big game for Lathan last night
- Thread starter EddieWilsonLives
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He's not a great fit for the way Pike plays, and I was one of his biggest critics, but we definitely still wanted him and could have used him this year. Would have allowed us to never see Fall, Dortch could have played some 4, and it would have given this team someone who could score.
sure i mean if he stayed you'd like to think he'd be better defensively in year 2 of the system...
but at the price he was rumored to get and our budget...we're good here.
Yeah put another way, he likely cost at least double what we’re paying Ogbole and he would not have helped us win more games. Of course we’d rather have him than Ware or Fall. I would take him in place of both but that doesn’t say much.
We must have very different definitions of good.... We are so far from having anything in the program as good, except maybe some good kids.
Especially when that team isn’t even all that good. They just lost to Seattle…. With a 3rd string center getting paid north of 800k.
I think he was just trying to say “we’re good” in the sense that while the staff made a lot of mistakes, not prioritizing an allocation to pay Lathan the 800k+ he required wasn’t one of them.
Guess that depends on what Fall got paid, but I do agree giving Lathan 1/4 of our budget would be malpractice
LOL...obviously not saying we are good at the 5 or anywhere for that matter...
just that I'm good on Lathan being here for anything other than what our measly budget could afford.
I would have been cool with paying Lathan with unlimited room temperature hot dogs leftover from every home game . anything more than that would have been too much .
I believe Paul was somewhat burnt out by the end if his RU tenure. He really lived and died with the wins and losses here. Stuff like becoming a target for the Indiana trip and also hearing it sometimes from our knucklehead fans as well probably contributed to a desire for a chance of scenery where he could just play ball without the stress.
No it doesn’t depend on that. We shouldn’t have paid Fall anything - clearly that was on the long list of mistakes I referred to but it was not a matter of picking Fall to replace Lathan. We don’t know specifics but a center who didn’t see the floor at 2 prior stops clearly had to cost a lot less than a center who played 25+ mpg as a frosh at Rutgers. If we paid Lathan, we probably couldn’t have also afforded to keep Dylan Grant here.
sure, show your facts. actions and timing speak volumes unless you can refute them with such facts. i'll be waiting with others.
"Paying Lathan means losing Grant" seems highly unlikely.
According to Richie, the staff had 750k each for 3 transfers.
Lathan could easily be taking one of those spots at 800k
Hell give him the money for 2 spots. Hypothetically - not that he deserved it.
Seems there would have been no impact on Grant or anyone else.
I think people are severely underestimating how much Francis, Buchanan and especially Fall are getting.
The money had to go somewhere
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This has always been my assumption (rightly or wrongly).
Pike brought in a 5th year pure PG Noah Fernandes presumably to compete with Mulcahy as the lead/starting PG.
At minimum a 1a/1b situation.
Noah was too small to be on the court with Mulcahy and not have the ball.
If Mulcahy was pushed more off ball, he's now competing with Cam Spencer, Simpson, Mag, Hyatt and "elite" shooting recruit Griffiths for time.
His minutes (32.4mpg the prior year - 2nd behind Caleb) and role was clearly going to be diminished.
The irony is that Noah and Gavin and Simpson weren't good.
Cam left.
Mag bailed on the season.
So if Paul stayed, his role wouldn't have dropped much, if at all.
His replacement JWill ended up leading the team in scoring.
Why does someone who didnt see the floor have to cost less? We have people in a TJ Powers thread talking about how much was spent to get him, he didnt see much of the floor at his prior stops. No one knows what anyone paid for these guys. Agree that Fall shouldn't have cost much, that doesn't mean he didn't.
Whatever we paid Fall was a waste of money because he can’t help at all. But he was picked up at the end of the cycle with whatever remaining funds we had left. His addition had nothing to do with Lathan which was an early cycle decision made at the time when we would have presumably been working out the details to keep Dylan Grant, Ogbole, J Mike, Dortch and deciding not to keep Jordan, Lathan, etc. we don’t know what anyone cost us, but I don’t think replacing Lathan with any of these guys on the roster would be helpful, and I’m reasonably confident Lathan cost a lot more than all of them so no, we didn’t make a “mistake” in letting him leave. No way.
Sure Richie said that - but that was at the very beginning of the cycle. J Mike didn’t announce his return right away. Neither did Ogbole. There’s zero chance J Mike got 400k and then we brought Francis in for 750k. Pike even came out and said Francis surprised him with his D (meaning he thought it would be worse). All preseason signals suggested Pike didn’t expect Francis to play this much.
What happened with our NIL presumably was that at some point we decided to deploy a “spread the wealth” strategy and go into the Euro pro market instead of spending that much on individual guys (likely because the guys interested in coming to RU at the 750k price point weren't all that good). This was where Pike’s strategy went astray IMO. He “thought” he budgeted like you said tp get 3 “impact” players in the 500-800k range and retain the guys we have from last year’s roster. He started with Buchanan who probably got on the lower end of that range. That addition alone may have been fine if it had actually been true he could convince two RHJ / Geo type kids to come here for 800k. The problem was, plenty of other teams were waiting to offer the same money or more and without ties to RU we had no shot with these types of kids unless we offered significantly more. At that point, we should’ve doubled down and offered one kid we really wanted 1.5M - but we didn’t. Time went on and we had zero proven impact players and still had that allocation to spend. Zrno almost certainly is being paid like a transfer. He might even be getting more than a guy like Francis who came from a low major with mediocre metrics. I’m sure Denis is getting NIL too.
I’m not sure how you can really compare. Baye Fall checked in to only a total of only 13 games in two prior seasons. It’s one thing to not earn much time - quite another to be so lost that coaches give up on even trying to get you experience for development purposes.
And J Will didn’t play until the second half of the season. we would’ve made the NCAAs if Paul stayed. Cliff would’ve had a much better season. A lot of things would’ve turned out different in my opinion.
I never said mistake, I said we wanted him back. I also said giving him 1/4 of our budget would have been malpractice. Yes, whatever we paid Fall was a waste, but IF it was close to Lathan's ask (and I could see Pike preferring to spend on a "defensive" guy), who would you rather have right now?
An “average” could be based on one single game. Fall checked in to a grand total of 4 games last season and he was not injured. That had to be a massive red flag from a NIL valuation perspective and that would be true even if he averaged 15 minutes in those few games. The point is he was so weak that the coach didn’t see any value in even getting him into games for experience purposes. A blatant lost cause.
Powers played in 24 games last season. That’s very different from 4.
wait....Baye Fall got a check???
college basketball has indeed been destroyed
college basketball has indeed been destroyed
Sadly there’s zero chance he got less than 250k.wait....Baye Fall got a check???
college basketball has indeed been destroyed
The fact that we're paying any of these players anything more than tuition/room/board is horrifying to me. And then to think it's 100s of thousands of dollars makes me want to vomit. There isn't a player on our roster worth anything near that kind of money. The downward spiral is in full force. We had a couple of fun years with Geo, Ron, etc....but is so far in the rear view mirror and now we're paying guys to suck at basketball. Stop the ride and let me off.
The second it became legal to pay players, a market was established for every level player. We just don’t have the transparency to understand it. Simply put - market value is dictated by the importance of winning, being competitive and even simply fielding a team for a particular sport. For each school, these considerations are what drives spending decisions for programs in the long run. All of these things are in turn driven by how much the fans care about these things which is reflected in ticket sales, team apparel sales, TV viewing and a number of other direct and indirect revenue sources for the program.
That’s not what happened and it had nothing to with playing time. Paul was going to get his 32+ minutes a game with the ball in his hand if he stayed and he knew that. His role wasn’t going to be diminished at all. I had a long conversation with someone who knows Paul very well.
Washington had a well known NYC basketball guy reach out to someone who Paul knows and trusts (I am not naming names). A meeting was set up in NYC late in the portal cycle, and that’s why the timing was late. Paul and the NYC basketball guy discussed the offer from Washington.
When Paul was supposed to fly out to Washington he really didn’t want to but it was too late to go back on the offer and come back go RU.
Anyway- big money gets thrown around to 18-22 year olds, and most of them didn’t grow up with $$ and it’s a tough decision to make.
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Lathan is the classic example of a kid who will make money but get hurt because NIL. If he stayed here Pike would’ve made him a better defender and he would’ve played a lot of minutes. By the time he was a senior he would’ve been an impact B1G player. But he chased the bag. Coaches now spend so much time trying to get 6-10 new guys to play together (for one year) that they don’t have the time to dedicate to develop a kid for years 2-3 in the program. They also know bag chasers won’t stink around so there’s considerably less incentive to find the time.
The market is not rational. Players at the level we have are not worth a dime of NIL or revenue sharing. Just because we are allowed to pay players doesn't mean we should. This is absolutely an irrational market and it cannot be sustainable. Fans will lose interest when ****** basketball players are being paid six figures to suck and lose badly. We have a horrible product...nobody wants to pay for that and we'll see attendance at games fall...viewership on TV fall...and donor activity fall. The whole premise of paying guys to play crap ball is ridiculous. And who would pay Lathan Somerville $700k to suck at basketball. Guy sucks.
100% true! He was being moved off the ball into a point forward role. Just as he was at the end of the season
A point forward isn't really off the ball though, that's only an acknowledgement he couldn't guard ones and some twos.
I said “in the long run”. Markets may be irrational in the short term but they generally correct over time.