No, I'm not talking about Anthony Weiner and his social media selfies.
No, not Alex Rodriguez and his quest to ensure he pads his career stats for the Cooperstown plaque he will never get.
No, not even Denzel Washington and his clockwork-like annual box office topping hit.
No, of course I'm actually referring to your favorite amateur armchair Syracuse Orange blogger. None other than yours truly.
Given the amount of time that has elapsed since my last post and all that has changed since then, both for our favorite college basketball program and for myself, it seemed like an appropriate time to provide a little Q & A to catch up on all the comings and goings of this offseason.
All questions are provided by actual readers of this blog.
Q: Wait, hold on. Do you expect us to believe you actually have followers that are devoted enough to provide you with questions to use for the purposes of this article? Better question, do you expect us to believe you actually still have any readers at all after letting this blog sit dormant for half a year? Seems a little far-fetched, no?
A: Hey now! The Great White Forth has an ardent group of die-hard followers who... Ok, fine, who am I kidding. You caught me. I made up all the questions. I won't begin my comeback to the blog by telling bold, outlandish lies right to your face. I'll wait and sprinkle in smaller lies judiciously throughout the blog. Moving on.
Q: Fair enough. So what happened at the end of last year? You had a lot of hype and potential in the preseason and produced reasonable results for the first few months. Then you just disappeared in March and April. What I'm getting at is that basically you were the blogging equivalent of the 2012-13 Kentucky basketball team.
A: Long story short (except actually probably still long, because I don't tell any stories short), as our boys went into a tailspin late in the season last year, so did I. I resorted to every trick in the book to try to flip our fortunes. I cross-referenced who I watched wins and losses with in an attempt to come up with a Beautiful Mind like formula for who was allowed in my house and who wasn't. I tried all 7,234,930 variations of Syracuse jerseys, shorts, hoodies, hats, and tshirts that I had available to me. I live-tweeted, I blogged, I laughed, I cried. And at the end of the day, I got too busy the week of the Big East tournament to write anything. And Syracuse started winning. Being the most important time of the year (and the inflated sense of self-importance I can exhibit), I was not about to tempt the fickle wenches known as the College Basketball Gods. So I tucked cjoj.blogspot.com away in hibernation in a shoe box in the back of my bookmarks and moved on. But here we are 6 months later, and I have come to terms with our ultimate demise in the Final Four and I'm ready for another run at a National Championship and the title of Most Excessive Use of Terrible Puns in a blog.
Q: Phew, good to know. For a second I was worried that your posting of Michigan pictures to your Facebook profile after the Final Four game was a sign of you turning coat and I was going to have to go somewhere knowledgeable to consume my Syracuse information.
A: Have no such fears, I will continue to provide you with a mediocre well of information to waste your time reading. My dancing with the devil was merely to pay off a bet, for I am a man of honor (occasionally). Although, I must admit that I did forget when the bet had been paid off and left the pictures up for approximately 10-14 days longer than necessary while I stumbled around the greater Penfield metropolitan in a stupor. Milk was indeed a bad choice.
Q: Ok, enough about you. Let's talk coaching staff. Has Jim Boeheim retired yet?
A: No. Or Yes. It depends on how you define retired. Either way, Jim Boeheim will still be belittling reporters in 2013-14. Oh, and coaching our team as well.
Q: If Boeheim is back, then that must mean Hopkins is gone right? I mean if Boeheim isn't going to retire coming off a Final Four appearance and his swan song in the Big East, then he never will. If the thought of eating in a Denny's on a February night in Clemson, South Carolina can't get this man off the road, he just may coach until he's 100.
A: Yes, you are correct. One would think if Boeheim didn't retire after last season then he really may coach forever. And Mike Hopkins was certainly one of the sexier assistant coaches being talked about for a promotion this off-season. Middling power conference schools were looking at Coach Hop and lickling their lips like pre-pubescent tween girls of the 90's did for Justin Timberlake. A funny thing happened along the way though, and schools the likes of USC and Minnesota decided he looked more like a Hanson brother than JT and chose to pass on Hopkins.
Oddly enough, we have two of our biggest rivals to thank for keeping our coach-in-waiting as Boeheim's right-hand man. Without
Take away either of those scenarios and Hopkins is very likely retweeting motivational quotes for some other team this season. Instead, he's still killing the recruiting trail for us.
Q: So were supposed to thank Georgetown and Louisville fans?
A: Sure. Go ahead and thank them by reminding them of these two plays
A: Well, for the 2nd straight season we are losing 3 of our top 4 scores and our leading assist man. That would be Michael Carter-Williams, Brandon Triche, and James Southerland for those of you keeping track at home. For all the complaints that fans had about that triumvirate over the course of last season, and they were plentiful, it is a lot of talent to lose and will certainly be a tall order to replace.
James Southerland was our only true 3-point threat last season, with the ghost of Trevor Cooney and the rest of his backcourt mates all shooting below 30% from range. C.J. Fair did lead the team, shooting nearly 47%, but did not really have enough attempts to be considered a "threat". With him out the door, the search begins for a new irrational confidence player off the bench.
Brandon Triche was enigmatic. Is that the proper work to use? Teasing? Inexplicable? Suffice it to say he was up and down for his 4 years on the hill. He often showed the potential to be one of the best players in the Big East and take over games, and he just as often showed the ability to disappear. But at the end of the day, he still is the all-time winningest player in Syracuse basketball history, so he obviously was very successful in his 4 years and leaves a huge leadership void in his wake.
And Michael Carter-Williams. It became very fashionable to hate on Hyphen at the tail-end of last season. His flaws were very obvious (a penchant for turnovers, poor shots, and a weakness for Lord and Taylor bathrobes), but he didn't get nearly enough credit for all the good things he did. He led the Big East in assists and steals and was 3rd and 6th in those categories nationally. He also finished in the top 30 in the Big East for points and rebounds per game as well. Was he frustrating as hell at points? Sure. But those are big shoes to fill. It's going to take more than 1 player to replace all of his contributions.
Q: You forgot his 3.4 turnovers. That might take 3 players to replace.
A: Touche
Q: Well now that you've painted such a dire picture about everything we're losing, do we have anything coming back? Or are we doomed to finish in the bottom third of the ACC?
A: Oh sure, we have plenty coming back and a big recruiting class coming in. Despite all the losses, we should still have the potential to be a top 10 team and a threat to crash the Tobacco Road party and steal the ACC conference title.
You can start with potential ACC Player of the Year and Great White Forth favorite, C.J. Fair.
Q: Oh boy, here we go. Better settle in, this could take a while...
A: You're damn right it could take a while.
Now, I know that anything I say about C.J. Fair might come off as a little outrageous and seem like hyperbole given my well-known biases. But I will proclaim right here, right now that I think C.J. Fair is not only on the short list of favorites to win the ACC Player of the Year award this season, but I think he's a dark horse for National Player of the Year.
Look at his stats over the past 3 season and the improvement he's made each year. With even modest improvement over last years numbers, he's averaging 17 and 9 on a team that will provide him plenty of opportunities to be in the national spotlight (more on the schedule later).
I may or may not be planning to pen an ode to C.J. Fair later on in the offseason, so I won't waste too many words on him for now. But suffice it to say that I think with C.J. Fair alone is worth an NCAA Tournament berth. If one or two of the other returning players steps up, it should be enough to compete for an ACC Title and be a top seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Q: Who might those one or two players be?
A: The two most obvious options to me are Jerami Grant and incoming freshman point guard Tyler Ennis. Grant made the U-19 team for the United States and was going to have an opportunity to keep working on this game in the Czech Republic alongside some of the best young college talent, including potential Player of the Year Marcus Smart and future foes Rasheed Sulaimon (Duke) and Mike Tobey (Virginia). Alas, a bout of mononucleosis prevented Grant from traveling with the team and he was replaced on the roster with James Robinson of Pittsburgh (Oh the humanity!)
Nonetheless, Grant should still be more than prepared to step into a major role on the wing this season for the Orange. He already proved his potential when given extended playing minutes last season. In the six games missed by James Southerland, Grant stepped up and averaged 10 points and 5 rebounds. With more steady minutes and less proven scoring options surrounding him this season, I full expect Grant to show a little more of his offensive game. I don't necessarily think he'll be a go-to scorer by any means, but he should be able to average double digit points and somewhere between 5 and 7 rebounds a game. In fact, did you know that in the 11 games last season that Grant got at least 20 minutes of playing time, he never once got less than 5 rebounds per game?
Q: I did not know that. Seems to me that can be attributed to his ridiculous length and motor. Jay Bilas must be drooling somewhere. Would you say that Grant's wingspan is more of the Go-Go Gadget Arms type or the Gumby type?
A: Forced to choose, I'd say Gumby. But personally, I like to think of it more as a "last 5 seconds of Space Jam Jordan cartoonish arm stretch" kind of wingspan. The point is, I'm pretty sure you won't find two better rebounding wings anywhere in the nation this season than C.J. Fair and Jerami Grant.
Q: Speaking of rebounds... I had a hallucination last March that Baye Moussa Keita was the most productive player in our big man rotation. I gotta lay off those chile peppers.
A: Fear not dear friend. Your wild and crazy dreams were actually reality. Keita came out of nowhere to string together an unprecedented run (for him) of meaningful contributions during the Big East Tournament and NCAA Tournament runs. Our long, lanky Senegalese cub grew up into a ferocious lion before our very eyes. Ok, maybe it was more like a sassy housecat who still has his claws. Whatever. The important part is that he actually stepped up and provided a presence for us down low while his frontcourt mates continued to underwhelm (Christmas) or ride the pine (Coleman).
Of course, even with Keita's emergence, you still prefer him to be your 7th or 8th man off the bench and playing maybe 10-15 minutes a game, or 20 -25 in case of foul trouble. You know, like a break glass in case of emergency kind of thing. Otherwise you give Keita too much time to do Keita things, like airball a layup or lose the ball on his way up for a dunk. Who knows though, maybe with an extra offseason of improvement and the buoyed confidence from last season's emergence he will have us all saying I Believe I Can Baye.
Q: So what of the rest of the returning players? Do you have any thoughts on Christmas, Coleman, or Cooney?
A: Other than that their names all start with C's and they all sucked last year? No, not really.
But I'll try anyways for you. Here are three Haiku's expressing my feelings on the these three...
Rakeem Christmas:
Hyped Freshman in '12
Did not deliver the gifts.
More shoes than post moves
DaJuan Coleman:
Power Dribble? F@!&
Our best hope for a center
Please, no Chipotle
Trevor Cooney:
Gerry he is not
Was that a pass or a shot?
At least he can dunk
Q: Let's never do that again.
A: Good call.
Q: Well that covers all the returning players. What about this incoming freshman class?
A: It's a big one, with a wide-range of talent in it. There's highly-rated prospects named Tyler from the Class of 2013 (Tyler Ennis and Tyler Roberson). There's former highly-rated prospects who transferred or went to prep school (Michael Gbinje and Ron Patterson). And there's players likely to be redshirted or relegated to the deep, deep reaches of the Jim Boeheim freshman twilight zone (B.J. Johnson and Chinoso Obokoh).
Q: Wow, there's a lot of meat there. Let's start with highly-rated prospects named Tyler for $200 please Alex.
A: Don't call me Alex. I am not a pompous Canadian who makes 12-year old kids cry. Speaking of Canadians though, Tyler Ennis is one. And he led all players in scoring in the U-19 tournament (the very one we mentioned Jerami was not able to play in earlier) while repping the Maple Leaf flag.
Obviously, you traditionally prefer your point guard be a facilitator first and scorer second. But given the dearth of established scoring threats this team will have going into next season (see: C.J. Fair and then a big black hole), we can use the scoring punch wherever we can get it from. There is obviously the concern over having your primary (only?) ball-handler being a freshman, but this kid will be good and should make an immediate impact.
As far as Tyler Roberson goes, he is the biggest unknown to me for next season. He is certainly rated highly enough that he could be an immediate impact type of player. I just don't see where the minutes come from playing behind Fair and Grant on the wing. You know Fair is playing 35+ minutes a game, so that basically leavers Roberson to battle with Grant for his minutes. Maybe he's better than I'm expecting and he forces Boeheim's hand for extra minutes, but right now I'm not expecting much more than an impact similar to what Grant gave us as a freshman last year.
Q: And the former highly-rated prospects who transferred or went to prep school for a year?
A: Well the big one is Michael Gbinje. He transferred from Duke (yes, that Duke) after his freshman season and sat out last year while getting a chance to practice with his teammates and work on his game.
First and foremost, let's get this out of the way up front. We all make mistakes when we're young. Just think about what you were doing when you were 18 and 19 years old. So we will forgive Mr. Gbinje for his prior dalliances with the enemy. Let's just hope he atones for his sins by dropping 20 on his former teammates and coach come this February.
The most important thing is that he was rated in the top 40 of the Class of 2011, just 3 spots behind our recently departed Michael Carter-Williams. So that shows you the level of talent he can be. Then again, Carter-Williams was ranked 4 spots behind the most timid mohawk-wearing big man there ever was, our own Rakeem Christmas. So that shows you what kind of disappointment he could be as well. I'm going to lean towards the optimistic side of things (completely on a hunch I should point out, as I have never seen even a highlight clip of this kid), and say he's got the potential to be Wes Johnson lite for us this year.
Then there's Ron Patterson. He was less highly-rated than any of the other 3 players we've talked about so far, barely coming in on the back half of the top 100 in the Class of 2012. He had committed to Indiana, before they conveniently found out that he did not qualify for their academic standards (despite clearing the NCAA's standards) when they overbooked their scholarships last year. So it was off to a prep school for a year while he reopened his recruitment. Patterson went to Brewster Academy, where he played with future Class of 2014 Orangeman Chris McCullough (also the former school of the one and only C.J. Fair)
Ironically enough, both Gbinje and Patterson will have opportunities for revenge this season. The full 2013-14 schedule has not yet been released, but we do know that Syracuse will play host to Indiana as part of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge (December 3rd) and Duke as part of the College Gameday lineup (February 1st). Gbinje will also get a shot at Duke in Cameron Indoor, although the date of that game has yet to be announced.
Q: And the rest of the freshmen?
A: Take what I said about Tyler Roberson's prospects for playing time and multiply it by 10. That's what I feel about B.J. Johnson and Chinoso Obokoh. Hopefully they both get lots of good practice time and develop over the next 4 years into solid players like Fair and Keita have, but I find it extremely difficult to envision any scenario in which either of those two play a meaningful minute this season. I actually think it is very likely that Obokoh goes the Trevor Cooney route and takes a healthy redshirt his freshman season to work on his body and game.
Q: You mentioned the Indiana and Duke games. What else do we have to look forward to this season?
A: I, like many others, was devastated at first when I found out the Orange were leaving the Big East. Since that point in time, the Big East has dissolved into a mess of mediocre programs that resembles what it would look like if the Atlantic-10 and the 2003 Conference-USA had an ugly step-child named Adam Morrison and the Cuse released their inaugural ACC schedule. All reminiscence went immediately out the window.
The slate is loaded this year. This is probably the best Syracuse schedule I can remember in quite some time. The Orange open the season in Maui, where they could potentially play Minnesota, California, and either Baylor or Gonzaga. They get the aforementioned game against Indiana in the ACC / Big Ten Challenge. They picked up non-conference games with former Big East foes Villanova and St. John's. And then in the ACC schedule they get Duke, Miami, and Pittsburgh each twice and (obviously) one game against every other team in the conference, including North Carolina, Virginia, and Notre Dame.
Suffice it to say there should be plenty of opportunities for my yelling at the tv to frighten my newborn daughter.
Q: You mentioned Duke. What is the over / under on number of scathing posts you write about Coack K and the Cameron Crazies?
A: Off the charts. You know when an important player like Tom Brady or Adrian Peterson gets injured and Vegas immediately pulls all the odds related to that team off the table? That's what Vegas had to do on all prop bets relating to my blogging habits when the move to the ACC was officially announced.
It will be extremely weird for sure. All this time I've been able to hate Duke from afar with no real repercussions, and to be totally honest for no real reason either (other than they make it really easy).
But now? Now there will be at least one, and possibly up to three matchups a season to produce further referendums on all things evil about the Blue Devils. These are dangerous, dangerous times we enter. If Syracuse were to sweep Duke this season, I would be even more deliriously happy than I am when the AT&T puppy brother commercial comes on. But if the Blue Devils sweep the Orange this season? I would be even more depressed than a Western New Yorker is when they are forced to relocate to a place without Wegmans.
Q: You need to get a life.
A: Yes, yes I do. But while we're on the topic of odds, let me lay out a few other early offseason props to track this season...
Most Improved Player
Jerami Grant - 2/1
DaJuan Coleman - 5/1
DaJuan Coleman's Appetite - 5/2
Trevor Cooney - 10/1
Rakeem Christmas - 15,000/1
Rakeem Christmas' Beard - Even Money
Number of Times Jim Boeheim is asked about retiring this season
Over 24 1/2 (-110)
Under 24 1/2 (+350)
Number of Times Jim Boeheim will be asked about Denny's this season
Over 24 1/2 (-110)
Under 24 1/2 (+350)
Most Likely Player to fill the mid-season academic suspension role
DaJuan Coleman - 5/1
Rakeem Christmas - 8/1
Trevor Cooney - 20/1
Any Walk-On - 100/1
Over/Under number of games before Jason tries to incorporate his daughter into some sort of superstitous in-game ritual
Under 5.5 games (-400)
Over 5.5 games (+750)
Q: Are we done yet?
A: Yes, mercifully this futile exercise is ready to be terminated. For those of you who have stuck with me for this long, I want to give you this little nugget of information to walk away with. First of all, go take a long hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what went wrong in your life that led you to this point. Second, while you're mulling over that question, check out Time Warner Cable Sports this Wednesday - Saturday nights for 4 straight nights of Syracuse exhibition games, as they take on some of our friendly neighbors from the Great White North (you see what I did there? Yeesh, this needs to end soon). Get your Toblerones ready!
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