SoCalHoops Recruiting News

West Coast All Stars First Session:
Best Of The Best All Star Game--(July 10, 1999)

The Best of the Best, with a couple of minor omissions, was truly the best of the camp.  Again, we thought that Josiah Johnson and Steve Moore should have been in this game, and frankly, we know that we and Mike Miller agreed that Richard Cobbs should have been in this game as well, but that's why we just write about this stuff and leave the selections to others. . . . If only they'd asked us first . . . ah well. . .  The roster for the Best of the Best consisted of the following: 

This game marked the resurgence and reappearance (along with this camp) of Torin Beeler, who is turning out to be one of the best juniors of the class.  Torin threw down a couple of very impressive dunks, and had 3 steals in a row in a single game last night in three successive possessions for the opposing team, and he's not only smart, he's talented. Quick hands, good body control, and the ability to get through traffic or create his own shot off the dribble.  Torin was kind of a surprise selection, not because he didn't belong here--he clearly did-- it's just that we figured the selection committee would have been a bit more conservative and put him on the junior game.  In the Best of the Best, Torin had a couple of steals, and several layups, one very nice spin move at the basket to avoid a defender and he finished, and in general he played really well, and we'd expect that next year a bunch of high majors will be all over him to sign.

Jacoby Atako mostly was relegated in this game to playing the two spot because Keilon Fortune took the old adage of "demanding" that he get the ball a little too seriously, and every time he touched it, you could count on Keilon to push the ball up the floor and set up the lob for the slam dunk by guys like Paul Williams or Maurice Tyree, proving that he can play point with someone other than Tyson Chandler to lob the ball to.  Keilon actually had a great camp, despite his initial hesitancy, he proved that he was not too good for the rest of the group, just really good.  Of course, Jacoby had already impressed a ton of coaches with his quick, smooth ball handling and running the floor, not to mention his consistently good outside shot, so it really wasn't all that crucial here that he didn't score a lot or didn't run the show. 

Kyle Bailey got into a bit of trouble, overdribbling a bit but with him it doesn't seem to matter as he has this great and uncanny ability to recover where he over-penetrates, or to find the open man even when he's way off balance.  His crossover is not really going to fool a lot of guys, but he does manage to get to the hole by beating defenders with a very quick first step more often than not.   Jordan Brice played credibly well, nothing flashy, and he's a solid point who can run the team, push the ball, or play effectively in the half-court offense.

Ronald Dosty didn't do much in the first 10 minutes of this game, but then came alive eventually, and he put down a couple of dunks, and grabbed a bunch of boards.   Chad Bell was also an obvious pick for this camp, and he's getting so much more physically stronger than he was last year, that it's hard to recognize him as the same player.  He's a tremendously talented shot blocker, and in one defensive series he got four blocks all on different players, each of whom managed to pick up the ball and attempt shots after it had been swatted away the first time by Chad.  He's got decent coordination, but is still in that stage where he's got to put on more weight, more muscle and gain more speed. . . but then you don't have to worry about this 7'-0" player getting scholarships because next summer, they'll be beating down his door.

Langston Grady looks sort of like a Deshawn Stevenson body-double, but he doesn't have the hops or the shot, and is only about a step behind Stevenson in the first step department.  Very athletic, he'll be traveling now we hear with the Pump N Run Black team in Vegas, with Errick & Derrick Craven, David Gale, Baker Dunleavy, Steven Brown, Montell Duhon, Johnathan Harper,  and we also hear that Jeff Day (6'-9" Jr. F) from USDHS might also join them.    Langston didn't have an especially good BofB game, but he had a great camp, and there were many who believed that he was the single most talented player in attendance, and maybe he was.    Doyle Cole, who will reportedly travel with the Pump N Run Gold team in Vegas and at the Best of Summer, didn't have a very good camp, and he had some "adjustment" difficulties which may have been a distraction.  Whatever. . . Doyle is a fine player, and he had a couple of dunks in the game, but he's going to have to focus on a couple of things such as grades and attitude in order to play in college at the level he is capable of playing.  Oh well, enough soapbox.

Shea Robinson also played very well.  He's a sort of stocky, very strong point, who pushes the ball, has great quickness and explosiveness, just a very, very solid player who will definitely go D-I, we'd bet our life on it.  He penetrates well, dishes and kicks out the ball to the wings really effectively, but he sometimes does tend to outrun the dribble in the open court when he's rushing. But that's a minor thing, considering all the other considerable talents he's got, not to mention his 3.2 gpa and 1100 SAT score.  We expect that coaches will be all over him by the end of the summer.

Domanic Ingerson played reasonably well, but no where near the flash and showmanship that he exhibited during the camp. Domanic is a very talented player, who will attend Rim Rattler next week, but the only downside to all that talent is that Dominic is very much aware of how much talent he's got, and that sometimes gets in the way of his better judgment. Still, he was one of the most physically talented players here, and he clearly deserved this game.

Casey Cook had some great dunks, and so did William Kimble and Paul Williams, each of whom tried his best to keep the little guards out of the paint by clogging up the middle.  With Jake Chessman in the mix, it was a really tall lineup for both teams, and Chessman continues to intrigue a lot of people with his sheer athleticism and good GPA (3.91), and Jacob not only looked good, he really played well, rebounding, not just outletting the ball to the little guards, but brining it up himself, and he's got a pretty good handle.  As we said before, the word on Chessman, directly from him, is that he wants to also play baseball, and we have it on good authority that Pepperdine will (if they havent already) gotten a committment from him.   Just call it a wild guess.  Which is not to say that he's not still wide open; heck, the recruiting season is just getting started, and he really doesn't have all the offers he'll get.

Eddie Lincoln scored  a bunch of points and he seems to be playing with a skill and style that we haven't seen from him in a while.  A very solid wing player, Eddie can stroke it in, or slash to the hole, where he's also a pretty effective rebounder too.   Robert Smith is a capable point guard type with a good handle, but not overwhelming quickness and he seems to thrive more in a halfcourt situation than he does running the floor on the break, although we saw him do that a couple of times.

Maurice Tyree and Marcel Cummings, the ambiguously EBO-Duo (sorry, that's a bad pun, it's just that they we're wearing their EBO shirts all over the camp, like we didn't know they played for Mats. . . right), we're looking decent, but not spectacular in this game.  Maurice is a well-proportioned and strong wing forward, while Cummings is really more of a shooting guard, who didn't actually shoot all that much in this game, we're sure that his lack of touch was at least partially result of dread about having to drive more than 4 hours straight to get Cummings Fresno in time for summer shool.  At least that's what we were told.

Another recruiting-type website really didn't like the way that Sherman Gay or DeShaun Anderson played, and we'd have to agree with them that it's not a lot of fun, nor terribly productive to see a player taking tons of shots, basically shooting the ball on every possession.   Phil Bryant tells all the campers that if they don't share the ball, he's going to take 150 of them, put them on one team and the other 150 in the camp on the other team.  He'd put one team on one side of the court, and one team on the other.  Then he'd put one ball out on the floor and tell them to play.  "That's what it would feel like to these guys who do nothing but hog the ball," Phil says.   "See how they like it when they never get to touch the ball, sort of like just one ball for 300 guys."  Both of them, Gay and Anderson, can play so much better if only they'd put their minds to it, and we know that Sherman will, as will DeShaun.

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