HARTFORD – How good is Fairfield freshman forward Greg Nero?
People who have been around Fairfield basketball for a long time say you have to go back two decades to find a better Stags’ freshman.
The stat sheet says that with 12 points Saturday night, he led the Stags in scoring for the fifth straight game in the Stags’ 74-49 loss to UConn in the Hispanic College Fund Classic at the Hartford Civic Center.
His teammates and coach say he’s played far beyond his years in every game of the season.
But if none of that is enough, take it from a guy who’s forgotten more about basketball in the last two hours than most people will learn in a lifetime.
“The kid Nero, he is going to be terrific,” said Jim Calhoun, head coach of the 21st ranked team in the country and owner of 734 career wins, two national championship rings and a plaque in the Hall of Fame.
“He more than knows what he’s doing. First of all, he is tough; secondly he is very skilled. And thirdly, he plays hard. He knows exactly where he is on the floor and uses his body.”
Calhoun was raving about Nero even before the game started. In his post-game press conference on Friday night, after the Huskies defeated Central Arkansas and Nero had scored a team-high 19 points in a 70-67 loss to Mississippi, Calhoun said he thought Nero could give the Huskies post players problems.
And despite the fact that, at 6-foot-7, Nero is half a foot shorter than the man who started the game guarding him – 7-foot-3 UConn center Hasheem Thabeet – Calhoun was absolutely right.
When the Huskies took a 7-0 lead early in the game, it was Nero, with a break-away layup at the 17:07 mark, who put the Stags on the board.
Two minutes later, he brought the ball out to the top of the key, and beat Thabeet off the dribble, dashing into the lane for another layup.
A minute after that, he hit a baby hook with the left hand, over Thabeet’s out-stretched hand. And just 42 seconds after that, with the Stags suddenly back in the game, he beat Thabeet from the opposite side of the lane, this time using his right hand.
At that point, the Stags had rallied back from a 10-2 deficit to trail 14-10, and Nero had eight out of the team’s 10 points.
In the game’s first timeout, Calhoun said that Thabeet reported being worried that Nero was going to get him into foul trouble by taking the ball at him so aggressively. In the second half, of course, Nero disappeared. He picked up his fourth foul just three minutes into the half, and spent most of the rest of the half on the bench.
When he did play, he was neutralized by Thabeet, who stepped up his defensive game and finished with nine blocks, and by Jeff Adrien, a 6-6 forward who plays defense like a 7-footer.
And when Nero went down, so did the rest of the team. The Stags were anemic on offense in the second half, shooting an embarrassingly low 19.2 percent and scoring only 16 points.
“He didn’t score any buckets in the second half because Hasheem blocked his shots, but he is not going to face [players that tall], unless I’m forgetting some guys who are 7-3 in the MAAC,” Calhoun said.
Indeed, most of the players Nero will go up against in conference competition will be his own size, and none will be as polished on either end of the floor as the front court players he saw Saturday night, several of whom will be wearing NBA uniforms in the next two to three years.
There aren’t a lot of MAAC players who would be able to play competitively in the Big East, but count Calhoun as one guy who thinks Nero would do just fine going up against national powerhouses night in and night out.
“He’s a find,” Calhoun said with a smile. “He’d be a nice power forward for a lot of schools, some at different levels of our league.”
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