First Impressions of Mescheriakov
Nikita Mescheriakov practiced with Wake Forest for the first time today. We’ll have an article in tomorrow’s Journal with Coach Dino Gaudio explaining his reasons for taking the transfer from Georgetown. Hope you check it out.
Not to give away too much of the story, but these are a few of my early impressions of Mescheriakov, who will have a season and a half of eligibility remaining starting at the end of next fall semester.
I’ve seen him listed at 6-7 and 6-8, but he looked to me to be every bit of 6-8, with long arms. That said, don’t expect him to do a lot of banging underneath the basket. He had real trouble against McFarland, Weaver and Woods in the post drills. He spent most of the scrimmage guarding wings, L.D. Williams and Ari Stewart, and stayed with them pretty well.
He has a nice, compact left-handed stroke on his jumper. Not much wasted motion. His shot is not exactly flat, but there’s not a great deal of arc.
He was hustling really hard, which you would expect from a player during his first practice with a new team. But one of the reasons Dino said he took him was his former coaches said he had a really strong work ethic.
He made a couple of nice passes and showed some good court awareness.
And a reader named Andrew Wiseman who wrote in to say that the name of his brother who played at George Washington in the 1990s is actually spelled Yegor, was right. I went with the Georgetown website, which had the name spelled Egor. I asked today, and Nikita set me straight.