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Message: [QUOTE="UcMiami, post: 3206532, member: 199"] I think the 'recruiting/drafting/trades/transfers' aspect of all sports have become way overblown by the need for year around sports talk 'filler'. In basketball because team size is so small comparatively to other team sports it is certainly is more immediately seen and the results can be more dramatic in their impact. Stewart can directly lead to 4 NCs and then a WNBA title as Maya led to two and three and DT led to 3 and 3. But that was not in a vacuum, and the surrounding pieces had to be pulled together and the coaching had to align, and the bounce of the ball had to go right. For Uconn and the fan base, the Stewart/Moriah/Tuck class and the people on the team when they arrived and the additions in the following three years were a mixed blessing because they created entitlement and unreal expectations that a few FF later without NCs have create disappointment rather than joy that most programs would experience with such continued excellence. And that feeds the angst when ... Various hoped for recruits have failed to materialize. People start looking at team make-up and finding holes in the recruits that do commit and the hoped for ones that go elsewhere. The obvious hole in the team is a truly dominant center - the realization that we haven't had that 'center' since Dolson three NCs ago gets lost in the miracle that was Stewie. There are not a lot of HS kids Geno actually wants to coach and they are not either defined by being 'top 10' or limited by that designation. Of those players only a very small percentage are taller than 6'2" and all players over 6'2" are coveted by about 350 other coaches of D1 programs - they have the choice where they will play and we have been in a bit of a geographic anomaly in that most of the better 6'2"+ players over the last 10 years are from anywhere other than the NE. When we got Tina, Rutgers got Kia Vaugn from NYC, Dolson was from the Hudson Valley, Stewart was from Upstate, Wolters and Lobo from MA. It is difficult to draw people from TX and Florida, and the west coast to the NE and the NE has had a hiatus from producing their own talent. Even Boston was a transplant to NE from the USVI. To think that Geno can manufacture post players is a dream of the rabid fan - that he doesn't covet them is to think he is lacking in intelligence. To be unhappy that the team doesn't have more is understandable, but to bemoan it continuously to the detriment of enjoying those players we do have is to live in some fantasy land. And to think having height is a solution to the next NC ignores that the last height we had in Stevens didn't actually produce. Stevens didn't want to be a post and she still isn't one. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach

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