Morning Five: 07.19.10 Edition
Posted by nvr1983 on July 19th, 2010
It was a relatively slow weekend for major college basketball news so we are left to deal with issues off the court.
- Just five years after helping UNC to a NCAA title, Rashad McCants, who was the 14th overall pick in the 2005 NBA Draft, is out of the NBA and struggling to find a way back in. McCants averaged a very respectable 14.9 PPG on 45% FG in his 3rd year in the NBA, but quickly fell out of favor with his coaches and now has a toxic reputation across the NBA. The Cavs offered him a shot on a Summer League, but McCants did not show up in Las Vegas (scroll to last section) for “personal reasons”.
- We touched on it briefly on Saturday, but we are still waiting to hear from Notre Dame what they plan to do to Eric Atkins and Tim Abromaitis in response to their arrest on Friday night. Our guess? Nothing more than a few extra suicides at the end of practice.
- Seth Curry suffered a sprained ankle during one of the loaded S.J.G. Greater NC Pro AM games. It doesn’t seem like it was that significant although Curry sat out the rest of the game. Curry said “It’s just a little sprain. I’ll be all right. I’ll be back out next week.” The bigger question for us is what Coach K plans to do with his starting backcourt next year as he will have to decide between Curry, Nolan Smith, Kyrie Irving, and Andre Dawkins. Our guess is that Duke will use 3 guards (with Kyle Singler at the 4 and Miles or Mason Plumlee playing at center) and Smith and Irving are basically guaranteed spots, which means that Coach K will have to decide between Curry and Dawkins as the first player off the bench. The problems of the rich…
- While his predecessor Oliver Purnell has been busy making news at his new job at DePaul, Brad Brownell, who won 20 or more games in all four of his seasons at Wright State (no Duke or UNC on the schedule though), has been trying to get a hold of the program that Purnell built at Clemson. While the Clemson faithful were undoubtedly frustrated with the fast starts followed by what seemed like annual collapses, Purnell did build them into a solid ACC team that made three straight NCAA Tournament trips and made Littlejohn Coliseum a place that opponents dreaded coming to every year. Brownell has a solid group of players left behind by Purnell, but will have to deal with the loss of All-ACC Trevor Booker to the NBA.
- Last month we mentioned the decision of Carrick Felix to back out of a commitment to be the first junior college recruit to commit to Duke, opting to go to Arizona State instead. Recently he sat down for an interview where he talked about the decision and, although he does not go into the specifics (we did not expect him to, either), he says that he went to Duke because that was where everyone said he should go, but it did not feel right so he went to the Duke coaches who then helped him find the right school.
