they left, it spelled trouble.
Totally agree, but holy cow, what a stable of athletes we had back then.
 
No doubt -- failing to line up even a merely adequate replacement for Sherman Douglas is what sunk that 89-90 team, which was loaded in just about every other respect.

Not sure about the short bench. But in an era where we were recruiting like gangbusters, our inability to fill The General's shoes was a big impediment the following year.

On a semi-related note, the following season we landed Adrian Autry, who was a highly touted point guard. Arrived a year too late, unfortunately, or we might have another title hanging in the rafters.
And maybe would've put the program on another level with what K was building at Duke. It's easy to forget he hadn't won a championship yet despite a good run of final fours. Our failure to capitalize on that glutton of talent followed by the sanctions really killed ridiculous momentum for what could've been.
 

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