Recruiting Rumor Mill: 07.26.10 Edition
Posted by nvr1983 on July 26th, 2010This week’s action was mostly centered around Las Vegas (and we will certainly talk about Vegas), but there as always there was news from across the rest of the nation. Based on the way that these AAU tournaments run most of our “news” comes from tweets from courtside observers, but we do have a few articles sprinkled in here. If you have a hot recruiting tip or news that you want to share with us, e-mail us at rushthecourt@gmail.com.
- MVP of the weekend? Cindy Richardson. Who? Richardson is the mother of Michael Gilchrist, the #1 recruit in the nation. She earns the award for telling her son to take a break from the AAU grind and consequently ended what would have been an ESPNU-televised showdown between Gilchrist and Austin Rivers tonight.
- A lesson for life? Just being on a loaded AAU team does not mean you will live up to the hype? Quincy Miller and Deuce Bello learned this the hard way this weekend.
- Speaking of Miller, Mike DeCourcy caught up with him for an interesting piece that gives us some good insight into a recruit who wants “to be somebody that everybody hates”.
- Adam Zagoria caught up with Maurice Harkless and Quinn Cook on their potential college choices. Harkless originally committed to UConn before opening up his commitment again. Cook is basically considering everybody in Division 1 (ok, he did trim his list from 11 schools to 9 schools).
- Scott Phillips gets to the essence of AAU basketball in under 140 characters.
- The parent of every promising recruit might want to take a few minutes looking at Tony Wroten‘s Twitter account over the weekend and think hard about whether or not they want their young athlete to being posting without some kind of filter (coach, PR department, etc.). Among the gems: letting the Twitter-verse that he should be a top 5 prospect, spending time looking for college coaches in the stands while he is playing in games (will happen at the next level with NBA scouts), and expanding his college list to 10 schools or is it 15 schools (I’m pretty sure he just ran out of space there)? Multiple media personalities chimed in on this subject with the two most notable being Matt Jones of KSR (Wroten is considering Kentucky) and Seth Davis of SI/CBS.
- Adonis Thomas had a great weekend and really turned some heads.
- Cody Zeller is another player who had a strong performance this weekend.
- Speaking of bad behavior, an unidentified AAU player was arrested for stealing someone’s camera on a plane going to Las Vegas. To all the college coaches in attendance that is a “red flag”.
- That player wasn’t the only one who wasn’t on his best behavior as the nastiness carried into Vegas where two players got into it and then a parent joined in the fracas. I’m not sure where bad parenting is on the warning screen for college coaches, but I’m going between a “yellow flag” and “red flag” here.
- This is looking ahead a little, but class of 2012 prospect J.P. Tokoto apparently lit it up in Vegas this weekend. Right now he’s somewhere in the #25-35 range in his class according to most recruiting sites. Based on the clips I have seen of him (see below for one) I think he should be higher than that. I only bring this up because rtmsf disagrees with me (I should point out that he also thought that Michael Beasley should have went ahead of Derrick Rose) so now we have a few thousand people as witnesses for a year or two from now.
- In another “too early” post, Shabazz Muhammed (the #1 rated SF in the class of 2012) probably had the highest single-game output of the weekend dropping 52 points on some unnamed team.
- Although many sites have stated that PG Chasson Randle has announced that Purdue, Stanford, and Illinois are his three finalists it seems like the article that everyone is citing states that those are three of the seven schools that will be his finalists with the other four revealed this week. Sorry to burst the bubble of fans from those schools.
- By now everybody has seen Inception(does anybody doubt that Dwyane Wade told LeBron to see it?), but we’re beginning to wonder if Jeff Goodman isn’t doing something similar with his scoops reporting that his sources told him of Tristan Spurlock‘s decision to transfer from Virginia to UCF almost 3 hours before Spurlock announced it to the Twitter-verse.
