There is a reason Wolf played less than 14 minutes a game last season despite some of the coaching prodiges on the boneyard calling for him to play more. Enosch Wolf is more appealing in theory than he is in reality - he's appealing because he's seven feet, he has a wide body, and his touch around the rim is unusually soft for a man of his size. Granted, he did some nice things for UConn last year, but the reality is anything he brought to the table in terms of rebounding and rim protection was negated and then some by his poor pick and roll defense. He was slow-footed and inattentive, which is not a good combination for your anchor and last line of defense. He also fouled at an extremely high rate which put us in the penalty sooner in games than we would have liked.
For those of you wondering how we'll hold centers under 30 points, provide me a list of centers in college basketball who are supposedly going to eviscerate us next year. There aren't any. And if teams do decide to pound us down low, they're really doing us a favor because they're deviating from their strengths, which for the vast majority of college basketball teams is strong guard and wing play. Believe it or not, post defense wasn't a huge problem for this team last year - the problem was rebounding. A guy who is going to grab 3 or 4 a game is expendable.
Look - the difference at this stage between guys like Wolf, Nolan, Facey, and Brimah is slim. They range from "serviceable" to "under-developed" to "massive project". The difference is Nolan and Facey, anyway, appear to have higher ceilings than a mechanical seven footer who does more harm than good on defense and often can't get out of his own way. Ultimately, this may be a blessing in disguise because the young bigs will be forced into duty early in the season. Sure, they'll take their lumps, but my hope is they're all viable (or at least two of them) options in the frontcourt when the games start to really matter.
I wish Enosch luck. He seemed like a nice enough kid aside from the incident, and he could have contributed next year. But we'll move on.
