The recruiting class of 2012 was never destined to challenge the class of 1990—Rodney Rogers, Randolph Childress, Trelonnie Owens, Marc Blucas, Robert Doggett and Stan King—for the distinction of best in school history. It’s not every year you get two Hall of Famers, along with two invaluable role players like Owens and Blucas. I happened to run into Dave Odom at practice last week and razzed him about missing out on Doggett and King. Thankfully he knows me well enough to recognize my feeble attempt at humor. And truth is, if Doggett hadn’t had knee problems, he might have been the real thing as well.
Not nearly as much was expected from this year’s class of Chase Fischer, Daniel Green and Anthony Fields. Good thing, for their sake. Only Fischer has made more than a nominal contribution. He’s averaging 6.7 points while shooting 35 percent from the floor and 32 percent from 3-point range. He had a decent stretch going on 3-pointers, hitting six of 15 over four games, before going 0-for-4 against UNC. Nobody except C.J. Harris could hit the broad side of a barn against the Tar Heels.
But Green did make an impression against the Tar Heels, hustling for five rebounds while committing four fouls in 15 active minutes. I asked coach Jeff Bzdelik yesterday if a lack of depth was showing up in the way the Deacons have faded in the second half in their past three games. He said possibly.
Partly because of that, and partly because he loves how the kid plays, but Bzdelik said he’s decided to give Green a bigger role in the final eight regular-season games headed into the ACC Tournament. Green has played 135 minutes total, and is averaging 1.3 points and 1.5 rebounds.
“Daniel Green has been improving steadily and has earned and deserves minutes,’’ Bzdelik said. “He did a great job in the time that he was in there, and I can see, for the remainder of this year, him getting a consistent amount of time.’‘
Fields lost his confidence somewhere along the way, and it’s hard for a coach to have confidence in a player who has none in himself. He has played 175 minutes total, but only 17 in ACC play.
Bzdelik did remind me of something that I’d forgotten along the way. Fields has had two wrist surgeries over the past 12 months, and Bzdelik is convinced that the forced inactivity and rehab has set Fields back. I don’t believe anyone expects Fields to ever be the next Chris Paul, but the staff would like to see him develop and provide depth at college basketball’s most critical position of point guard. It’ll probably be next year before we find out if that’s in the cards.
“In fairness to Anthony Fields, Anthony spent almost six months with his left hand in a cast,’’ Bzdelik said. “And he had two surgeries on his left wrist – with a bone graft. And he wasn’t able to play for six months.
“His wrist is still stiff to the point that the doctors said it will take about a year for him to get mobility back. It’s very difficult for a point guard to play basically with a hand tied behind his back. That needs to be understood.’’
It’s way too early to tell if the prospects for an improved offensive line are looking up at Wake. But as the beat guy, I know I’m going to be looking up to talk with the offensive linemen the Deacons have landed in the past two recruiting classes.
The three who signed with Wake today are Tyler Hayworth of Kingsport, Tn., Will Smith of Charlotte and Joel Suggs of Sophia. Hayworth is 6-4, 306-pounds, Smith is 6-5, 285-pounds and Suggs is 6-6, 285-pounds. Head coach Jim Grobe said he was tickled pink to land the trio.
“The thing I like about Will is he’s got really good length to him,’’ Grobe said. “He’s tall. He’s got long arms. He’s just a great looking kid that I think is going to develop. He’s going to get bigger, faster and stronger, and all those kinds of things. So I think we’ve got a great frame to work with in both Tyler Hayworth and Joel Suggs.
“I just think we knocked it out of the park with these three offensive linemen. I thought we brought in three pretty good ones last year, and I think with these guys adding to that group we’ve really helped our depth.
“We’ve always kind of wanted to have like 15 offensive linemen that we’re working with, and we haven’t had that for awhile. So I think these three guys – added to the ones we’ve already got – I think we’ll come back in the fall and have a really good-looking group. You really don’t want freshmen to play in the offensive line. Joe Looney did. But these are three really, really good football players. I think we’ve done really good with these guys.’‘
Looking back, the three the Deacons recruited last year—all of whom redshirted—were Hunter Godwin, Dylan Intemann and Cody Preble. Godwin is 6-6, 290-pounds, Intemann is 6-5, 300-pounds and Preble is 6-5, 315-pounds.
I asked Grobe about the evolution of his recruitment of offensive linemen. The play of the offensive line has been, at best, adequate over the past six seasons.
“Initially we were looking for guys with better foot quickness than size,’’ Grobe said. “We were really kind of hanging our hats on running the football, and especially running some option football. As we’ve evolved with guys like Riley Skinner we needed better pass protectors.
“And so I think we’re looking for that kind of middle-of-the-road guy. We kind of have gone to a dual-threat quarterback, a kid that can run, a kid that can throw. And we kind of want a dual-threat offensive lineman, a guy who can be a little bit of a road grader and come off the ball and hit, but is big enough to pass pro and set blocks in the throw game. So I think that’s what we’ve done the past couple of years, and that’s kind of what we’re evolving toward is, more of a two-dimensional guy instead of a guy who is just a run blocker or a guy who is just a pass protector – a more versatile guy.’‘
It bears noting that all but one of the six offensive linemen who have signed the past two seasons stand at least 6-5. The runt is Hayworth at 6-4.
“The thing that you get into in pass protection is leverage, and you need a little bit bigger guy,’’ Grobe explained. “Because in pass protection, you really have to somewhat absorb the rush. And if you’re not big enough to do that, you get driven back into the quarterback. And if you’re a shorter guy, guys are able to get their hands up a little better and bat balls down and things like that.
“So yeah, I think we don’t need a guy that’s too big, but we do need a guy who can get up nose-to-nose with you and kind of keep your hands down and protect the quarterback in the pocket, as much as being able to come off and hit you when we’re running the football.’‘
If you were at Joel Coliseum last night, you know what the place looked like. If you weren’t, here’s some less-than-professional video to give you an idea.
Most of my buddies don’t believe it when I tell them, but sportswriting is not all fun and games. Well it is a lot of games, but not all of them are fun.
Yeah, I get in free. Yeah, I get good seats. Yeah, I get to talk with the players and coaches afterwards. I even get complimentary sodas.
But there are nights I’d rather be watching re-runs of Pawn Stars than sitting through and having to write about, on deadline no less, the kind of game I saw tonight between Wake and North Carolina. Apparently, judging from the number of empty seats in Joel Coliseum, quite a few people felt the same way. Not even the multitude of Tar Heels fans on hand had all that much to get excited about while watching their guys shoot 31 percent from the floor—the lowest by a North Carolina team in victory since Roy Williams’ first Tar Heel team beat Akron while shooting 30.4 percent in December of 2003.
Given the Tar Heels’ crooked sights, the game was there for the taking with 11 minutes remaining after a jumper by Chase Fischer cut the lead to seven. To have a game against North Carolina there for the taking is pretty heady stuff, even in a good season. And this has obviously not been a good season at Wake. So, as it turned out, the Deacons weren’t good enough to take advantage of their opportunity. They played 6 1/2 minutes without a field goal, got outscored 16-1 and spent the final minute and a half playing against the Blue Steel Team, or whatever the original Blue Team made up of bench-warmers and/or walk-ons is called these days.
After the Tar Heels prevailed 68-53 joy was hard to find from either side. Williams talked about how ugly the game was, but that a team has to win ugly to have a great season—which the Tar Heels have every chance of doing. He was asked about the lack of atmosphere and how it might have affected his team’s intensity and motivation.
“Well, as a basketball player you’ve got to play,’’ Williams said. “I would hope that my team would play really hard with nobody in the crowd. It’s probably not as much fun, or something, but you’ve got to set the habits and set standards of playing exceptionally hard, regardless of what the crowd is doing.’
“If you’re a basketball player, play. If it’s on the damn playground, play. So I guess my answer to that is no. That’s a bunch of horse manure. You’ve got to play basketball, or don’t play.’‘
Coach Jeff Bzdelik was even less accommodating with the assembled media. He answered my question about the empty possessions after Fischer’s jumper cut the lead to seven, but he wasn’t as forthcoming with others. Michael Jennings of DeaconSports made mention of how the Deacons recurring problems cropped up again—with UNC outscoring Wake 11-0 on turnovers and 20-9 on second-chance points. Bzdelik’s answer could not have been more succinct.
“Right,’’ he said, allowing six seconds to lapse before I asked the next question.
When Jerome Richard of the Burlington Times-News asked if he was pleased with his team’s shot selection, Bzdelik was not about to let the fact he had touched on that subject earlier slide.
“Well like I said—I just said this—I said that we had opportunities around the rim and they blocked 12 shots,’’ Bzdelik responded. “So their length impacted the game. And then we had open looks, several open looks, probably a dozen open looks that we just couldn’t make shots. Sometimes that happens.’‘
The box score was as ugly as a stretch of South Carolina highway between Orangeburg and Florence. Tyler Zeller lighted it up with 18 points and a career-high 18 rebounds to go with three blocked shots. John Henson had 14 points, 12 rebounds and four blocks, but missed 10 shots from the floor. Kendall Marshall—a player any coach would love to coach—had a season-high 14 points along with six assists and no turnovers. And C.J. Harris outlasted some serious defense applied by Reggie Bullock to get to the line eight times, make all eight shots and finish with 19 points. But the Tar Heels, as mentioned earlier, shot as poorly as they have in victory since the 2003-04 season and Wake shot worse than they did, at 29.6 percent.
The most telling stat on the sheet, though, was 12,865. That’s the attendance that was given, which means there were probably not that many more than 10,000 in the building. The arch-rival is in town, their fans buy up around half of the tickets sold, and still Wake doesn’t come close to a sellout.
These are hard times for Wake basketball, as hard as I’ve seen in years. Maybe they’ll get better. It’s hard to imagine them getting worse.
From my earliest days as a sportswriter, I was cautioned to avoid cliches.
It’s a policy to which I have tried to adhere, though, I have to admit, with only mixed success. We who make what living we make out of words have to come up with something. The goal is to snag and hold on to a reader’s attention, and sometimes the best way of doing that is through the use of a truism, a bromide, a platitude—all gussied up words for cliches.
For as Skip Prosser was wont to say, the reasons they’re cliches is because they’re true. If they weren’t true, they would have never been repeated enough times to become cliches.
The one I’ve spent the previous three paragraphs setting up is ``The best thing about freshmen is they become sophomores.’‘
That’s the thought that came to mind during yesterday’s ACC coaches teleconference, when two coaches from different area codes in the conference standings riffed about the struggle of getting a talented player through his freshman year as mentally and emotionally unscathed as possible. Even the best—well with a few exceptions like Kyrie Irving and Kenny Anderson—struggle in their first year of college. All freshmen think they have an idea of what they’re getting into when they arrive to play basketball at college, but few do. Even a staggering talent such as Harrison Barnes sometimes has to take his lumps before he finally figures out what he has to do and how he has to do it to become the player everyone expected him to be.
Yesterday coach Roy Williams of North Carolina and coach Jeff Bzdelik of Wake Forest commented on two freshmen we’ll see tonight when the Tar Heels play the Deacons at Joel Coliseum.
Williams was asked about James Michael McAdoo, the 6-9 forward from Norfolk who is averaging 5.4 points and 3.6 rebounds while shooting 41 percent from the floor and 60 percent from the line.
“You can’t tell with freshmen what goes through their mind every day,’’ Williams said. “Freshman have a wide variety of ways to handle things and you don’t learn about that until you’ve had them for a whole year.
“It’s a bright new world out there. The game is moving so fast. Everybody’s bigger and stronger. Guys come at different paces so you have to more or less try and push them as much as you can and try to force them to come, but still they’re going to come at their own pace.
“You can help them a little bit but mostly it’s up to them.’‘
Bzdelik was asked about the play of Chase Fischer, the 6-3 guard from Ripley, West Va., averaging 6.9 points while shooting 37 percent from the floor, 34 percent from 3-point range and 86 percent from the line. It’s just a hunch, but I believe if Wake hopes to make any kind of game of it tonight then it will need a significant contribution from Fischer.
“Chase has, I think, done a wonderful job,’’ Bzdelik said. “He’s very comfortable and confident out there. And yeah, he’s had moments when he’s been like a freshman and he’s had moments when he’s been otherwise.
“One thing that Chase does – people talk about his ability to shoot the basketball, and he can do that – but he also passes the ball really well. I think he might be our best passer. He sees the floor very well. He makes some really tough passes with his left hand. He’s made about five or six passes off his left hand, just dribbling with his left hand and firing that ball even across court with that left hand.
“I feel real good about him and I’ve got great confidence in him, and he has a really terrific future in this league if he gets stronger and understands positioning more and gets more experience. He’s a good all-around player who has a high IQ and who has really good skills.’‘
Tony Chennault is a tough, hard-nosed Philly kid who plays hard. He also smiles a lot and is fun to be around.
But there are days when it becomes painfully obvious how much work remains before he establishes himself as a solid, dependable ACC point guard. Today, against senior Andre Young of Clemson, was one of those days.
Young, unbridled in his younger days at Clemson, had his lessons to learn as well. By now, as a senior, he has learned many of them. One is to not get down when the going gets rough. The going got pretty rough early today for the Tigers, who missed 15 of their first 16 shots from the floor. But from the time Young drilled a 3-pointer from the left wing for Clemson’s second field goal, with 10:28 left in the half, the Tigers dominated play on the way to a 71-60 victory.
Young contributed seven field goals on 12 attempts and three 3-pointers on six heaves to lead Clemson with 19 points. At least as impressive was his floor game, which resulted in five assists and no turnovers in 33 highly effective minutes.
Chennault, meanwhile, made one of seven shots from the floor, scored three points and had three assists and two turnovers in 29 minutes. C.J. Harris (19 points and seven rebounds) and Travis McKie (13 points, 12 rebounds, three assists and two steals) played well, but it’s hard to play well enough to compensate for such a discrepancy at college basketball’s most vital position.
“He’s a really smart player who knows how to pick his spots,’’ Chennault said of Young. “He was a real leader for them, a good leader.’‘
Young bided his time early, starting only three games over his first two seasons. He cracked the lineup last season, and responded with career highs with 11.1 points and 80 3-pointers while committing just 40 turnovers against 102 assists.
Chennault, through 21 games this season, has 61 assists and 42 turnovers. Young, through 20 games, has 69 assists and 24 turnovers.
It should not be overlooked that again, Young is a senior while Chennault is a sophomore who missed 17 games last season with a broken foot.
“It’s important to have seniors who have been around for awhile and who understand,’’ coach Jeff Bzdelik of Wake Forest said “And that just takes time.’’
It was a pretty drive through the upstate countryside to Clemson, but I couldn’t get out of the car once I reached Littlejohn
Ryan Bingham was on Outlaw Country singing Southside of Heaven and I wasn’t about to turn it off. It’s too good. It is a long song, but considering it was 9:50 and tipoff isn’t until 12:06, I didn’t have anything to worry about.
Bingham, who I got turned onto in the fabulous movie Crazy Heart, was a bull rider before he became a country music star. I always wonder how bull riding first got started (“I’m going to jump on the backk of that big son of a gun and hang on for eight seconds”). I imagine there’s a good chance alcohol was involved.
The rest of the time has been spent waiting for Scott Wortman of the Wake media relations department to find out the latest on Ty Walker. Scott just walked up and said that Walker is good to go, and that the battery of tests conducted yesterday and today have revealed no medical reason for him not to play. I asked if he will start, and Scott said he thought he would.
Catalin Baciu, the 7-2, 255-pound center from Romania, is listed as a starter for the Tigers. That will be a matchup worth watching. If Walker plays as well against Baciu as he did against Alex Len of Maryland, I have to think the Deacons have a chance. We’ll find out in a bit.
Ty Walker made the trip to Clemson and practiced on a limited basis today, but didn’t participate in any contact drills.
The medical staff will evaluate Walker Saturday morning to see if he has recovered sufficiently from the concussion sustained Wednesday against Florida State to return against the Tigers. Trainer Greg Collins said Thursday that only after the concussion symptoms are no longer detectable will Walker be given post-concusssion neuropsychological tests to determine Walker’s brain functions and memory.
Even if Walker is cleared, I’d be surprised to see him log the 32 minutes he played against N.C. State or even the 24 minutes he played at BC.
“We don’t want to return someone too soon because if their concussion symptoms return, that prolongs the length of the concussion and prolongs the recovery,’’ Collins said. “It’s something we take very seriously.’‘
Asked Thursday if sophomore Carson Desrosiers would start if Walker is not available, coach Jeff Bzdelik declined to say.
Trainer Greg Collins doesn’t know yet if Ty Walker will recover from his concussion in time to play for Wake Saturday at Clemson, and he might not know until Saturday morning.
“It’s too hard to say right now,’’ Collins said during today’s practice, which Walker attended but did not participate in. “These things can really be fickle. Not everybody is the same and not everybody recovers the same way.’‘
What Collins does know is that there is no conference or school policy that would prevent Walker from playing the next game after sustaining a concussion. If you were watching the FoxSports telecast of the Wake-Florida State game Wednesday, you might have heard differently from color commentator Mike Gminski.
Travis McKie wasn’t the only one in the building to have a bad night.
“People ask me `Is he suspended for the next game?’ ‘’ Collins said. “There is absolutely no conference policy concerning that. These are medical decisions. We don’t have a set policy. It’s something the doctors look at on a daily basis. The number of people who say he’s already suspended for the game. That is just completely wrong information.
“I don’t know who put that out there, but it was completely incorrect.’
Collins said Wake’s policy concerning concussions is very specific, and can actually be accessed on the Wake Forest Sports Medicine webpage I’ve linked here WF Policy on Concussions’
Walker walked through the door of Budd Gymnasium slowly, but was dressed in uniform. He said he feels better than he did after his collision of FSU’s Bernard James, which sidelined him for the second half of the Deacons’ 75-52 loss. But he said he still has a headache. On Wednesday night, he put the pain at 8.5 on a scale of 10. Today’s it’s down to 4.
This was before I talked with Collins, so I asked him if he had been told about his chances of playing at Clemson.
“They haven’t at the moment,’’ Walker said. “They said yesterday things look pretty good. They gave me some concussion tests and said in the best-case scenario, I should be able to play.’‘
I mentioned that I imagined Walker wanted to play against the Tigers, especially considering how much a difference he has made in recent games.
“I definitely want to, but also my health is most important,’’ Walker saide. “But I definitely want to contribute to this basketball team.’‘
Wake’s game against Florida State tonight was as good an example as I’ve seen lately as to why wrestling and boxing have weight classes.
Barring some kind of miracle, a flyweight is not going to beat a heavyweight no matter how hard, or how many times, he tries. And I got the same feeling watching the Seminoles 75-52 knockout against the Deacons as I got in both games against FSU a year ago. The two could play 10 times, and little to nothing is going to change.
The question I had for coach Jeff Bzdelik in Tuesday’s practice was, has Wake packed on enough muscle and strength since last year to be able to compete against the FSU’s of college basketball. He said we’d find out tonight.
Did we ever? The Seminoles poured in 40 points in the paint, dunked six times, shot 68 percent in the second half, forced 18 turnovers and held the Deacons to 35 percent accuracy from the floor.
“With their physicality and the size, we were just too small in there,’’ Bzdelik said. “And we start wearing down. So it all just catches up to you.’‘
As long as Ty Walker was on the court, the Deacons had something for the Seminoles to deal with. Walker blocked four first-half shots, and, according to coach Leonard Hamilton of FSU, made his team tentative offensively.
“We didn’t attack the basket nearly as well as we have in some other games,’’ Hamilton said. “I think a lot of it was because of Walker’s presence back there, and unfortunately they lost him for the second half. It was a lot easier for us to attack then.Walker really bogged us up a bit in the first half.’‘
So Wake’s hopes for an upset were pretty much gone by the time Walker was diagnosed with a concussion at halftime—the result of a collision with Bernard James, FSU’s 6-10, 240-pound forward who, having spent six years in the Air Force, will turn 27 next month. Walker’s replacement, sophomore Carson Desrosiers was defenseless against James and his fellow front-court mates Xavier Gibson and Jon Kreft, so much so that Bzdelik finally just pulled him and alternated Nikita Mescheriakov and Daniel Green in the post.
“Carson just had a tough night in terms of his production and his presence—which is the best way to describe it—down low,’’ Bzdelik said.
But the damage had already been done, with FSU scoring 12 straight points to set the rout in motion.
FSU, which has run UNC out of Tallahassee and won at Duke during its five-game winning streak, was impressive tonight. I was impressed, and so was C.J. Harris.
“Sometimes they knocked the ball out of our hands, had a couple of offensive rebounds, a couple of deep post-ups, just getting us out of the way,’’ Harris said. “It’s a mind thing. You have to be mentally tough to fight through screens, to box out big centers. In spots we didn’t do that and it hurt us.
“They stuck to their game plan. Even when we went on runs, they didn’t falter. They kept running their offense and getting it inside, attacking the offensive glass. You could see the maturity.’‘
What I can’t see is any recourse for Wake against the most physically mature teams on their schedule, at least not until next year. Desrosiers obviously has to keep getting stronger, and the Deacons will still need help from their six-man recruiting class which includes three players—forwards Devin Thomas, Tyler Cavanaugh and Arnaud Moto—who, if initial reports are correct, should make Wake a bigger, stronger team.
As for Walker’s status Saturday at Clemson, no one could say as of tonight. But I’ll be at practice tomorrow for the latest.
