The Next Steps

Earlier in the week I had written a lengthy article that I planned on posting yesterday about how we are at such an interesting time in Providence basketball history.

The season ended on a lengthy losing streak and there were well-documented off-court issues, all the while recruiting at Providence is as strong at Providence as it had been in over a decade. It is truly a great paradox.

There have been plenty for Providence fans to gripe with over the past nine months, but the optimists have always had the future to cling to. With Texas’ player of the year and ESPN and Parade All American Joseph Young heading north to Providence the Friars had the dead eye shooting guard they’ve long lacked.


Add Scout’s 35th ranked senior in Gerard Coleman and a host of big bodies and the result is the 5th ranked recruiting class in the Big East according to an article this week from ESPN. Providence's class is rated higher than powers Villanova, Louisville, West Virginia, and Pittsburgh.

Even after a chaotic offseason and little on court success, still the recruiting machine at Providence churned out a top rated class and looked to reinforcements in the form of Naadir Tharpe (verbal commitment), and a host of 2012 studs from New England who had PC high on their lists (most notably Notre Dame Prep product Khem Birch).

Providence fans have become accustomed to rebuilding over the past five years and while there were cringe-worthy moments during the season and more significant ones after it, few could argue the improvements made on the recruiting trail in Keno Davis’ two years here.

While it feels like years, just two months ago things were looking way up in Friartown with the commitment of Tharpe. Friartown was alive unlike it had been since 2004. Coleman was proof that they could land the big time local target and Tharpe confirmed that they would be doing so regularly.

The assault charges levied against James Still and Johnnie Lacy were a major black eye on the program, the dismissal of the team’s leading scorer and rebounder elevated the concern level to Orange, and the news of Pat Skerry leaving to another Big East program this week, one that he and his staff out-recruited this year according to ESPN, stung the most because it hit the Friars where they were most optimistic and successful: New England recruiting.


Challenges Ahead

Much has been written about the shortcomings of Providence over the past year, and while some may argue that losing Skerry to a Big East rival is an indictment on the athletic department and head coach, Skerry had only been working at PC for two years and had an opportunity to move on to an established power with amazing facilities and recent success to sell. The job is a step up.

Rather than add to the growing list of commentary on where the program has fallen short of late, it is time for Keno Davis and his staff to learn from mistakes of the past, but not harp on them. He has a lot of work to do and he knows as well as anyone that he has to start right away.

Five key challenges the summer of 2010

• Find another recruiter. This is an obvious one and should be the top priority. Does losing Skerry mean that Providence has to start over again with New England stars like Ricky Ledo, Khem Birch, and Nerlins Noel? Perhaps, and it would be disappointing to see Providence fall by the wayside with talented players who were seriously considering the Friars, but the job of the next guy is to try to pick up where Skerry left there and start building towards other leads. There is a lot of talent to be had and Providence needs someone as tenacious as Skerry to replace him.
• Get Naadir Tharpe on the phone. The talented point guard would add to an already deep backcourt group if Young and Coleman pan out and equally important, a sense of stability and continuity. A committed Tharpe sends a message to Friar fans and recruits across New England that Providence is still a forced to be reckoned with.
• Stabilize the program with positivity. At the end of the day, this program has seen a lot of turnover in the past year, but the only true on-court impact player was Greedy Peterson. For all of the ‘sky is falling talk’, much of which is justified, this is still a program featuring one of the best young point guards in the league and adding two guards who are as good as any added since God Shamgod. Those three guards have the potential to make up the foundation of a winner in the Big East, the challenge will be to find big men who can flank them.
• Find, or become, the enforcer. Rumors of in-season bar room brawls turned into news stories of assaults and incidents with 15 year olds by season’s end. Responsibility has to be taken by both the coaching staff and the players to avoid any embarrassing stories coming out again. Providence fans have stomached more than their fair share of rebuilding years and will continue to support the team through lean years, but incidents that tarnish the school’s reputation are a different story.
• Defend the rim. Keno has a chance to silence his critics with an improved defensive squad next year. Young teams are rarely great defensive teams, and this team will be very young, but you won’t find many Providence fans who wouldn’t be thrilled with a season that resulted in chemistry among Council/Coleman/Young and an improved interior defense. Turning next year’s team into a middle of the road Big East defensive team would be a major improvement and combining that with evidence of vastly improved guard play and this program will be back up and running soon enough.

Each of these tasks are very do-able and would go quite a long way towards bringing back the excitement that was felt in Providence just two months ago.

Greedy Peterson out at Providence

The Greedy Peterson era in Providence is over and with him goes the player who most symbolized what the 2009-10 Providence Friars were all about. He was often breath-taking, more frequently maddening, disinterested in defending, and proof that with a year of hard work and focus athletes can turn into scorers under this coaching staff.
What this staff couldn’t instill in him was the instinctual part of the game, the intangible plays that smart players make throughout the course of the game that help win basketball games. They instilled the importance of rebounding and gave him the confidence to take off offensively, but Providence fans hoped that over the next two years Greedy would take the same level of interest on the defensive end, with a little more James Posey and a little less Paul Westhead to his game. Amazingly, a 20/10 performer had as much room to grow as anyone on the roster (a roster that is looking woefully thin up front now once again) but PC fans will never get the opportunity to see if this coaching staff could instill a winner’s mentality in him, not simply a scorer’s.

Proponents of Greedy will point to the amazing numbers, the lack of depth in the frontcourt now that he and two other big men have moved on, the room for improvement in his game and recognize this as a huge loss.

Detractors viewed him as a turnstile defender, capable of putting up huge numbers, but not doing so in the context of a winning style of play. What good are 19 points if you give up 25?

Then there will be those who look deeper and see this as a lost opportunity, not only for next year’s team or Peterson himself, but an opportunity to see if Keno Davis and his staff could help him make the same jump defensively as he made offensively this past year.

One of the most intriguing subplots to next season was going to be how Keno and Co. will respond to such a porous defensive year, with many eyeing Peterson as exhibit A of a kid who had enough athletic ability to defend, but never got around to it. Another year of lackadaisical defense would have been an indictment on both the player and his staff. Now we’ll never know.

We’ll also never know how a kid who finished second in the Big East in rebounding and fourth in scoring would have improved offensively. There was certainly room to. Perhaps if he bumped his 47% free throw shooting up to 70 and continued to work on his handle he could have been a 24 point per game scorer.

He was the first Friar to average a double double since Michael Smith dominated the boards in the mid-90s, but he’ll never be remembered as an all time great at Providence. Maybe some day future generations of Providence fans will look at the numbers and ask how he fell under the radar of all timers at PC. They’ll question how a kid who put up 38 and 17 in the Big East Tournament as a sophomore and had 29 and 20 against Rutgers end his career as little more than a footnote in the annals of Providence basketball history.

Those us of who were there for it, saw the Greedy show and will remember a kid who had to have put in countless hours on a jump shot to turn himself into a 37% three point shooter. We’ll remember him as perhaps the most explosive dunker in PC history and his truly great games at Providence, not the Big East Tournament stat grab, but the domination of a big UConn frontcourt and his devouring of a strong Pittsburgh defense from 18 feet in during a heart-breaking road loss.

The Pitt game will always be the gold standard for those who watched and will remember Peterson. He was efficient, took good shots, the Friars played at the perfect pace and nearly pulled off a massive upset on the road. He defended some. He was only a sophomore and the hope was the message was finally sinking in. He had two seasons to up his offensive efficiency and turn himself into a suitable defender. The potential was there for him to be great.

A few months later his Providence career is over and there are some who would argue his teammates aren’t devastated with losing their star.

Perhaps the departure of Peterson is indeed addition by subtraction. It’s becoming more and more clear that there were plenty of headaches on last season’s roster and the fastest way to rebuild a program is to bring in kids who are committed to rebuilding it with you.

The loss of two disgruntled JUCO players was expected, the criminal case against Johnnie Lacy and James Still shocking, but Greedy Peterson moving on is the first roster move that actually impacts the roster. When five players leave your program and only the fifth to do so had any on court impact, it illustrates the lack of depth in Providence a season ago.

Factor in graduating seniors Sharaud Curry and Brian McKenzie and it looks to be an issue that Keno Davis has to overcome once again in 2010-11.

Friar fans get knocked for not being a patient bunch, but unless PC gets unusual contributions from freshmen next season they will have to be so once again. Suddenly, Marshon Brooks, Vincent Council, Duke Mondy, Bilal Dixon, and Ray Hall are the only returning contributors.

I looked forward to seeing Peterson’s development. I wasn’t confident that he would become a two-way player at Providence, but I was interested in seeing how it all played out. Greedy Peterson leaves Providence as a footnote, a monster statistical year in the midst of a losing season for a guy who virtually played one season in Providence. You become memorable by winning and you win by playing both sides of the ball. Greedy played one way in his one season. That’s his legacy.

Alex Murphy Highlights: Real Deal at the Rock

Kid is a good athlete.


Find more videos like this on BALL IS LIFE

11 Crazy Months

“You saw a lot of people in the coaching world defending us recently. Well, that’s not because I like to have a steak and a glass of wine with them. People respect the job we’ve done here,” Welsh said. “It’s one of the tougher spots to move into that upper echelon, and I think people respect that. We’ve never complained about it, but it is. It was a challenge, but that’s made us better. We’re better coaches than when we got here.”


- Tim Welsh to The Providence Journal’s Kevin McNamara after learning he had been fired as Providence’s head coach.

Just over two years into his regime as Providence College head basketball coach, Keno Davis has yet to utter sentiments along these lines, and by the way he and his staff are attacking the recruiting trail you get the sense they don’t have time to mull it over. Clearly, they are aware of the challenges of competing in the Big East, but what has been refreshing for Providence fans has been this staff’s insistence that they will get it done here. What has been encouraging are the inroads being made on the recruiting trail without the benefit of postseason success.

With the constantly evolving world of recruiting, it can be easy to overlook the amazing strides made by this staff over the last calendar year. In the never-ending quest to build a winner, fans are thrilled by the news of a highly regarded player coming aboard, buzz about it for a week and quickly ask “what’s next?” Now is a great time to take a breath and just stop to see what the last year has brought. The results are astounding.

It is easy to forget now, but this is a program that had not landed a top 100 player since DeSean White committed in the fall of 2003. In the past eleven months they scored Scout’s 35th ranked player, a Parade and ESPN All American, a verbal from a top 60 junior, welcomed to campus a top 50 junior, a top 20 sophomore shooting guard, the top player in the class of 2012 and apparently lead for ESPN’s 19th ranked player in 2012. They also hosted a top 100 senior last weekend.

Keno Davis and his staff may recognize the challenges so many pointed to when Welsh was dismissed from PC, but they aren’t letting it stop them from going after, and landing, a level of talent not seen at Providence in a very long time.

There will always be a faction of Providence fans who need to see the proof on the court, who believe the ratings and rankings are nothing but projections that won’t mean a thing unless this coaching staff can blend the talent into a cohesive unit, one capable of winning in the biggest, toughest conference in the country. This is fair, yet, even the staunchest critics cannot argue with all that has been accomplished in the past year.

The standard model for this staff is to get on kids early, get them to campus, build a relationship, and seal the deal. It is the formula that worked with Gerard Coleman and one they hope will work with others, including Khem Birch, Nerlins Noel, and Ricky Ledo.

Yet, they have also shown the ability to deviate from that game plan. They spotted Joseph Young before the rest of the country bought in and convinced him to go to school halfway across the country before blew up. They scored a commitment from Brice Kofane, a player with no local ties, whose recruitment opened late, and managed to swoop in to land the shot blocker.

BC finally releases Minnesota native Kevin Noreen (another top 100 player per ESPN) and within weeks he is on campus taking an official visit.

If Noreen chooses Providence the Friars will have landed three kids who are popping up on top 100 lists somewhere. DeSean White in ’03 was a long time ago indeed.

The commitment of Gerard Coleman last June kicked off a furious year of recruiting, and almost eleven months to the day of his verbal the good news out of Providence continued with a visit by one of the top big men in the class of 2012, Khem Birch.

If the next eleven months are as productive on the recruiting trail as the past eleven, Providence will be buzzing about the oncourt product soon enough.

Game Film: 2010 Providence Jamfest Semi-final: CBC vs. Expressions

Before I started this site one of the features I thought would really benefit any college basketball website would be game film of recruits. Highlight reels give you a feel of a player’s strengths, but often times fans that don’t live close enough to recruits to see them for themselves have to rely on written reports or highlight videos to make a judgment on a school’s target. Highlight reels don’t include bad passes, forced jumpers, missed free throws, slow defensive rotations, or sloppy ball handling. I love highlight reels personally (especially those done by Crusader22 and at Brewster Academy), but a game film provides a different perspective for fans and that’s what I’m looking to do here.

Throughout the prep season I didn’t tape any of the action because I really wanted to focus on the games themselves. I wanted to see a kid like Naadir Tharpe interacting with high profile teammates, Gerard Coleman’s demeanor in the huddle, and how Khem Birch handled playing for a tough coach in Mike Byrnes. I’m always looking for an angle when covering these games and when watching through a video camera it becomes easier to miss the little things.

AAU events have a different feel. Rosters change by the game and at last weekend’s Jamfest, a game was delayed for half an hour due to lack of players and then they played the opening five minutes with four kids on one team. And the short-handed squad won. These games provide a sense of how a kid plays but don’t provide quite the insight of a prep or high school game. It is a perfect opportunity to tape a game.

This is the first of a new installment to the site "Game Film."


CBC vs. Expressions: Providence Jamfest Semi-finals
This was my first shot at taping a game and it was a learning experience. Only coaches and players were allowed on ground level, so I watched the game from a perch high above the court which affected my angle.

I’ll zoom in a lot more and get closer to the court in the future, but my thought is that for true recruiting junkies this will give you a look at Andre Drummond, Khem Birch, Ricky Ledo, Vince Van Nes, and Mike Carter-Williams, and not just at their best. Any flaws or mistakes are there for anyone to see, as are the great plays.

For the record, Birch and Carter-Williams did not play up to their potential in this one, while Ledo and Drummond excelled. Click here for my recap of the weekend.

A few things to keep in mind while you watch these videos:

• I suggest watching the videos in full screen. Due to my camera position it can be tough to make out numbers watching it in the smaller YouTube screen. The quality drops off in the wide screen, but it makes for a better overall viewing experience. By far.
• Drummond is #3 in blue with the white elbow band. Ledo is #32 with the black undershirt, Birch #22, Carter-Williams #24, and Van Nes makes a cameo #15. Jules Tavares (Wareham, MA) is #23 on Expressions and had a solid game.
• Games took around an hour (16 minute halves, 5 minute halftime), but the video is far shorter. I only taped when Providence targets were on the court, and after time outs or during times when I had to step away I might have been late rejoining the action (two Ledo 3s and a great block by Drummond were the highlights I kicked myself for missing).
• I cut out the final minute as it turned into a foul fest.
• For PC fans with six months to wait until the season starts, my first attempt should serve as a bit of a fix for the true junkies out there.
• Turning the volume off or listening with music is suggested, unless you prefer hearing the lady yelling "dee-feense" for 80% of the game.

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Part V: