4-star center/power forward recruit Greg Echenique has been taking in a lot of schools in the past week or so. The native Venezuelan is a junior who plays at St. Benedict’s Prep (Newark, NJ).
On Wednesday he hopes to get to Miami for the Miami-Boston College game that will be shown on ESPNU. Then he plans to return for classes at St. Ben’s on Thursday and Friday before departing for the North Carolina at Duke game on Saturday. Then he would drive or fly to Pittsburgh for the Panthers’ Sunday’s noon game with DePaul.
This past Sunday he had been in College Park to see Maryland implode against Clemson. He holds an offer and has interest in Pitt.
There’s no sense as to when he will be making a decision, but Rutgers is considered a favorite because they have been to every one of his games and recruited him hard this whole season. Notre Dame, Duke, Maryland and Memphis all have offers for his service as well.
Just get good players, don’t worry about height.
The Stanford-UCLA game was great viewing for basketball fans last night, but particularly compelling for people on this website for two reasons:
1) It was the most poorly officiated second-half and OT of the year, HANDS DOWN. I know lots of people on here like to bitch about officials — and I am certainly one of them sometimes — but Stanford got jobbed ROYALLY last night. There’s handing people games, and then there’s smacking games out of the hands of people, which is what the officials did in the last 3 seconds of regulation.
2) UCLA’s d. It might look familiar to many of you. And it was lauded all night as incredible. Love and Mata-Real were hedging out 25 feet from the basket to disrupt Stanford’s ball-handlers…Mata-Real once pinned a Stanford guard AT THE HALF COURT LINE on a really aggressive hedge. Two things that struck me about the effectiveness of this maneuver: 1) Love and Mata-Real are quick and aggressive with it…they SPRINT from the post out to the spot they want to be…I’d like to see more of that from our guys. 2) Stanford, a top 10 team, has slow guards. I mean REALLY slow. That’s part of the effectiveness. And living in Pac 10 country, I can tell you, most teams out here have slow guards. Not just guys who don’t run fast, but guys who take an extra second to make decisions. I can count on one finger how many times I’ve seen Georgetown, Louisville, Notre Dame, Syracuse, or Marquette guards hesitate this year. Think about Flynn and Green and co just slashing around the hedge and driving the lane or dishing to an open man who had come over to fill the empty spot in the post vacated by our big man. These are things that happen when the offense’s speed exceeds the defense’s. These are the things that DON’T happen to UCLA in the Pac 10, for the two aforementioned reasons.
So in conclusion….get faster and play slower guards. Some of that might work.
And it’s been the same thing game after game. Which begs the question: why hasn’t it been fixed??!! Perhaps I’m being naive, but, really, either they can or can’t do it, and if they can’t, stop motherf@#$ing trying it and just start switching and/or fighting through the screens. Is it just Dixon being stubborn, players who don’t have the intelligence to grasp the concept, something else? If it continues, they may be beat DePaul, barely, and get sent packing the first round in the BET, which could very well put us on the outside looking in at the Big Dance.
Get a grip. Explain to me how my comments were “anti-Dixon.”
Yes, don’t worry about height. Because Alexander (6’8″ – 32 points), Greene (6’11” – 23 points), Williams (6’6″ – 27 points), Padget (6’11” – 21 points), Barro (6’10” – 14 points) and Harangody (6’8″ – 23 points) were all shitting purple Twinkies when they got the ball on the blocks.
If Young, Biggs, Blair and McGhee could play defense I wouldn’t question the pursuit of another mid-sized big man. But they can’t, so my question stands.
Just because Blair, Young, and Biggs struggle doesn’t mean Echenique will. Hell, Young and Biggs will be gone before Echenique arrives, so what they have to do with him is beyond me.
They were pretty damn effective with Lett, Troutman, and Zavackas in the post, and GASP!!!!! the tallest of them was only 6’8″!!!!
Just get good players, don’t worry about the height.
And you’re missing the point. There is no interior defensive presence in the program at the moment (I like McGhee’s effort, but he is weak defensively | Austin Wallace has yet see the court | Diggs may not be able to play again because of a hip injury) and there’s only one “big man” in the pipeline at the moment (Dwight Miller) — and he’s only 6’8″ and in all honesty, not that highly regard.
This Pitt team would benefit tremendously from a shot-blocker. They fail to rotate on help defense when beat on the perimeter. Having a safety-valve in the paint means fewer easy baskets in these instances. Yes, Lett Troutman and Zavackas to a lesser extent fared well defensively — but that’s because the teams they were part of grasped the concept of team defense and rarely failed to rotate on help.
“Getting good players” just isn’t enough. Ask Jim Boheim. Getting the right players is much more important.
Of course, we may very well need Echenique because we’ll be dangerously thin at that position by 2009. We’ve failed to secure a quality interior defender in recent recruiting classes and this may very well come back to haunt us. I hope that Blair continues to improve at a dramatic pace because we’ll be in trouble if he doesn’t.
Height isn’t the most important. It is what you do with your height, and, even more so, how well you defend. But the teams with the height in the form of players who can actually play (Hibbert, Okafor) have had the most success during the time those players were there.
But for some reason (could be fatigue, could be the massive number of fouls called on this maneuver after a certain point) he stopped hedging as effectively.
The hedge can work, but Blair is fatigued/tentative and McGhee is too slow. Maybe playing Biggs some more to rest Blair? This is a tough question.
Second posession, we trap the screen, blair decides to play between his man (that he had to rotate to) and the bucket instead of between his man and the ball, easy pass to his man, he has to close hard, skip pass to open man, wide open 3.
What the fuck happened between those two posessions?
I think his hedge is weak cause he’s been called too many times on a hard hedge – making him sit the entire first half. Now, he just sticks and arm out and runs to the wrong spot. It disrupts nothing.
Some people say its “focus,” some “consistency,” some “youth.” I have no doubt they’re being told what to do, but the repetitive executions just isn’t there.
And let’s not even get into the play where someone sets a backscreen on someone else (a third man is handling the ball at the time) – everytime someone runs that on us, it seems like its the first time we’ve ever seen it.
That’s another problem – our guards are just content to stand 4 or 5 feet from their man, allowing them free reign to pass anywhere they want all over the floor. If we made the guard on the backscreen pick up his dribble, and stand there ONE INCH from his face, we could deny a great deal of those easy passes to cutters. Instead, our guys are just happy to take a break.
And who knows what the hell is wrong with Sam Young. 3 years in the program and plays defense every fourth or fifth play. How the hell do you let a kid like LEVON KENDALL start ahead of you? Alls you had to do was play some D…could’ve gotten major minutes for 3 years…
Maybe they’re just going to have to keep gettin embarassed until they decide defense needs to be played on EVERY play. I have no doubt that they are ABLE to play D – they just don’t seem to care. We’ve taught less skilled players to play better D before. Its a mindset, not something thats requires great physical gifts.
On other thing watching UCLA last night – they double the post, ALWAYS. The second the 5 gets it, the 4 is sprinting over, the 3 face guards the 4 (to prevent the easy dumpoff which we love to allow), and the 1 and 2 sag off their men, and pick the best angles to deny passes to the 1, 2, and 3. They try to deny a skip pass to a guard on the weak side, cause its too hard to recover – at worst, a guard has to come behind the 5 and take a pass – but thats easy enough for one of the guards to cover, and allows everyone else to rotate.
When we rotate, the 4 thinks about it, rolls over to the 5 eventually to maybe provide help, the 3 is too busy standing around, and the 5 gets the easy dump to the 4 for the layup/dunk. Its awful.
We seem to be content to allow guys to pass the ball around to whomever they want, and allow them to do whatever they want, and just hope that we’ll have someone there to get a hand in their face when they finally take a shot. We need to start disrupting plays before they begin, not “read and react” – is Rhoads coordinating this defense too?
That is Jr High School stuff and easy to fix, but it requires communication between players. Maybe you and others are right and JD has had too quick a hook. Big troubles ahead if we don’t fix it.
Starting with DePaul. Anyone that thinks this will be a cakewalk only needs to see their quickness from the perimeter. What a shame it would be to lose another Senior Day.
Hearing more and more rumors on Dixon leaving and Pitt quitly courting Sean Miller. Maybe the players hear them too….Mixed feelings here if that happens. JD has given his all…lot of bball yet to be played.
Could it be that the loss in quality assistant coaches over the last few years is finally catching up with us?
Look at what Mike Rice has done at RMU. Those guys are really stepping up the D – 29% and 31% shooting in the last two games.
Stuart, I’ve also thought the player we’ve wound up missing the most is Kendall because of his defense – Graves also, to a lesser extent.
Seriously, they don’t need anymore height to play competent defense. How tall do you need to be to prevent a 5’9 guard getting a DOZEN rebounds against you? That kid was THE SHORTEST kid on the foor and he was KILLING us in rebounds. We’re not a bunch of 5’6 midgets. Teams can get it done with our height. Quit scapegoating.
I’m sure Dixon goes after tall kids every year – and we know, he sucks cause he doesn’t land UNCs and Dukes (or even that amazing Syracuse’s) lineup every year. Enough already.
If Dixon benched him it probably still wouldn’t solve our problems defensively. I am positive the coaches are telling the kids what to do. For some reason or another they simply aren’t executing. We are a little inexperienced and we know Young just doesn’t get it on the defensive side of the ball. In fact, 3 of the 5 players out there are first year starters. I’m sure that has something to do with it. I’m not going to blame the coaches because they aren’t the ones out there making ridiculous mistakes.
I know they’re not a dime-a-dozen, but I’d like to see some legitimate big men being entertained at The Pete. Echenique may be a great player, but he’s “only” 6’8″ — I think we’re set for a couple of years there. Blair and Troutman were unique in their ability to defend (well, Troutman at least) and score against bigger men. The lack of a true post presence on defense is causing us to collapse with help and leave opponents with far too many open shots. A legitimate shot blocker like UConn’s Thabeeet and even Duquene’s James would go a long way towards solving our current problems.