10-12-2018, 02:59 PM
One and done is a total red herring excuse:
1) The most famous teams rely on one-and-done players, but those teams are a fraction of the best teams. Since we fans are (I hope) more interested in being the latter than the former, we have to be a bit more broad-minded in our thinking. That teams like Villanova, Michigan, Michigan State, and on and on, succeed without one-and-dones should indicate that Stanford, too, can succeed without instant NBA players.
2) The other big error with focusing on one-and-dones is that, well, it confuses thinking where Stanford is with where national championship teams are. It'd be like a college graduate concluding that since all billionaires have mansions, it's no use buying real estate unless one can buy a mansion. There's a lot of distance between point A and point B! Even if you believe the lack of one-and-dones imposes a ceiling on Stanford's prospects, the program isn't exactly scraping against those rafters.
To be more concrete, let's think about the Pac-12 here. Only two schools (UCLA and Arizona) are really frequent one-and-done recruiters. Since the conference gets, say, 4 or 5 tournament spots per year, that means -- if you're being rigidly deterministic -- that there are still a handful of spots up for grabs in any given year. Obviously Stanford has only very rarely grabbed one of those spots in the post-Trent era -- with schools like, say, Colorado and Oregon frequently making it to the tourney -- which means, in my opinion, it's been underachieving.
We'll see if Haase is building towards it, but so far the signs are mixed.
1) The most famous teams rely on one-and-done players, but those teams are a fraction of the best teams. Since we fans are (I hope) more interested in being the latter than the former, we have to be a bit more broad-minded in our thinking. That teams like Villanova, Michigan, Michigan State, and on and on, succeed without one-and-dones should indicate that Stanford, too, can succeed without instant NBA players.
2) The other big error with focusing on one-and-dones is that, well, it confuses thinking where Stanford is with where national championship teams are. It'd be like a college graduate concluding that since all billionaires have mansions, it's no use buying real estate unless one can buy a mansion. There's a lot of distance between point A and point B! Even if you believe the lack of one-and-dones imposes a ceiling on Stanford's prospects, the program isn't exactly scraping against those rafters.
To be more concrete, let's think about the Pac-12 here. Only two schools (UCLA and Arizona) are really frequent one-and-done recruiters. Since the conference gets, say, 4 or 5 tournament spots per year, that means -- if you're being rigidly deterministic -- that there are still a handful of spots up for grabs in any given year. Obviously Stanford has only very rarely grabbed one of those spots in the post-Trent era -- with schools like, say, Colorado and Oregon frequently making it to the tourney -- which means, in my opinion, it's been underachieving.
We'll see if Haase is building towards it, but so far the signs are mixed.