- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 9,577
- Reaction Score
- 24,403
These are all good inquiries. I was going to broach some of those same topics as part of a longer essay and then open it up to the board for discussion, but framing them in a way that makes me an effective mediator rather than someone people just want to disagree with is tricky and takes some time.
For the sake of clarity, I'm largely impressed with what Hurley has done already since taking the job. His most important task was recruiting Jalen Adams back for his senior year and he did that. The fact that we did not add a big fish - and I'll try to expand on that term in a moment - for 2018 is mildly disappointing but at the same time not something I could have reasonably expected. To use an analogy, I liken running a college basketball program to playing a college basketball game - you are going to miss shots and make mistakes simply because there are so many things happening every single day, even when you don't know they're happening, that perfection is impossible. I don't want to confuse the absence of perfection for being dissatisfied with what he's accomplished so far.
That being said, I continue to believe that this team was - and I use the past tense since all of our scholarships have been filled - at most two players away from competing for banners this season. If you caught Hurley or Calhoun in an honest moment, I think they'd tell you the same thing.
Now, I want to be careful that I don't understate the difference between saying that and actually making it happen. There are a lot of teams that can say they are two players away from competing for banners. A large portion of the top eight or nine conferences in the country can say that and most of them were much better last season than we were. To think that Hurley was going to come in and have immediate impact guys lining up to play for him is not realistic. The optics are what they are, and if the perception is that this is a rebuild, it's going to be something of a rebuild.
But there is a very big difference between a good recruiter and a gangster. And well before Danny Hurley was even in the running for the UConn job, I wondered that about him, because if you can get Stanford Robinson to commit to Rhode Island, if you can get Kuran Iverson to commit to Rhode Island, if you can get Jared Terrell to commit to Rhode Island, then there is reason to believe that he is the latter.
The grad transfer has changed recruiting. Now, you can go from off the grid to contention in a minute. Pitino pulled it off a few years ago when he added Trey Lewis and Damien Lee. Louisville would have set their sights on the final four if they hadn't been banned. If Kevin Ollie had done a better job that same season, Sterling Gibbs and Shonn Miller could have taken us on a deep run. Iowa State lived off grad transfers under Hoiberg. DeAndre Kane was one of the best players in America after transferring from Marshall.
My point is, these are the big fish I'm talking about. The fact that Ollie was casting Oz as his lead recruiter last off-season contributed to his demise. It's the quickest way to riches in college basketball and it has the added benefit of not working against new coaches who haven't had time to establish relationships with high school kids.
Of course, that doesn't mean other players - regular transfers that might win a waiver appeal, high school players that might re-classify, decommits, etc. - are off limits, and in the interest of finally answering your question, I'll give you three names (with an additional wild card as a bonus) that could have theoretically wound up on this roster with the right sales pitch:
- Tariq Owens
- Mustapha Heron
- Jalen Lecque
All kids from the northeast that were on the open market and settled for lesser options. Add two of the three to this team and we're thinking about Minneapolis. People will disagree but to me it's obvious. Then you have another kid, also from the northeast, who actually committed to play for Hurley in Jermaine Harris. Is he an immediate impact guy like those other three? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly he has a better shot at being one than Brendan Adams, one would think.
And before people list all the reasons this wasn't going to happen...yeah, that's the point. If it was supposed to happen we wouldn't call them gangsters. There's no way Jermaine Harris isn't following John Calipari to UConn. None. And if he's not John Calipari, fine. We shouldn't expect him to be. But people should ask themselves what that's going to look like in this conference.
