Rhody15 wrote: ↑1 year ago
Blue Man wrote: ↑1 year ago
Rhody15 wrote: ↑1 year ago
He graduated literally last year. Completed four consecutive seasons at Rhody.
It has not “been such a long time” since we had a a high school player contribute to winning and then stay the rest of his career here.
It happened 365 days ago.
Fatts Russell was not a winner. He was a lot of things, but he was not a winner. Very talented. Also very selfish.
He had a highlight reel play as an off the bench guy. It was a big play and one of my favorites. But he wasn't a winner. The book is out on that. When it was his team, we were losers.
Keeping it on Rory, this looks like a kid who is "under the radar" in terms of not having the high-visibility ranking, but has the skillset to fit Archie's system and be a 4 year contributor.
We haven't had guys like that since DC took over.
When he was healthy (freshman and junior year) we won. Was a catalyst on that tournament team. Led us to the bubble with a tremendous junior season.
Hurt sophomore and senior year where we struggled mightily.
Moving this from the Rory thread and to a place where it can be more related to Fatts.
What did we "win" exactly when Fatts took the ball from Jeff, or when he was on his own? With Jeff Dowtin on the floor, this team had 2 NCAA wins, 2 A10 titles, and a host of big wins against ranked teams. Jeff was a winner. So I'll take anything good we did in Cox's first 2 years as Jeff Dowtin's doing. It was clear when he left that he covered up for a lot of inadequacies.
"Led us to a bubble" is possibly the saddest, most demoralizing moving of the goalposts I've ever read.
In the A10 tourney his sophomore year, Fatts had a sick 3-14, 0-7 performance in a game we blew a double digit lead.
Even in his statistically great junior year, down the stretch he had 25% shooting percentages while taking the most shots on the team in must win games...leading us to the wrong side of the bubble.
The dude was talented. Fast. Probably one of the best on ball defenders I've ever had the pleasure of watching and made some electrifying plays. He was one of the best finishers at the rim and could collapse a defense like few others. He didn't do that enough.
He also was the most selfish and least self-aware player I've ever seen, and needed a coach who would put him in his place instead of let him do whatever he wanted.
His junior year was an outlier. Even with that 35% shooting season, he's a 28% 3 point shooter who took 5 3's a game.
He's probably the least efficient scorer to ever be the "best" player on a team at URI and he hurt us in far more games than he helped. As a whole he rarely made the team better. He rarely took a back seat to be a distributer. He was a shoot-first PG without being a gifted shooter. If his shot wasn't falling it didn't matter he was still taking the shots. He refused to take a different role on the floor. He was going to do what he wanted to do, and more often than not what he wanted to do hurt the team.
