Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Thoughts for June

It's sort of a dead time for Basketball fans, unless you're counting the NBA Finals as basketball, but that's over relatively quickly. Totally uninformed prediction: Celtics over Lakers in 6.

The Indiana men's basketball team is in the hunt for 6-6 Emmanuel Negedu, who would be the highest rated prospect coming into campus this fall. And if he did decide on the Hoosiers, he might well put Kyle Taber on the bench and be a 30 minute/game starter. But it's Negedu's choice, he may well want to work with asst. coach Josh Pastner at Memphis. And even though he wouldn't get any PT there next season, being at Memphis would probably be good for his NBA profile in the long run.

In other recruiting news, Maurice Sutton went to Villanova, but IU picked a Juco who should give the team what they were probably going to get out of Sutton in the short term: a 7-footer to practice against. Tijan Jobe comes to Bloomington basically unheralded, but he has "good upper-body strength" which probably means he can't run, and I suspect he'll top out at 10 minutes/game. However, I was looking forward to what Sutton might develop into in 2-3 years, and I doubt Jobe's gonna develop much. Here's hoping I'm wrong about that.

Coach Crean picked up a couple of guards for the 2009-2010 season, local favorite Jordan Hulls and Georgetown transfer Jeremiah Rivers (son of Doc). Rivers might work his way into the starting five as a defender and glue guy, but at the very least IU will be getting a rotation player.

I've been looking over the national scene for the 2008-2009 college basketball season, but I really need the NBA draft/early entry business to shake out before being anymore informed. I actually have been fairly interested in the Big East, which looks to hold the most talent in the country next year, even if the national champion will be most likely be from the ACC or Pac-10. At some point, I'd like to go over my player ratings by position and compare who's got what coming back, but that may be a project for the dead-time of July & August.

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