Definitely need more of this type of athleticism in blue & orange.
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It’s worth remembering that there were at least two games in 2019 in which Clark sat for the greater part of the second half. In both the UNC and Syracuse games, he struggled in the second half and was replaced. Since 2019, there have been other games, or portions of other games, in which he should have probably been on the bench, but the staff had no real options. It is also worth noting that he has improved each year. He still has lapses in judgement, but they are far fewer than they were earlier in his career. Regardless, I am hopeful that the staff will have other options this coming season. There are times and/or situations where he is outstanding. There are other times when he is a serious liability. Hopefully, the staff has the tools at hand to deal with the latter.
Malpractice is probably a little strong of a word, but the LJ drama was certainly a significant blunder, and the ensuing effort to correct that blunder has been less than a success.
I’ve said before that I saw it as an intel mistake. It is a generally accepted simplification that anybody looking for the bag is “not our kind of guy” (and I say this without any judgement on the kid. it’s just a recruiting reality). So just not knowing LJ was in that bucket, was an intelligence error. Someone’s gotta be on top of what these kid’s are really after, whether that is via connections with the AAU teams, coaches, whatever. Then simply to take an 18 year kid at his word with so much time on the recruiting clock, without any apparent contingency planning, compounded the problem. Again, no judgement on the kid, but until the ink is dry on the NLI, nothing is a done deal, especially in the NIL/G league era.
Edit: I’m not trying to disparage the staff or anything, but for me this episode falls clearly under the heading of “clear staff error, criticism allowed if not warranted”
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For me it was the GoFundMe for Ukraine. tell tale sign there…
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But what if the kid didn’t even know he was a bag type of guy at that point. He might not have. I mean, ultimately it’s always on the staff no matter what happens because the buck stops with them, but if you think you have a kid in the fold you aren’t exactly recruiting other options and that was during the season anyway. Maybe not looking harder in the Spring was a mistake but maybe they just didn’t like anyone.
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I think if LJ wound up on another team that would have been closer to a bungling. But LJ has basically decided he’s a pro now and didn’t even play AAU this summer. But that leaves two questions:
- Should we have seen the writing on the wall earlier?
- Could we have changed his mind?
For me, it’s really hard to know, based on public (even pay board) info. Maybe we should’ve seen the writing on the wall, or maybe LJ strung us along effectively (or to be fair to them, just changed their mind suddenly - picturing Shareef as Lord Frey saying “The Lannisters send their regards!” - oops, spoiler alert from Game of Thrones…).
I guess maybe we should’ve been more ready with a Plan B, but I feel like our plan B is working out okay: basically, outside chance to get a top 50ish PG still (Chatman or Elmarko), if not, go all in for Ty Davis (or other). And if needed, fill in with a grad transfer in the portal (if Reece leaves early, or we really need a gap filler).
With Green? Meh, I don’t know. I think I was less excited about Green as our PG of the future than many. I kind of got the impression he was being recruited as a “nice piece to have for our guard rotation” not PG of the future. And Miller was probably selling PG of the future (amongst who knows what else).
If we get Davis or Elmarko or Chatman, hard to see it as a bungle, IMO.
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At the very end of the day LJ proly did us a favor by not coming…
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Right? I like to think I’m not that old school, and there are definitely guys that just wind up in college hoops because it’s a decent place to spend a year, and now guys that just do the OTE or G-League route, and that works out just fine. They are ready to be pros (like LJ’s buddy Scoot, probably; that guy Green on the Rockets another). But LJ’s game struck me as not really in that ballpark, and him seeing himself in that ballpark might have been a red flag.
Most guys who aren’t Jalen Green or Scoot can benefit from the resources that college hoops have to offer (one of which is bountiful NIL opportunities, to be fair!).
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lot of this seems like monday morning qbing. You had an elite pg that was silently committed and you had the entire summer to find a new point guard if that didn’t work out. Not sure why you’d risk angering silently committed pg to offer a sub 100 ranked pg just in case LJ decided to go in a different direction. If this had occurred in July and CTB was still all in, I’d get the gripe.
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OK, so first off, none of us has all the facts, so I’ll readily admit there could be “factors” that render my take invalid.
But the point you make here, doesn’t really weaken mine. This is not a question of character to me. I’m not saying funny story guy is a bad guy. I don’t care. But if you’re recruiting a high level player, the possibility will always exist that the g league or Kentucky comes in late with a bag and the kid can’t pass up what he sees as a superior offer. The blunder wasn’t in missing out on him. Shit happens. It was in being (to my judgement) totally unprepared to recover.
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With high school kids, sometimes the writing on the wall is chiseled in stone. Sometimes, it is more ephemeral than that on a dry-erase board. Given the limited amount of contact available to recruiters, this is something I don’t think we should second guess. That said, I think, over time, warning flags become apparent (as they eventually did with Johnson). (I also think that the staff becomes aware sooner than the folks on message boards.) Then, posters want to know why a particularly talented prospect isn’t being more aggressively pursued. I’m glad I’m not a recruiter.
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I agree with this statement. As a sales guy who sells large scale IT equipment to international customers… there is always so much going on behind the scenes on the customer side, distribution side, OEM side and prime contractor side that trying to piece together exactly what is going on is an exercise in futility.
Declaring failures off of what you read on message boards is ridiculous. No way all the information is out there for anyone on here to have an abject opinion. I tend to remain on the positive side of most recruitments. You could say I have a bit of accismus, but I would really just call it optimism that CTB knows what he is doing… or possibly just knowing I don’t know what is actually going on and giving the coach staff the benefit of the doubt.
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It’s not ridiculous. It’s the generally accepted form of torture we all perpetrate on each other called message boarding.
You shouldn’t have lost that big deal
Yeah, I had to look it up
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I broadly agree with this, but do think it can be taken too far. We don’t have all the info, so we can’t know about mitigating circumstances. At the same time, I don’t think it’s right to say “Well, since we aren’t there in the room, we can’t judge the staff’s performance at all. We should just assume they are fantastic at every aspect of their jobs and that they never make a mistake.” That doesn’t make sense in any field either.
At the end of the day, while we may not know all the details about the process, we have to be able to at least partially judge performance by the end result. I personally think it’s still too early to judge this class because there are still a bunch of moving pieces that could make this recruiting cycle a home run. But it could also end up more like a bunch of the classes we saw from 2017 to 2021. But I do think it’s fair to look at the results and posit some form of opinion, while acknowledging limited info means any of us could be wrong for any number of reasons.
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Had the PG alternatives even revealed themselves at that point? I don’t recall the exact timeline but of Chatman, Dilione, Elmarko, and Green, I thought only Chatman was considered worthy of an early offer? Didn’t the other guys show out in AAU later? And if the answer is to offer a bunch of guys just to not fall behind in a race, you have to wonder if we would have gotten McKneeley, Traudt, Buchanan, hopefully Power and other guys who were impressed by being the primary recruit at their position.
As for not being prepared for a kid to take the money and run, isn’t it fair to say we weren’t suitably prepared (with quality replacements) for Dre, Ty, and Kyle to do that?
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Look, like I said, I’m not trying to bash the staff or be overly negative here. But two things seem pretty apparent: 1) we clearly wanted to get a PG in this class 2) we are perilously close to failing in that objective. If 2 becomes a reality, why is it not fair to say the staff bungled the process at that spot? I’m not saying it’s the end of the world but at the end of the day it is the result that counts, whether the staff was blind sided by the funny story or not.
I didn’t say we should’ve offered a bunch of dudes. I said we should have been prepared better. I mean if the 4 or whatever PGs we have pursued this cycle are the only players in the country that we could possibly have lived with, then it is what it is I guess and I retract my take. But the super limited offer approach has not been a raging success overall. 22 was great. 21 was not. 23 is TBD but at this stage that in and of itself is not great. And I think the fact you see more offers in 24 is an admission of that fact.
Yes absolutely.
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There are a variety of ways to describe that recruitment, but bungles implies the staff messed up in a way that most others would not have. I don’t think any of us has clarity on what was said among the staff and LJ to know whether there were clues. It’s possible that it really was out of the blue and even to LJ that he had another option. Nevertheless, it’s in the staff to figure it out from here.
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I was addressing several comments, not just yours. We have made hay in focusing in on a primary recruit in a number of circumstances. Also, there are fair number of critics here that we settle too early on lesser recruits rather than top talent. In this PG recruitment, we started with Caleb Foster, then focused on LJ, and then moved on to Spring finds (where HGN says we have found some gems). We are where we are, but it wasn’t for lack of trying with the top guys and then some others. Recruiting is a tough gig with imperfect information. And we’re not done yet. Have to be thrilled with last year’s haul and this year’s continuing prospects.
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If you gave me a choice of continuing with current guys or getting a sure commitment from Ty Davis, I’d go for Door #2 100 times out of 100. That dude is the most Ty Jerome guy I’ve ever seen that wasn’t Ty Jerome.
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I have rarely seen this criticism of TB. The one I’ve always seen is the opposite. That he’s too selective early in a cycle so then he has to settle late because there aren’t any good options left on the board. If he wasn’t so picky early he would get a better player than the scraps he ends up getting when he misses on his top guys.
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Oh, it’s a message board so there’s definitely all kinds of takes out there. But there’s plenty of - we’ve won a natty why aren’t we pulling in (or at least competing for) top talent like UNC, Michigan, Nova, etc. Personally, I think Bennet is working through his talent evaluation like he always has and looking for the right fit for his program. I imagine he has no idea whether a guy is a Top 25 recruit or a #200 recruit and it wouldn’t factor into his approach. Buchanan started real low, Caleb Foster started real high.
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Don’t overcomplicate things. We wanted a PG. this year. we aren’t getting one mostly likely.
If he’s so good, why would he come to UVA? And also why haven’t we offered him yet if he’s better than the remaining 23 possibles?