Saturday's Skull Session will give you some talking points for this weekend as you watch various sporting events, be it baseball, the NHL or NBA playoffs, or the college baseball and softball national tournaments.
For your sake, today's session will be mum on stuff regarding E. Gordon Gee's off-color remarks about Catholics and Notre Dame (as well as everything else in the world) and the national attention he is receiving for those remarks. Even though...
That said, it will be entirely about basketball.
WE'RE #19! One of two important indicators of program health and quality in men's college basketball is how well the program places its alumni in the National Basketball Association come draft time. The other indicator is obviously wins and titles, but success in the NBA Draft attracts recruits as well.
With that in mind, Ohio State fans should be somewhat pleased to learn that Ohio State was profiled recently by Eamonn Brennan as a program that does well in placing its players in the NBA Draft. In ESPN's countdown of the top 20 NBA prospect-producing college basketball programs since 1989, Ohio State comes in at... #19.
The rationale for Ohio State's inclusion at the bottom rung of the "top 20" is understandable. Ohio State's five best pros since 1989 are Michael Redd, Mike Conley, Jimmy Jackson, Evan Turner, and Jared Sullinger with Daequan Cook as a "sixth man" on that list.
Per Brennan, that is a solid group, but not spectacular. Ohio State's position on this list could have been helped by having draft picks who have moved beyond pure potential (i.e. Evan Turner and Jared Sullinger) and into solid NBA contributors, like Mike Conley. Sandwiched between Randy Ayers' glory years in the early 1990s and Thad Matta's tenure, which started in 2004, is a whole lot of nothing (beyond Michael Redd).
More than anything, I loved Brennan's discussion of Michael Redd. As a guy who watched the NBA rather religiously from adolescence through 2005, Redd comes up as a player whose greatness in that period is forgotten.
If you're young enough to have just started watching professional basketball in the past few years, and have only seen an aging, slightly paunchy Redd chucking 3s for the Phoenix Suns, you might not be aware of just how good of a pro he was for almost all of the aughts. ... From 2003-04 to 2008-09, he averaged 21.7, 23.0, 25.4, 26.7, 22.7, and 21.2 points per game, respectively; he was one of the purest perimeter scorers in the NBA, an NBA All-Star in 2004 and a member of the U.S. Men's Olympic "Redeem Team" in 2008. Basketball-Reference's Elo Fan Ratings list Redd as the No. 207th-ranked player of all time, ahead of Allan Houston and behind Steve Francis. That sounds about right, and it's not too shabby for a guy drafted 43rd in 2000. Redd was a good pro.
That Ohio State makes this list at all is really a statement of what Thad Matta has done recently. If not for him, our discussion of Ohio State pros in the NBA since 1989 focuses on Michael Redd, Jimmy Jackson, and... Lawrence Funderburke.
Ohio State always has been, and probably always will be, a football school. Matta has changed that reputation more than any other coach in OSU history; he's spent the better part of the past decade recruiting top talent and fashioning it into tough, defensive-minded teams that challenge for national titles. Redd and Jackson prove that NBA talent at OSU isn't limited to the Matta era.
If Matta keeps moving at his current pace, Ohio State could climb much higher in this list in a decade's time. Right now? It's worthy of inclusion … but only just.
KEVIN MCGUFF ROUNDS OUT ASSISTANT STAFF. Kevin McGuff gave fans of the women's basketball program some good news worth discussing on Friday when he announced the addition of Mark Mitchell to his group of assistant coaches. He joins Joy Cheek, a recent Duke basketball player who spent the past two years at her alma mater as a recruiting coordinator, and Patrick Klein, a holdover from Jim Foster's staff and very diligent assistant (ed. note: I knew him from my days in college and have great things to say about him).
Mitchell's path to Ohio State as an assistant coach for the women's basketball team is much different than the route of either Cheek or Klein. Cheek was a former player at Duke, one of college basketball's blue-blood programs, and Klein started from the very bottom as a student assistant for Jim Foster in 2002. For the past ten years, Mitchell was the boys' basketball coach at Taft High School in Cincinnati.
Yes, he actually coached Ohio State's starting strongside defensive end, Adolphus Washington, on the hardwood. Mitchell, himself, was a four-year letter winner in football at Eastern Kentucky. He was coached by 1-AA coaching legend, Roy Kidd.
Mitchell's tenure at Taft High School was nothing short of sterling. His record for his ten-year tenure at Taft was 221-50, an 81.5% winning percentage that was punctuated with a Division III state championship in 2011. Before Mitchell arrived from Winton Woods, where he was an assistant, Taft had ten straight losing seasons. Mitchell's success was immediate. The Taft Senators (still love that name) were 22-3 in Mitchell's first year.
Mitchell does have some experience with coaching girls basketball that is relevant to his new job under Kevin McGuff. Namely, he was an assistant coach for All-Ohio Girls Basketball on the AAU circuit for the past three years.
In the press release announcing Mitchell's hire, McGuff added that Mitchell "will play a large part in player development and helping craft an exciting style of play" for the women's basketball team, starting this season.
Fratelli, d'Italia. Della Valle, s'e desta. DELLA VALLE EN ROUTE TO ESTONIA. Summers can be fluid for our men's basketball team. Some players get invited for national team play (like Under-20 (U20) or Under-23 (U23) tournaments). Other members of the team remain in Columbus and work with various program alumni and other professional basketball players who come to Columbus to work with Chris Jent, shooting specialist. Ohio State sophomore-to-be and unofficial team mascot, Amedeo Della Valle, will be spending his summer in Estonia playing for Italy's U20 basketball team. The Under 20 European Championships begin in Tallinn on July 9.
Della Valle did not receive many minutes as a true freshman. This belies how promising he is to the future of Italian national basketball, which already has senior players like Marco Belinelli and Danilo Gallinari. Della Valle was the leading scorer on Italy's U18 team in the 2011 U18 European Championship games before getting injured in the quarterfinals. The Azzurri finished 4th place in that tournament, which precluded them from finishing on the podium. That same year, the U20 team for Italy finished in second place, losing to Spain in the final game.
Italy is in Group D of the tournament, beginning the tournament against France on July 9. France lost in the final game to Lithuania in Slovenia in last year's U20 tournament in Europe. The Czech Republic, hosts Estonia, and Slovenia are also in Group D.
The hope is Della Valle gains valuable experience from this and that Italy goes deep into the tournament. I'm not sure Della Valle is more than a "seventh man" in this upcoming season of Ohio State basketball, but he will likely have our surest jump shot this season.
Della Valle was fun as a true freshman, mostly because his inclusion in games coincided with some fan-friendly "mayhem" on the court, for which he may or may not have been directly responsible. Further, Della Valle is a fan favorite largely because he looks like an average college student, seems to genuinely enjoy his "college" experience, and is engaging on Twitter. That he will improve his overall game with this experience is beneficial to Ohio State men's basketball and its fans.
MISCELLANY. Why can't Canada win the Stanley Cup?... The $15,000 was for laser upgrades... Roy Hibbert really puts these images over the top... Archie Griffin sweater vests dot tumblr dot com... Game 6 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals is 8:30pm on TNT. Western and Eastern Conference Finals in the NHL begin today: LA @ Chicago (5:00pm ET, NBC Sports) and Boston @ Pittsburgh (8:00pm ET, NBC).
