Just entered the Portal. Elite talent.
Yes - I know he isn’t coming here, but worth mentioning for college basketball fans.
Yes - I know he isn’t coming here, but worth mentioning for college basketball fans.
Emoni Bates
- Thread starter TheSpecialSauce
- Start date
What if Pitt promises to name a street on campus after him? 🤔
Bates is the living embodiment of everything that’s wrong with major college basketball. Check out his backstory, where his dad pulled him out of his public school and, with a bunch of Nike money, formed his own online basketball-only school, Ypsi prep. The players took an online high school equivalency program and flew around the country playing other basketball mill prep programs. Living here in Michigan i have followed his hype and well-publicized saga since he was getting press as the #1 8th grader in the country. He committed early to Izzo, then toyed with going straight to the G league, then decommitted and signed with Memphis. I’m sure Penny made him (and his dad) an offer they couldn’t refuse. Bates thought he’d be in the NBA after spending one year at Memphis, but he underperformed and didn’t develop or get any better under Penny’s lax tutelage. So here he is now in the portal. That’s only fitting.
100%
The kid obviously has some big time traits, but instead of working on his game, the hype machine took over and the kid got shuffled around the country to play games that did nothing but continue to feed the hype. One of the best books you can read on basketball is “Play Their Hearts Out” about Demetrius Walker who similarly got pegged as a future super star and got chewed up by the AAU machine. For every LeBron, there’s a million kids like Walker, Lenny Cooke, etc. that get chewed up and spit out by the hype around grassroots basketball.
Had he gone to MSU with Izzo, he’d have gotten some great coaching but I doubt the family would’ve had too much control. Instead he goes to the mess in Memphis and lost a year of valuable development. The best move would be a G League spot where he can get some development away from the spotlight
Bingo. The absolute cautionary tale on all of this "get paid as fast as you can get paid" mentality. I mean, this is what we are now teaching everyone. The CEO makes how much? And you make this much? THAT'S NOT FAIR!!!
Or, you play the games and the coaches get paid how much? THAT'S NOT FAIR!!!!
Funny how it is fair when these guys finally sign contracts for more money than most people make in 5 lifetimes before they prove anything on the pro level. THAT'S NOT FAIR!!!!
It's time we stop giving our youth this entitlement mentality. Cesar Chavez they are not.
It wasn’t ideal the way it had always been, but players definitely got something of value in full rides at expensive schools, and most of the best were getting paid (including bling and cars and the like), just unofficially. They were living great lives in comparison to many other students (and most others their age).
It certainly looked bad that the coaches were making so much more than the players, which echoes much of how corporations pay scales works (CEOs making many times of their line workers, which makes many in society crazy, and I certainly can see why).
But what to do? If schools had collaborated to keep coaches salaries low, there would have been lawsuits and possibly even congressional hearings for price fixing (though not likely have ever gotten to that, because some rogue schools would have abandoned the agreement and it would have crumbled).
However, what definitely could and should have happened was that schools should have agreed to write and actually enforce coaches contracts (though maybe that would have been thrown out for being unconstitutional). However, the making huge money AND ease in jumping jobs, while the ‘poor’ student athletes were getting ‘nothing’ AND ‘locked’ into schools, made things REALLY ugly (and agin, one can understand why).
So going the other way and suddenly paying players significant figures (above the table) and letting them leave with impunity, while ‘fair’, is ending up like, well, exactly how this is looking…and it might end up killing the golden goose, or at least a lot of geese are likely to get blown out of the sky in coming years. But that would be ‘fair’ I suppose.
Lmao.. tell us you don’t know about development, without telling us you don’t know about development.
Using Mo shows you have no clue. His stats were almost identical at Stoney Brook, some were better there.. just stop.. you are making yourself look foolish
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Not to nitpick but your post isn’t entirely accurate. He’s not eligible for the NBA Draft until NEXT year. The NBA rule is you can’t declare for the draft until 1 year after your original class graduates. That’s this year.
Hope he signed a 2 year NIL deal with FedEx so they can’t back out of paying him this year
It’s fine - they can just transfer his NIL deal to FedEx Ground’s HQ out in Moon Township.
Which raises a question I’d never thought of before.
Can these deals be written to have conditions such as remaining at the school you play for when getting the original deal?
No. They are not performance or condition based
it’s why NIL like the transfer portal will eventually calm down.
Foolish is claiming that stats from the American East Conference are equivalent to stats from the ACC. If you did not see the development of Mo from the beginning of the season, you must not have been paying attention. Too busy creating new accounts, probably.
The problem is two fold:
1) Is on the grass roots level right? Where it all starts and these "entourages" and hangers on, AAU coaches, street agents all essentially pimp these kids out. As I mentioned last week, the 1981 McDonald's All American team, 17 of the 24 kids all attended their local public HS's. Last year, 17 of the 24 kids all attended some prep/basketball factory. So obviously the exchange of money and goods etc...is happening at an early age to get these kids at these schools.
2) Then the college level. I am not against paying the players something, but you have the complications of Title IX and what do you pay a bench player vs a star vs a non revenue athlete vs a female non revenue athlete. And the NCAA being the feckless organization it is, just punted on this admittedly complex issue and let it become the Wild Wild West with NIL basically becoming legalized cheating.
Why?
He’s been getting paid all along .
You prefer the talent to be unpaid and the money all going to handlers and coaches ?!?
backwards thinking
But par for course for the trickle down fantasy folks
True, Mo‘s transportation out of town was being paid for by clowns on this site after just a game or two. Begrudgingly I do admit that Mo was able to express himself and his game in whatever the system Capel plays. Lol.
It’s more foolish to believe that Jeff Capel, yes Jeff Capel transformed Mo into what he was in a few months.. it’s laughable..
He shot the same, rebounded the same and played the same. AAC OR ACC.. doesn’t matter. It’s ok, Jeff Capel will still be your Friend..
Did you ever see him play a game for Stony Brook? If your answer is "no," then you have no idea how his play there compared to his play at Pitt. I did not seem him play there either, but I know that the level of play is very different from the level of play at Pitt. Claiming that he was not better at Pitt than he was at Stony Brook is ridiculous.
That was my thought -
Those longing for money only going to the coaches are idiots and dinosaurs
If Mo had more eligibility left and entered the portal now after the season he just had he’d be one of the most sought after players in the country !
Of course everyone in the country also had Justin as a sure fire NBA prospect .
From the perspective of the people that pushed for this to happen, it was never ao much about what the coaches were getting paid. It was about what the schools were making in everything-TV money, selling merch with players’ names and numbers, etc etc—on the backs of the players. Chris Webber was the first one I can recall to start publicly crowing about this issue, because U of M made literally 10s of millions selling his jersey, and he received none of it. Of course he may not have been the best spokesman because it turned out he and his dad were paid a couple hundred thousand, free luxury apartments off campus, cars etc from a certain crooked booster named Ed Martin for him to go to Michigan.
So to an extent I understand the bitch that the school makes tons of money off of players names and numbers. But there had to be a better way to address that than what we ended up with now.
Also foolish to believe a 4 year college player suddenly “developed” as a 5th year player at a program he was only with for a few months.
So Stony Brook misused him?
For whatever reason, he shot ones, twos and threes better at Pitt than he did in either of his seasons at Stony Brook.
Probably watched UTube videos on how to play and shoot better against stiffer competition during the summer !
Alondes Williams, as a 5th year player, went from 6.7 ppg at Oklahoma to ACC player of the year at Wake Forrest. That is a bigger jump than Mo's, and there are others who have made big jumps. So count me in the foolish camp.
So in 5 months Capel fixed his free throw stroke, his jump shot and taught him how to dunk and score around the rim. Things he couldn’t do for the 4 years of college basketball he played before Pitt.
That’s very impressive coaching. Give that man an extension.
And I looked at his numbers. They were a hair’s breadth better than they were at Stoner Brook. And that’s as a 5th year player on a depleted team with more offensive feeedom-like shooting 4 3s a game instead of 1. Gimme a break Joe. If anything credit an extra year of experience and age for any modest improvement.
You were there all along bro.
So it was one short offseason of coaching that brought Williams along? Got it.
By the way-there was no “jump” for Mo. He shot more threes at Pitt. That’s about it. Some posters on this board act like he was Kevin Durant last season. He was an OK player on a really, really bad team.
Everyone is ripping on Penny Hardaway like he cant develop a team. When he got that team healthy they were rolling at the end of the year and almost took down Gonzaga. Emoni Bates not being a lottery pick has nothing to do with Penny. The guy went to play for 1 year under a HOF NBA coach in Larry Brown and Penny Hardaway. If you cant get better under those circumstances that is on you. I saw him play in person against ECU, he is a bit lazy and just wants to shoot the 3. I saw nothing that said top 10 pick at all.
Everyone “almost beat” Gonzaga in the tournament. Until Arkansas did beat them.
And dude-Larry Brown is 82 years old. Pretty sure he wasn’t working on Bates’ game with him any more than he is out on the road recruiting. He’s collecting a paycheck and is a figurehead to try to give Penny more credibility.
Penny is like Calipari, but without the actual basketball coaching part.
Yep, I'd prefer it to be D3 and the HC to get paid as much as a high school gym teacher and all the players to be walkons, regular students, and I'd watch that over big time NCAA hoops as long as it says PITT on the jerseys.
Was it easy for you to knock that strawman down, or did it really put up a fight?
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