3star_recruit

Max Amadasun, one of our most recent big man offers, committed to Pitt. Athletic 6'9/6'10 guys have been flying off the board the past two weeks.

This will get you started, using last year's free throw stats: Virginia .744 Villanova .728 North Carolina .743 Duke .686 Kentucky .739 Michigan State .771 Kansas .705 Gonzaga .761 Tennessee .754 Michigan .701 Florida State .744 Texas Tech .732 Purdue .719 Auburn .711 LSU .752 Houston .711

As a percentage of the rotation, they are small. Check out the team free throw percentages of the top 25 programs. Most of them shoot well over 70%. When you have 6 guys in your rotation that are good to great from the line, you can afford to have a couple of bricklayers.

Here's a dirty little secret - most successful college basketball coaches recruit players who are good free throw shooters in the first place. It's one less thing they have to worry about. Shooting is a fundamental skill. You're supposed to have individual fundamentals down by the time you get to college. While you're wasting time trying to learn a fundamental skill at age 20, your peers are learning more advanced skills and becoming better players.

I'm not holding Coach Ford to anything, I'm giving you concrete examples of how he operated given the personnel. He's already said in recent interviews that he feels the team can play faster because he has the depth to do so. There is no mystery here.

These are Ford's players playing in his system. Over half of them are new and most of the new players are freshmen but these are his players. His small ball teams at UMass, after taking their lumps the first year, scored a lot of points. Same way at Eastern Kentucky. At Ok State, he didn't have enough depth most years to play uptempo. If you look at his entire career, he's already demonstrated a willingness to play different styles according to his personnel.

I think it's fair to say that Coach Ford's player development at OK State was average. He has a relatively short list of players he can point to that significantly improved their production after their sophomore year. Coach experienced more success with developing players in his short stint at UMass: Stephane Lasme, Chris Lowe, James Life and Etienne Brower off the top of my head. I hope he reproduces that success here.

Coach Ford had the same problem securing issue-free power forwards in the big 12. Carteare Gordon is not the first big kid with problems he's taken a chance on. The best power forward he ever had was Stephane Lasme, a 6'8 pogo stick he inherited when succeeding Steve Lappas at UMass. People are free to wish for whatever recruiting outcome they want but coach's track record is pretty clear here. More often than not our best option at the power forward will be undersized. But a physically mature 6'6 or 6'7 player can do quite well in the A10.

As you laid out, some years you're not going to have a true starting power forward on your roster, never mind a 6'10 center who can play 30 min a game. A center of that caliber is a luxury. That's just a fact of life in a mid-major conference. If you want such a player you're going to have roll the dice on a promising project and develop him. Most projects fail. Coach Ford understands this and is acting accordingly. You sign the best combination of length, rebounding and offense you can. If that guy is 6'6 195 lb you pack on 25 lb in his first two years with your weight program. If he's 6'10 290, you cut his weight down to 260. Before he reaches his junior year, make sure you have his replacement signed and repeat the cycle. This is how you get old and stay old. We were incredibily fortunate to get a physically mature power player like French straight out of high school. Those guys are almost as rare at the mid-major level as a skilled 6'10 center is. The two athletic bigs at Desmet are already grabbing the attention of high-majors despite being offensive projects. All it takes is a good weekend at an AAU tournament for either one of those guys to blow up beyond our reach. As a program you have to be prepared for that likely possibility. I love old school frontcourts with a traditional power forward and center. But you can absolutely be a perennial A10 contender with 6'6/6'7 forwards starting in the frontcourt, once they physically mature. VCU has been doing it for nearly a decade now. That is your cake. A skilled center is the icing.

Which is why I included him in the "potential" category. I was just trying to give a sense of Williams' playing style to those who haven't seen him play.

Should have included Tommie Williams from Belleville West in the potential list. He's another guard in the Jordan Goodwin mold - not a good shooter but passes, rebounds and defends well.

There are a few guys with potential: Lee; Ethyn Brown, Belleville East; Cole Farrell and Jonathan Dunn, Hazelwood Central. Looking out for late bloomers is half the fun.

I thought this would be worth cross-posting here: Local recruiting at the mid-major level is more of a feast or famine proposition. When you have plenty of playing time to offer, you have a counterpoint to offer top 150 recruits: "Hey, instead of fighting to get off the bench for a middle of the pack Big 10 team, come and be a major contributor at a rising program right away." But we just brought in one of the largest recruiting classes in SLU history and the local 2020 class is incredibly top-heavy. So we have all these conditions going against us: 1. We don't have much playing time to offer a top 150 guard out of high school. Given the choice between being a rotation player at a mid-major or a high-major, a recruit will pick the high-major most of the time. 2. A top 40 guy has his choice of high-profile programs. Unless that guy has an intensely personal connection with SLU, you're not even getting that guy's attention. 3. Top 100 bigs are always hard to land at the mid-major level. Everybody is courting those guys, including bluebloods. I think the staff did a good job of being realistic about their options. They shot their shot with Kasubke and Bradford and it didn't work out. They did their due diligence with the other top recruits and moved on quickly. The local 2021 class isn't nearly as top heavy and currently projects like this: Jordan Nesbitt 6'6 SF Top 100 Yaya Keita 6'9 PF/C Top 200 Sekou Gassama 6'10 PF/C Top 200 Nick Kern 6'5 SF Top 250 The good news is that we will have more playing time to give. The bad news is that, so far, there isn't much depth in this class.

Local recruiting at the mid-major level is more of a feast or famine proposition. When you have plenty of playing time to offer, you have a counterpoint to offer top 150 recruits: "Hey, instead of fighting to get off the bench for a middle of the pack Big 10 team, come and be a major contributor at a rising program right away." But we just brought in one of the largest recruiting classes in SLU history and the local 2020 class is incredibly top-heavy. So we have all these conditions going against us: 1. We don't have much playing time to offer a top 150 guard out of high school. Given the choice between being a rotation player at a mid-major or a high-major, a recruit will pick the high-major most of the time. 2. A top 40 guy has his choice of high-profile programs. Unless that guy has an intensely personal connection with SLU, you're not even getting that guy's attention. 3. Top 100 bigs are always hard to land at the mid-major level. Everybody is courting those guys, including bluebloods. I think the staff did a good job of being realistic about their options. They shot their shot with Kasubke and Bradford and it didn't work out. They did their due diligence with the other top recruits and moved on quickly. The local 2021 class isn't nearly as top heavy and currently projects like this: Jordan Nesbitt 6'6 SF Top 100 Yaya Keita 6'9 PF/C Top 200 Sekou Gassama 6'10 PF/C Top 200 Nick Kern 6'5 SF Top 250 The good news is that we will have more playing time to give. The bad news is that, so far, there isn't much depth in this class.

St. Louis definitely punches above its weight but the DMV is over twice the size of St. Louis metro. And we're not only competing with mid-majors in a 300 mile radius but Kansas, Kansas State, Iowa, Illinois, Mizzou, etc. Once you get past the top 5-6 players or so in our metro, we don't have a lot of depth. Just look at our current class. Caleb Love, Cam Fletcher, Ryan Kalkbrenner, Luke Kasubke and Davion Bradford (as of this evening) are off the board. Who else would you want from this class? But there are guys who were ranked 15-20 in the DMV who are starters in the A10.