This 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the growth of the AAU summer circuit it has been difficult for fans and coaches to keep track of all the action. There are few places where that has been more evident than in Las Vegas where at times there have been four tournaments going on simultaneously on dozens of courts making it impossible for someone to catch a potential superstar that everybody seems to have missed (Anthony Davis, anybody?). This year, however, there are only two tournaments to follow: the Super 64 and Fab 48 (you can guess how many teams each tournament has). If you only had one tournament to go to this weekend in Las Vegas (and how could there possibly be anything better to do in Vegas in the 120 degree dry heat?), we would suggest the Fab 48, which features the majority of the “big names” (for some reason the Super 64 doesn’t list its top players and we can’t figure out who plays for what AAU team), is NCAA-“certified” (although the Super 64 might be too), and also managed to snipe the last two Super 64 champs. Here’s a sampling of the talent (commits have the school next to their name) that will reportedly be at the Fab 48:

***Miller may not be at the Fab 64 (details below)

Read the rest of this entry »