UCONN Players you thought would be Real Good BUT............. | Page 3 | The Boneyard

UCONN Players you thought would be Real Good BUT.............

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ucjoet said:
Good job with Brian Buckelew. I always remember and chuckle to myself in regards to Buckelew and the Arnold Dean show.
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He had a great quote in the paper. He said his (shooting) range was "23 feet and in".
 
mauconnfan said:
I was thinking of Clay Johnson but I hadn't seen him in HS and when I finally did just didn't feel he was that good although had some very good moments in the Husky uni.........

How about Jim "Disco" Sullivan from Don Bosco in Boston.....came in after averaging about 28-30 a game in HS some decent accolades.......always rooted for the kid but didn't pan out to be all that much!

And one I forgot....Vern Giscombe, thought he was going to be a jewel out of Cardinal Hayes in the Bronx.......Perno never used him right!!
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Yeah Jimmy Sullivan was always a mystery to me. I heard he averaged 30 and thought we were getting a scorer.

Spot on with Vern. He should have played more.

I always liked Terry Coffey too. Thought he should have played more.
 
Drumguy said:
Chuck Aleksinas is in the top 5
but imho the biggest flop was Ajou Deng.

Ater also is probably top 5.
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I had forgotten about Chuck but then again I guess that's the point isn't it?
 
mauconnfan said:
Aleksinas, Rudy, Albert, Rash and Denham have no right in this thread..............

Al Lewis, Larry Blucher, Norm Bailey, Cup Cormier, Ajou Deng, Sam Funches, Marte Smith, Michael Leblanc are some
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Al Lewis was a student favorite though.
 
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Quagmire said:
N*** M****...ugh
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That's like the snake face guy in Harry Potter...NEVER say the name. Right now the NCAA is looking to see if it can work your post into a violation, well right now they are busy ignoring violations at UNC but soon they'll be looking at your post. Count on it.
 
PomonaHusky said:
I know he helped give us a championship.
I know he gave up his offensive role for the beterment of the team.
But, after his Sophomore year, I thought for sure Rickity Moore would be a superstar...
He's still one of my favorite players.
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Your right. Single handedly carry us in the first half of 1999 NC game and shutting Langdon on the last two possessions giving us our first NC. Is that all you got Ricky? PSSHT!
 
Ace Watanasuparp

5'6" 150 LBS out of Queens, NY.....Was expecting Mugsy Bogues like athleticism out of this guy but he never really came to form in a Uconn uniform.
 
Drummond has to go on the list if you are talking about just time at UConn. He came in as th e#2 recruit in the nation and never came close to living up to expectations last year. Rudy Gay is another one. He had a tendency to disappear for long periods...his numbers and such were much more impressive than his actual play...Deng of course makes everyone'slist...hell he was in SI as the next big thing before he ever played a game.
 
freescooter said:
Drummond has to go on the list if you are talking about just time at UConn. He came in as th e#2 recruit in the nation and never came close to living up to expectations last year. Rudy Gay is another one. He had a tendency to disappear for long periods...his numbers and such were much more impressive than his actual play...Deng of course makes everyone'slist...hell he was in SI as the next big thing before he ever played a game.
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Exactly what i was going to say. Drummond was a dissaponetment he was supposed to be great but ended up being a decent player
 
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I thought Murray Williams was going to be a big time player but he never developed. He and Steve Piekell were wrecked by injuries.

There was another guy who transferred to Richmond, Flemming, he looked like he would be a great three point shooter for us.
 
This is maybe a bad suggestion, because his stats are mostly good, but I thought Earl Kelley should have been better, at least in terms of making the team better. Every season of his the team was under .50o overall and his senior year was especially disappointing.
 
This would be my starting rotation. I took out players with injuries:

PG-Dougie Wiggins (Disaster both on/off court)
SG-Mike Leblanc (really a SF, but he deserves to be on this team)
SF-Scott Hazelton (Tranferred to URI and struglled cracking top 10)
PF-Ater Majok (Waited a long time for him, why did the lakers draft him?)
C-Soulemane Wane (looked intimidating, thought he was going to be our first true '5')

Bench
G- Gilad Katz (I thought Nadav 2.0, couldn't crack backcourt rotation)
G-Nates Miles (doesn't deserve a comment)
C- Marc Suhr (Import from Germany, no skills for a 7'1 on a team that needed size)
F- Ajou Deng (Atleast he has some success at Fairfield)
F-Ben Eaves (URI should have learned from Hazelton)
 
Although he was a decent role player for UConn - I have to include Denham Brown on my list...the kid scored 100+ points in a high school game...brought a touch of hype along with that. Doug Wiggins, Nate Miles (never stepped on the court), Ajou, Ater and Jamal Coombs-McDaniel
 
Justin Brown, never listening to calhoun for summer camps and general work ethic.
 
Calhoun's Court said:
Yeah Jimmy Sullivan was always a mystery to me. I heard he averaged 30 and thought we were getting a scorer.

Spot on with Vern. He should have played more.

I always liked Terry Coffey too. Thought he should have played more.
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Yeah there's a good one Terry Coffey, tough strong guard from the Baltimore/DC area right?
 
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mauconnfan said:
Yeah there's a good one Terry Coffey, tough strong guard from the Baltimore/DC area right?
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Yes he was from the Baltimore/DC area.

Looking over this thread the only players not mentioned it seems it Sgt. Eddie Williams and Boo Willingham.
 
Calhoun's Court said:
Not only Pinone we should of had Harold Pressley too.

Wish we could have gotten in on Rod Foster too.
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That 2-3 year period was amazing for CT high school basketball, Gminski, Foster, Matthews,
Garrison, pinone, Dublin, McKay, bagley, Thompson, aleksinas, Jansen, who am I forgetting? That goes to a F4.
 
Stinger92860 said:
That 2-3 year period was amazing for CT high school basketball, Gminski, Foster, Matthews,
Garrison, pinone, Dublin, McKay, bagley, Thompson, aleksinas, Jansen, who am I forgetting? That goes to a F4.
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Bruce Kuzinski (who we did get) and Jay Murphy too a couple years later.
 
Stinger92860 said:
That 2-3 year period was amazing for CT high school basketball, Gminski, Foster, Matthews,
Garrison, pinone, Dublin, McKay, bagley, Thompson, aleksinas, Jansen, who am I forgetting? That goes to a F4.
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Corney Thompson was a player who did not play up to his hype either. He was a top ten recruit and had a good freshman year but every year after that he got worse. Perno had a great team in 1982 (Chuck Alexsinis, Mike McKay, Jim Sullivan, Norman Bailey) but could not seem to get them to play up to their potential. I always wondered what Jim Calhoun could have done with them.
 
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UConn2SF said:
thought marcus johnson was going to be special after his mini scoring outburst early in his freshman year, so good infact that he would eventually be lottery pick after sophomore/junior year. to this day, the best pure athlete uconn basketball has ever had
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A player's ranking and what's written about him has a lot to do with expectations we have. I remember when we were recruiting Marcus Johnson and Marcus Williams (the small forward that really liked UConn but chose Zona after JC seemed to cool on him preferring MJ over him. Well Hooper and I saw MJ at ABCD and weren't very impressed. He was a good athlete but couldn't shoot a J if his life depended on it.

At the time I thought we got the wrong Marcus and after watching them play in college felt even stronger about it. Now MW was a terrible defender starting out, so who knows if he would have seen the floor all that much at UConn his freshman year, but at Zona he lit it up from the word go, and I think entered the NBA draft after his sophomore season. I don't know what happened to him since. In fact I completely forgot about him till I ready this thread. He was a much better scorer in HS than MJ who put up modest #s. I think the relationship with coincidently our Marcus Williams father who was his AAU coach influenced JC's decision to take him over the other MW. If my memory serves me, we could have used his scoring during the years he played. MJ never really developed into a consistent scorer. He'd give us 15 one game and then 2 or 3 the next few.

Getting back to MJ, I probably expected more than what we got, but I never really thought he would be as good as many had hoped. He just didn't have a good feel for the game, nor was ever a good shooter. Very similar to Rudy Johnson, as far as being a good athlete, but not much of a basketball player.
 
Excalibur said:
I'd put him behind Scott Burrell in that regard. A distant second, in fact.
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Let's see...MJ, Scott Burrell, who was an oustanding athlete, but I think we're forgetting someone and one that's not all the removed from our program. Andre Drummond, ring a bell. He was and is a monster of an athlete. Pound for pound hands down the best athlete we've ever had. The man-child could dunk with his head at rim level. Not many who've walked this planet can boast about doing that.
 
freescooter said:
Drummond has to go on the list if you are talking about just time at UConn. He came in as th e#2 recruit in the nation and never came close to living up to expectations last year. Rudy Gay is another one. He had a tendency to disappear for long periods...his numbers and such were much more impressive than his actual play...Deng of course makes everyone'slist...hell he was in SI as the next big thing before he ever played a game.
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As hyped were both Rudy and Andre, I expected their best hoops were years away and while in the NBA. So as good as I believed both would be very good in the NBA, I felt they would not live up to their ranking.

With that said, I wished Rudy would become the go to scorer that JC had envisioned, but he turned out to be a better Hudini, dissapearing regularly during winning time. AD was just not ready. If he stayed another season he would have been a monster. He's doing quite well in the NBA so far.
 
Ajou Deng hands down gets my top vote, though he was more a victim than anything. He was hyped beyond what he ever did on the court. To this day, I don't know what people actually witnesed before he ever played at UConn.

Few have brought up Curtis Kelly. I saw him play in HS and expected a lot more. Granted if he stayed at UConn we would have seen more, but he just couldn't get out of his own way. Lacked maturity, similar to Doug Wiggins and Doug Wrenn who were magnets when it came to finding trouble on and off the court.

Cup Cormier is one that I had high hopes for when I first saw him play. Unfortunately he never learned to play safe and fast. All we saw was fast and sloppy. He'd step on the floor already with 2 turnovers.

Rudy Johnson is a player that many have mentioned. He was a product of being overhyped as well. I could never figure out why he was ranked as high as he was (I think it was like #23) but he averaged like 19 points in HS. He was not a very good shooter or ball handler. Was a great athlete but struggled with knee issues throughout his career. He was a great kid though and I really liked him.

Ater Majok is at the top of my list. He was really hyped, similar to Ajou, but not nearly as much. Many were dubbing him Ajou II. He never got much of a chance at UConn. He ran into eligibility problems for the get go. The NCAA took forever to clear him. I can barely remember him even playing. I think if he had played here for a few seasons he could have been a good college player. My expectations were high for him and he didn't even come close. He was a much more talented player than Ajou and not a fair comparison, though the contribution of both was eerily similar.
 
DogMania said:
Let's see...MJ, Scott Burrell, who was an oustanding athlete, but I think we're forgetting someone and one that's not all the removed from our program. Andre Drummond, ring a bell. He was and is a monster of an athlete. Pound for pound hands down the best athlete we've ever had. The man-child could dunk with his head at rim level. Not many who've walked this planet can boast about doing that.
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I'll take the guy who was drafted in the first round for two major professional sports, and had an offer to play football for what was the top program in the country at the time.
 
I'd put Josh Boone on the list. I think we saw how good he was his freshman year and were spoiled by the way Emeka developed, but Boone never really improved from there, and had a tendency to be very passive.

A few people have mentioned Denham Brown. I struggle to include him because he was a good player, but I always felt that he could have developed an offensive game similar to Rip's, but he never seemed get over his tendency for sloppy ball handling or develop the feel for when he could get his shot off.
 
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