Dressed in new practice jerseys that were – of all colors – black, thus discrediting the event’s title, the men’s basketball team made its first public appearance Saturday when it took the court for its annual Red-White scrimmage.
Absent from the mix were the team’s two graduated stars (Deng Gai ’05 and Tyquawn Goode ’05) and its one suspended star, senior forward DeWitt Maxwell. Present, though, were some new faces and some familiar faces with a different look.
A trimmed-down Marty O’Sullivan ’07 scored a game-high 16 points, leading the black team to a 52-28 rout and proving a couple of things in the process, the most obvious being that the teams were anything but even.
Michael Bell ’06 was the only member of the white team with at least two years of experience, and with 11, he accounted for nearly half of his team’s points.
Though it is virtually impossible to tell anything from such a small, unimportant sample of play, O’Sullivan’s afternoon made two things all the more apparent. One is that potential starting center Geoff Middleton ’09, who guarded O’Sullivan, is not Gai.
But also, if O’Sullivan can put up numbers like that during the regular season, it will help to fill the gaping void left by the absence of Gai and Maxwell.
“We talk about it all the time,” Alvin Carter ’05 said of the void. “We were small already but with the loss of DeWitt, that’s 15 points per game.”
If the void is to be filled, Carter will be among those who will need to contribute the most. In addition to serving as a tri-captain, along with Bell and Charles Bentley ’06, Carter, a fifth-year senior working toward a master’s in business management, is certain to see a rather dramatic increase in his playing time.
“He is one of the hardest workers, if not the hardest [on the team],” said Terrance Todd ’06, the team’s leading scorer each of the last two seasons.
That hard work, O’Toole said, is something that the Stags will need across the board to make up for their lack of size.
“What we’re trying to do is – with our size limited – we’re going to need every guy on this team to work his tail off,” he said.
It will also need Todd, the team’s leading scorer in each of the past two seasons, to take his game to the next level. He appeared to take control of the team from the minute he led them out onto the floor, smiling throughout the scrimmage and running the point for the black team.
He will be joined by a couple of new faces in the backcourt: freshmen Herbie Allen and Jonathon Han, both of whom played for the white team in the scrimmage.
Allen, a fleet-footed point guard, directed the offense for his squad, with Han playing on the wing.
“Herbie and Jon are going to help us a lot,” Todd said. “They’re coming along really well.”
Searching for starters
O’Toole said that he has no clue yet who his starting five will be, but conventional wisdom has it that as many as eight players have a shot to be in the lineup when the Stags play Saint Francis of New York on Nov. 18.
Five (Allen, Todd, Bell, Michael Van Schaick ’07 and Danny Oglesby ’06) will compete for three perimeter spots, while Carter, O’Sullivan and Middleton will fight for the two low post spots. Although he isn’t eligible to play until the second semester, Mamadou Diakhate ’07, a transfer from Eastern Kentucky, was impressive in his first appearance as a Stag.
He had 10 points and five rebounds for the white team, and is certain to be a vital part of the lineup when he joins the team.
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