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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 2362936, member: 289"] [I]Who are these guys, anyway? [/I] Jim Boeheim has been handicapped by a ridiculous 10 year investigation from the NCAA that caused SU to self-impose limitations in an effort to avoid further punishment by the National Comedy Athletic Association, the same group that decided to take no action on two decades of fake courses offered by North Carolina because non-athletes took those courses, too. So I guess the secret is to give illicit benefits to some non-athletes and you can get away with anything. One of the things that we got penalized for was a work study program through SU Child and Family Service program. It involved working with kids at the YMCA. The employee of the Y who kept track of their activities failed to make sure they completed the requirements, gave them car rides and employed them in setting up charitable events. Were SU basketball players the only ones enrolled in that program? If not, we should ask the NCAA to review the penalties applied to us in view of their decision in the UNC case. The NCAA wanted more than their pound of flesh and imposed scholarship limitations, limits on when our coaches can contact players and then, ridiculously negated over 100 wins. We are finally starting to get over the scholarship limits. At the start we could only have 10 scholarship players: the minimum you need to practice 5 on 5 with recruited players and to have sufficient depth and competition for positons. They moved it up to 11 and now to 12. Most teams can have 13 scholarship players. Actually, Boeheim usually doesn’t want that many because you wind up too many disgruntled players who aren’t playing. He prefers 10-11 guys. He thought he’d have 10 this year but unfortunately, he has only 9, which will limit practices, (somebody has to be guarded by a walk on) and leave little margin for error in case of injuries. We lost 3 guys last year. If that happens again, we’ll be down to 6 guys. We were there once before: 10 years ago when Scoop Jardine didn’t tell the coaches he had what turned out to be a hairline fracture of his left shin. He played (badly) with it because we couldn’t afford to lose any more people. If we again have bad luck with injuries we could have young players playing hurt again. Scoop overcame that but somebody else might not. Then there’s quality of the recruits we are getting. Two measures fans tend to look at with recruits are star ratings and Top 100 ratings. Some other things not enough fans look at: How much did our coaches want them and who else wanted the? The former can usually be determined by when they committed and did we try to get anybody else after they did so? If they committed early and we didn’t try to recruit over them, it means those players we either the coach’s #1 targets or that they were on the top plateau, where they didn’t care which guy they got as long he was one of a short list of similar candidates. Obviously, if quality programs were also after a player they must have seen something in him the recruiting gurus missed. Then there’s what I call the “snapshot” factor. When a player is rated by the ‘experts’’, even if they rate him correctly, that rating is just a snapshot of how good the player is at that moment. We are talking about teenagers here and not even older teenagers. These players are in their mid-teens. They may already have “peaked in high school”. Others may have a greater upside which will only be revealed later. Some players may decide based on what they’ve read about themselves that they are superstars and prove uncoachable as a result. Some may not have the work ethic to maximize their skills. Other might have academic or disciplinary or even legal problems. Some will prove injury prone. In a way, it’s almost better not have the most highly rated recruits because in the current system, they won’t be here long. We had Chris McCullough for 16 games before he got hurt and then declared for the draft anyway. Carmelo Anthony won us a national title but how often will that happen? With four year players, you can build a team – unless those four year players don’t stay for four years. That’s been our problem in recent years: Donte Greene left after one year. Jonny Flynn left after 2 years. Wes Johnson played only one year here. Dion Waiters was here for 2. Jerami Grant was just starting to develop after two years here. Chris McCullough had 8 good games against bad competition, then 8 bad games and then was gone. Malachi Richardson was here for one year and Tyler Lydon for 2. These guys were not All-Americans. They are not NBA all-stars, (although Dion may be getting something going). They did not have the ability to carry the team to a national championship as Carmelo did. But they were good enough to attract some interest from the NBA and wanted to make money more than they wanted to study while playing for free. So they left here before they’d fully developed their skills or accomplished as much as they might have for SU. I’ve given up fretting over it – it’s the way things are. Jim Boeheim hasn’t given up fretting over it. Anytime anybody brings up any suggestion that the NBA might be interested in one of his underclassmen, he crushes that talk. But he can’t end it. It’s left us with more what might have beens than most other schools. Kentucky and Duke get one-and-dones who could lead them to a title. Most schools don’t get one-and-dones, (or even two-and-dones) at all. We get tweeners who won’t get top level money but want it anyway. It means the team has to be rebuilt every year. There are multiple ways to acquire talent these days. You can recruit it from high schools or prep schools. You can get junior college transfers or transfers from other Division 1 schools, (but those guys have to sit out a year). Now you can get “graduate transfers”, players who are in grad school but had a year of eligibility left. These are guys who red-shirted or transferred, (we were the third stop for the three we’ve gotten), and got their bachelor’s degrees before they had played for four years. The cover story is that they are seeking a course of instruction not offered by their old schools so they had to go elsewhere and shouldn’t be penalized for that. In fact, it’s basically free agency. We could lose players under that rule as well as gain them. Last year we gained. Andrew White came from Nebraska to be one of the best shooters we’ve ever had here. He led the team in scoring with 18.5 points a game and scored 40 in one game. He hit 40% of 278 three pointers. John Gillon, from Colorado State, was as inconsistent as White was consistent. He had two legendary games that won’t be forgotten any time soon: He averaged 10.5 points and 5.4 assists. He was the hottest player I have ever seen against NC State in Raleigh, scoring 43 points on a ridiculous 9 of 10 three pointers and 14 for 14 from the foul line. We needed every point in a 100-93 overtime win. White and Gillon had the first 40 point games for SU players since Gerry McNamara beat BYU with 43 points in the first round of the 2004 NCAA tournament. Then Gillon beat Duke in the Dome with a 26 point, 6 assist performance that included the 40 footer that won it at the buzzer. Other games he never showed up, in spirit anyway. Neither played much defense, which was a big problem all year. Boeheim said at the end of the season that teaching his complicated zone to freshmen may actually easier than to teach it to transfers as freshmen don’t have to unlearn other defenses. He will get a chance to prove that this year. We will have just three players who played in any games for SU last year: Paschal Chukwu, a 7-2 string bean center who could block shots but do little else. He played 7 games, then got hit in the eye with an errant ball, necessitating an operation for a torn retina and ending his season; Frank Howard, a 6-5 point guard with limited scoring ability who played with “core muscle-related injuries”. Like Scoop Jardine a decade ago, he didn’t tell anybody until after the season and underwent surgery in May to repair the damage; and Tyus Battle, a highly recruited 6-6 guard who had a fine freshman season but was the 4th option behind White, Lydon and Gillon but will now be right in the defense’s sites. DaJuan Coleman finally graduated after an injury-plagued career that robbed him of his tremendous potential. Tyler Roberson also graduated after a disappointing career where he never fully developed his skills beyond hitting the offensive boards, which he did inconsistently. White and Gillon have ended their eligibility. Lydon jumped to the NBA. Taurean Thompson, an outstanding offensive center-forward who played no defense, waited all summer to inform the staff that he wasn’t coming back due to an unspecified illness in the family. He’s transferring to Seton Hall. Because of the timing, it was too late to get a replacement of any quality. Mathew Moyer, a 6-8 freshman forward is still with the team. It was decided to reshirt him after he sustained a foot injury in pre-season. Jim had to bring in a lot of new talent. His first recruits for the new class were Bourama Sidibe a 6-11 220 pound center, who was born in Mali but who played is basketball at St. Benedict’s Prep in New Jersey and Oshae Brissett, a 6-6 190 small forward from Toronto. The problem was, neither was then listed in anyone’s top 100 players. You would have thought the sky was falling from all of the internet comments. We were scrapping the bottom of the barrel! How do we compete with Duke, North Carolina and Louisville with guys like this! The thing is, that’s the early signing period. These guys hadn’t played their senior year yet. If they were so bad, why would the coaching staff be “settling” for them rather than pursuing higher rated players? The only answer was that the SU coaches had seen these guys play and gotten to know them and decided that they were the guys they wanted. Sidibie was recruited by Seton Hall, Virginia Commonwealth, Maryland, SMU, Kansas State, Arizona State and others. I’ve seen him slip into the top 100 at #88 in one listing. Brissett received offers from Maryland, Oregon, Mississippi State, Arizona State, USC, Memphis and others before deciding on Syracuse. He became a classic case of a player who ‘blew up’ after his “snapshot”. He grew three inches, (to 6-9) and added a few pounds (to 200). He became Canada’s player of the year. Comparisons were made to Canadian Andrew Wiggins, who was the #1 overall recruit in 2013 and the #1 NBA draft choice a year later. They didn’t say Brissett was Wiggins but they said he could become Wiggins. He’s now rated #48 from one service I saw and is ranked a 4 star recruit at the present time. Of course we’ll find out how good he really is when he puts on an SU uniform and actually plays for us. But the complaints about our ‘settling for him’ have ceased. These guys hardly represent the “decline” of the program. Howard Washington was definitely not our #1 target. He was a point guard from Buffalo who went north to play with Brissett’s team. He wasn’t our #1 guy but we were his #1 school. He was disappointed when we went after Quade Green, from Scoop Jardine’s old high school, Neuman-Goretti in Philadelphia. The word was we wanted Green so much we told him we wouldn’t recruit anybody else. Washington committed to Butler. The Green followed John Calipari’s siren call to Kentucky and we were left without a point guard recruit. Washington de-committed from Butler and accepted an offer from the ‘Cuse. So he was our second choice but second choice players can turn out to be good players. The problems come if you are just collecting warm bodies at the end of the recruiting cycle. Washington wasn’t top 100, either. The best rating I’ve found for him is #122 and 3 stars. But Butler wanted him. They have a strong program so I’d say he has a future here, too. Boeheim then went to the international market and brought in Marek Dolezai from Slovakia. He’s 19 years old and had played in the pro leagues in Slovakia, (which you can apparently do and still play college ball here). So his game should be advanced, even if his body isn’t. He’s listed at 6-9 180. Because he was a foreign player the recruiting services didn’t have a rating for him until one recently decided he was the 71st best player in the country. Matthew Moyer will be a freshman this year, although a redshirt freshman. That makes his a sort of unofficial part of this recruiting class. I’ve seen him rated as high as the 40th best player in that class. So that gives us 5 freshmen, four of whom were top 100. I guess the sky isn’t falling. Jim also brought in another grad transfer, Geno Thorpe from South Florida, who used to be a Big East rival, and he looks he could be major contributor. He’s a 6-3 guard from Pittsburgh, (where they play basketball like it was football). He originally played for Penn State in the Big Ten, so he’s used to power 5 competition. Geno is a 6-3 combo guard who played the point for the Bulls. He has a reputation as a defensive whiz who makes lots of steals but turned into a scorer last year, averaging 15.1ppg to go with 4.6 assists. We might also hear from 6-4 Brandon Bayer, who walked on after transferring in from Grinnell College, which is known for race-horse basketball. Brandon played one year there and averaged 10.5ppg but shot 51% from three point range. Jim also accepted an undergraduate transfer, 6-6 guard Elijah Hughes from East Carolina, where he averaged 7.8 ppg as a freshman. He’ll have a year to contemplate why JUCO and grad transfers can play immediately while undergrad transfers have to sit out a year. SI recently had a column wondering the same thing: [URL="https://www.si.com/college-basketball/2017/09/08/ncaa-transfer-rule-immediate-eligibility-scott-drew-archie-miller"]We should welcome some NCAA transfer chaos[/URL] He’ll have three years left beginning with the 2018-19 season. For that season he’s already gotten commitments from 6-9 forward Darius Bazley, rated the 20th best recruit, 6-4 Jalen Carey, #54 and his own 6-5 sharp-shooting son, Buddy, who is only rated #195. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be a good player, too. So I guess the sky isn’t falling. [/QUOTE]

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