Originally Posted by
elvis14
At the risk of having this derail into the age old discussion of the short bench and/or the OAD...Semi is one of the players that I thought should have been given more court time. When you have a OAD and a less skilled player who's going to be here multiple years there's a balance between winning games and getting court time for the multi-year player. I thought that was something we did rather poorly this past season as well.
I'm happy for Semi, wish he would have stuck it out at Duke. I think he would have been successful here as well. It's bothersome that his parents report so poorly on communication with our coaching staff. I also caught the line in the article about the older Duke players not communicating well with the younger players (of course we've solved that now by not having older players).
I agree with everything here. Semi was a product of getting "recruited over". Semi's sophomore year in 2014-15 came with competing with Amile Jefferson and Justise Winslow. No way Semi gets minutes over those guys. And if he stuck around in 2015-16, he'd compete against a senior Jefferson and a freshman Ingram. No one Semi plays over them. And as a senior in 2016-17, Semi would compete with Amile Jefferson, Jayson Tatum, and Harry Giles.
And yes, Coach K would absolutely still go after Ingram, Giles, and Tatum with Semi on board. Coach K would be foolish not to.
Semi absolutely made the right move by transferring. He would have been the poster child for "recruiting over".
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club