Skeen No Longer a Teen
Grizzled is one of those great old-fashioned sportswriter words that has probably outlived its usefulness. But because it has a bit of punch to it, I always love to use it just the same. So thanks to Jamie Skeen for returning to Wake Forest with the Virginia Commonwealth basketball team and giving me the opportunity.
I kept trying to put my finger on what looked so different about Skeen from when he played at Wake in Skip Prosser’s last season of 2006-07 and Dino Gaudio’s first of 2007-08. What I remember was a big player with a nice shooting touch whose production never seemed to live up to his natural ability. He actually started 30 games, but 24 of them were as a freshman when he averaged 7.5 points and 4.6 rebounds. When he got off to a wobbly start as a sophomore, he was replaced by Chas McFarland in the starting lineup. Gaudio made the move against at Iowa on Nov. 22, and afterward I asked Skeen for his reaction to McFarland starting ahead of him. We were standing in the corridor outside the visiting locker room at Carver Hawkeye Arena. Skeen said McFarland should be starting because he’d been playing better than him in practice. I appreciated the honesty to no end. But another part of me wondered if Skeen wasn’t taking the demotion a little too well.
We are talking ultimate competitive, big-time college basketball here and if I were a coach trying to make a living in the ACC I might be looking for a little more fire in the belly of my power forward.
After averaging 5.6 points and 4.1 rebounds as a sophomore, Skeen began his junior season in limbo when he was suspended for the first semester for what was described as a violation of the university’s academic policy. He would have had to apply to be re-admitted to Wake, but chose instead to transfer. That’s how he ended up with the VCU team that showed up at Joel Coliseum for the NIT Season Tipoff.
All I knew about his time at VCU was his numbers from last year, which were remarkably similar in points (8.1 per game) and rebounds (4.5 per game) to what he averaged as a freshman. But he shot 52 percent from the floor for the Rams, after shooting 42 percent at Wake.
He was 19 when he last played for Wake, and he is 22 today. You could see a physical maturity as soon as the Rams came out for warm-ups. He looked stronger, and far more self-assured, like a player who had been up and down the court a time or two. Compared the Jamie Skeen I knew at Wake, he looked grizzled.
And once the game started, he definitely showed an assertiveness I never saw at Wake. The VCU press led by senior point guard Joey Rodriquez was really what flummoxed the Deacons and sent them reeling to an sound 90-69 thumping on their home court. But Skeen got in his licks too, hitting five of eight shots from the floor to score 15 points. He also had five rebounds and a block in 23 productive minutes.
“I couldn’t be happier for Jamie to come back at Wake and play as well as he did and get the win,’’ Coach Shaka Smart said. “It’s not easy to do what he did tonight, and I’m really, really proud of him. I think he showed a lot of toughness.’‘
Skeen’s performance looks even better in comparison to the players he was going against. Starter Ty Walker, in 13 minutes, contributed all of two points, one block and one steal. And that was it. There were no rebounds. And freshman Carson Desroisers played better, good enough in fact to block five shots. But otherwise he hardly lit up the stat sheet with five points and three rebounds in 22 minutes.
“We allowed Jamie Skeen to catch the ball constantly too deep as opposed to being on top of him and not allowing him that low-post position,’’ Coach Jeff Bzdelik of Wake said.
Skeen appears to have landed well. If you’ve got good, savvy, veteran guards in college basketball you sleep better as a coach and Smart ought to be sleeping just fine. I was really impressed with the senior point guard Joey Rodriquez, who has 31 assists now in three games, and guards Bradford Burgess (25 points) and Brandon Rozzell (17) showed against Wake they can’t be left alone on the perimeter. And the Rams swarmed Wake, knocking them out of the game with 31 points off turnovers.
“We played against a veteran team of mostly seniors and juniors, and maybe a freshman on the team,’’ sophomore Ari Stewart of Wake said. “That was just like an ACC team in the ACC Tournament for us. And that is definitely an NCAA Tournament team right there. They’ve got a veteran point guard, and they had a chip on their shoulders coming in here on top of that.’‘
Skeen suggested that he had moved on when asked about the extra motivation of playing a school he once attended.
“It was not a motivation,’’ Skeen said. “I was just trying to get a win. We were just trying to get to New York. That’s all we’ve been talking about this whole trip. We didn’t want to win just one game, we wanted to win them both.
“I was hyped, or whatever, to be here, but at the same time I just wanted to get to New York and advance.’‘
But then he revealed he had not moved on, at least not for good, when he was asked about his footwear for the game.
“Yeah, I wore my Wake shoes,’’ Skeen said. “But it’s got Skip Prosser’s name on the inside of them.
“That’s who recruited me here, so I mean it was a special thing for me, may he rest in peace. But it was definitely for him.’‘