Filed under: Recruiting

Grab some pine, John Calipari. Pass the Gatorade to Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams and Bill Self. Kick your feet up Thad Matta, Josh Pastner and Ben Howland.

Elite recruiters aren’t needed here

While Calipari and college basketball’s top pitchmen have spent the summer picking up five-star recruits like Justin Bieber adds Twitter followers, the rest of the college basketball world has been left to fight for the the also-ran recruits with fewer stars than a Wayans Brothers movie.

But we’ve got good news for the programs that don’t dabble in college basketball’s high-end high-school market. There’s talent, and plenty of it among two-star and unranked players, if only your patience matches your eye for talent. We’ve compiled a team of active players who were two-star or unranked high school recruits that we’d take against any of college basketball blueblood’s NBA-ready squads.

As always, let us know who we missed in the comments, then watch us cut down the nets in April.

The fine print: We only considered players currently in college and all rankings are done according to Scout.com’s final rankings for the player’s high school year. All players must have been rated as either two-star prospects or not ranked/evaluated, though we did not include foreign players or other players that would’ve been prohibitively difficult to scout. As most of our research consisted of one staff member sticking his head out of his pod and yelling loudly, preferably in a funny accent, whether anyone remember player X as a high school senior, then checking the player against the Scout database, we are all but certain we missed some outstanding candidates.

Lastly, give credit to Dave Telep and his recruiting bunch at Scout. We might’ve found a heck of a team among the overlooked, but it’s a drop in a small lake in comparison to the number of elite players correctly slotted.

Starting Lineup

PG — Jimmer Fredette, BYU — His first name alone should’ve earned him at least a third star in recruiting circles. After all, naming a kid Jimmer is exactly the sort of career-shaping sobriquet that turns a kid into a March Madness star the way naming a child Jeeves leads him to polishing silverware in the crib . But as a point guard from Glen Falls (best known, we hope, as the home of Hacksaw Jim Duggan) in upstate New York, Fredette was only lightly recruited, receiving offers from BYU, Utah, Siena and UMass. However, the kid who played in the local prison in high school (a great way to prep for the toughness of the NBA or the visiting hours of the NFL) has emerged as the nation’s most prolific gunner. Fredette averaged 22.9 points per game last season, scored 37 in an opening-round win over Florida in the NCAA tournament (BYU’s first NCAA tourney win since the first year of the Clinton administration) and 49 against Arizona, a school and McKale Center record.

SG – Shelvin Mack, Butler – Had Gordon Hayward remained in college and Willie Veasley been a year younger, the entire two-star team could’ve simply been Butler. The Bulldogs’ 2008 five-man, all two-star high school class formed the backbone of last year’s national runner-up squad. Three players from the ’08 class were starters (Mack, point guard Ronald Nored and eventual NBA lottery pick Hayward.) The other starters were Veasley, a two-star recruit in 2006, and Matt Howard, a 2007 three-star (he presumably would’ve been docked to a two-star as well, had anyone been able to forsee his adventures in mustachery). Meanwhile, UCLA, the nation’s top-ranked class of ’08 has done much less with much more. Of the Bruins’ vaunted five-man class, two left the program acrimoniously (J’Mison Morgan and Drew Gordon), one declared early for the NBA (Jrue Holiday), one developed into a good college player (Malcolm Lee) and the last is still trying to arrive in the college game (Jerime Anderson). UCLA’s class has one NCAA tournament win, Butler has one Final Four.

SF- Tim Abromaitis, Notre Dame — Landing Rudy might have been a more difficult recruiting battle for Notre Dame. The schools that recruited Abromaitis were a brainsquad contingent of Northwestern, Notre Dame, Penn and Princeton, schools geared to career paths to a CPA rather than the NBA. Abromaitis was on the radar as a high school senior, but played in Connecticut, a state usually light on elite prep talent. His freshman numbers at Notre Dame (40 minutes of playing time) backed up the lukewarm recruiting rap, but Abromaitis exploded after sitting out his sophomore season. The versatile small forward with the nice outside touch averaged 16.1 points per game and carried Notre Dame to the NCAA tournament during the absence of star Luke Harangody. Credit coach Mike Brey for seeing his potential, or at least being smart enough to say something nice about an unheralded recruit. “Tim is a versatile player who can play a couple of different positions for us on the floor,” Brey said when Abromaitis signed with the program in 2006. “He’s a great fit for what we do offensively, and I think with time, will develop into a very good Big East player.”

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments