Hello all,

made a dumb mistake with one of my DII teams and offered a schollie to a center with 21 work ethic.   He is:

67 ath
63 reb
66 def
61 blk
42 lp 

with high/high potential in low post and low/high potential in rebounding.  

I plan on redshirting him, is it worth it to sign him or is his work ethic so bad that we will never be an efficient player?  Thanks.  

I wouldn't recruit him. Don't expect much improvement. If you can redshirt him and then get him a bunch of starts his freshman year and some games where he plays big minutes as a freshman and sophmore you may be OK.

I don't play D2 so I don't know how good that is by D2 standards; the improvement depends on how much PT/starts you can give him when he is a FR/SO, maybe schedule a few cupcakes in non-conference so he can start if you have a tough conference w/ no simmies.

Posted by bhay00 on 8/4/2012 12:08:00 AM (view original):
Hello all,

made a dumb mistake with one of my DII teams and offered a schollie to a center with 21 work ethic.   He is:

67 ath
63 reb
66 def
61 blk
42 lp 

with high/high potential in low post and low/high potential in rebounding.  

I plan on redshirting him, is it worth it to sign him or is his work ethic so bad that we will never be an efficient player?  Thanks.  

If those are his only high ratings, I wouldn't waste a scholarship on Hagen. He'd be adequate I guess on a good D3 team, but I can't imagine he'd be quality at the D2 level.

I agree with salag's first comment, but It all depends on what your team's needs are. So, given that that two of your seniors are big men and Kittle's poor Ath, it might be a good idea to sign him for cheap, redshirt him, then start him his freshman year. Considering that he already has acceptable Ath, as well as Reb/Def/Blk to go along, it doesn't seem like that big of risk since he won't be a liability on the court, IMHO. Plus, if you can get him on the cheap then you can go after a pulldown with the leftover available money.

With a redshirt and some decent PT as a freshman he will be a more than adequate D2 big.

I think that guy is an ok DII big.   He'll be fine.

He's fine, but the redshirt and early PT will be important. I have a guy on my DII team Kaiser who was in a similar situation. I could not get him a redshirt because he refused and did not get him the PT because I had a depth at the bigs at he is now starting his first season as a senior. Even with that, he is serviceable. Not a stud, but not a liability either. Just wish I could have gotten the redshirt on him.

He'll be totally fine - if he takes that WE and you can get him 10-15mpg his freshman year to get that nice WE boost then I bet he'll be real solid for you his JR and SR years.  I'd take him all day as a D2 big.  Wouldn't build a team around him, but he'll more than hold his own with that ath/def/reb and the high high in lp.

That guy's pretty solid. As others have said redshirt him. get him Starts next year and that guy could become a good DII center (depending on how the LP turns out).

Thanks for everyones opinion.   I did end up signing him now I hope he accepts the redshirt.  

This guy will be perfectly fine as a D2 big man.  If you can redshirt him, all the better.

I'm sorry, I just cannot resist. Brent, I'm assuming that you consider your Hamline team to be a very good/elite D3 team, yes (and I would totally agree that it is, no question about it)? You said this guy would be "adequate on a good D3 team", yet if he was on your Hamline team he'd be your second best big man RIGHT NOW without ever having played a single minute.

And Salag, you're saying don't recruit him because he won't improve fast enough.  Then you amended that to say that if he could get him enough starts/PT that he might be okay.  But you've got a Junior on your Suffolk squad (David Buchanan) who only has a 30 Work Ethic, who has never started a game and didn't average even 10 minutes a game his first two seasons.  Do you consider signing your guy to be a mistake, because that 30 Work Ethic sure isn't much higher after two seasons than his guy's 21 after no seasons?  And if he was considered a mistake, why keep him?  Why not cut his not-improving-fast-enough butt?  Cutting a single player that you recruited amounts to basically nothing in the way of a hit to your reputation.

We don't know what this guy's potentials are in Ath, Def, and SB since the OP didn't specify, but if he has average potentials in those three categories, you're looking at a player that comes in around 75-80 Ath, mid to high 80's Reb, mid to high 70's Def, 70ish SB, and with a high-high potential in LP could be anywhere between low 70's to low 90's LP.  Uhhh, yes, I think he'd be more than "adequate" as a D3 player.  In fact, I think he'd be damn near unstoppable.  Christ, there are low level D1 teams that could use a big man with those kind of ratings.  Even giving him only 3 points of improvement for low potentials still yields a very good D2 big man that I would take on my team any day of the week and be happy as hell to have.  "Adequate" on a "good" D3 team might be the understatement of the year.

Sorry for the rant but I get so tired of new coaches getting blasted for their "inadequate" recruits and told that they should be looking for guys with "this and this and this for ratings" when most of the "this and this and this" guys don't even exist in the first place, let alone occupy a roster spot on those veteran coach's teams.  I watched a veteran coach blast a rookie coach one time, telling him that he HAD to recruit guys that had initial ratings of "so and so and so" if he wanted to have ANY chance to be competitive.  Just for chits and giggles, I checked the veteran coach's FOUR teams he had in that division and NOT ONE of them had a player that met the standards that he told the rookie coach he had to have.  And remember, mind you, that the veteran coach had juniors and seniors on those rosters and they STILL didn't meet those so-called "necessary initial minimums".  Not one.

Rant over, sorry for venting.  Bhay, your guy will be fine and will end up being a very nice, quality player for you, not a doubt in my mind.  Definitely NOT a dumb mistake, good get.  Best of luck to you in your upcoming season.  Keep us posted on whether Hagen takes the redshirt and if you stick with that team through Hagen's senior season, give us an update as to what his ratings became.  Thanks and have a nice day.

Emy, you may or may not realize it, but I am rarely one who "blasts" coaches for inadequate recruits, and I honestly don't think I did so here. He asked for opinions; I gave mine. If the OP thinks I was blasting him, my apologies; it was not my intent.

Having said that, I don't think my analysis is as far off as you do (but I'm clearly in the minority, so I may obviously be wrong).

Here is the player. Look at him as a complete player.

As I said in my comment, I am assuming that he has no high ratings other than those mentioned by the OP. Obviously, if he is high in additional categories, it changes things.

So, ballpark numbers (assuming no lows either, which I suspect he has):

Ath - 75
Speed - 20
Reb - 85
Def - 70
Block- 70
LP - 70
Per - 20
BH - 20
Pass - 20
FT - 60%

With a WE of 21, he won't hit all those either, even with early PT. I take and give heavy minutes to young, low WE guys on a regular basis, and you just accept going in they won't (generally) his full potential. With a RS as a 21 work ethic, he'll see modest (at best) gains during that season/off-season. In a perfect world, you play the **** out of him as a freshman, try and get the WE up as high as you can, and *then* hope he takes the RS during that next season when he'd hopefully see more growth. But that assumes you don't mind playing him heavy minutes as a low IQ freshman.

As for the Hamline team, he'd be the second-best "big" right now, yes. But if you take a look at the team and my track record, you'd have to imagine that either 1) I know what I'm doing, or 2) I'm trying something new. It's actually the latter, as you can perhaps tell I've given up on recruiting true/conventional bigs in the past couple seasons since I think the engine hugely underestimates their importance (at least at the D3 level, and *especially* on the boards). If you compare him to the one real "big" I still have on Hamline, he's *clearly* not as good.

All that said, I did miss the fact that the OP is playing a zone defense (good for him, and my bad - I just assume that 75% of people are playing FCP, and the other 24% are playing M2M). As someone who plays zone, I do understand that changes things somewhat, particularly in terms of his value on the defensive end (his speed won't be as large of a liability).

Finally, and this is the case in everything on WhatIf (not just HBD), I do not approach things from the perspective of having "OK" as the goal, even for newer owners. Fine, walk before you run, but all too often owners get stuck in the rut of walking. The OP jumped from D3 after one season of a PI first-round exit. I'm loathe to encourage him to go after guys like this who - at best - are adequate. Adequate wins you jack ****, and the point of the game is winning.

Maybe I'm just vastly underestimating the difference between good D3 and middle-of-the-road D2 teams,because all I ever see posted here in the forums are the really good ones, but if this is really a "good" D2 guy who has a place on low-level D1 teams, I'd be very surprised. I can tell you from experience, at D3, this guy is *far* from "damn near unstoppable" for top teams. He'd put a hurting on sims and end up with good numbers, but at the top of D3, you're not building a team to curb-stomp sims; you need to beat the other owners, and he's not the type of player I'd fear come tournament time (at D3).

And, just regarding comparing a 21 WE and a 30 WE, there is a somewhat significant difference. Like most things in WhatIf, the further you get from center, the more extreme the impact of the WE rating (in my experience) and below 25 or so, you've got to hope everything breaks right for the guy to get near his full potential.

Guess we'll have to just agree to disagree Brent, but I still say that by the time this guy is a senior, he'll be way, way past adequate and much closer to very, very solid.  Yes, you have a great track record and plenty of experience to make the assumptions that you do, but I've also been playing for a day or two and have a bit of experience and not too bad of a track record myself.  You give me this guy on a one of my D2 teams and, as I said, by the time he's a senior, I'd be very confident starting him on a team that I would expect to make a deep tourney run.  Like Final Four deep.  Very possibly NT deep.  Against human owners.  With loaded teams.  There are plenty of coaches who have more NT's than I do, but I've got 8 at the D2 level and I can tell you from MY experience that this guy is far better than just - at best -  "adequate" and would have fit right in on ANY of those 8 winners.  Would he have been the star player on those teams, the number one, go-to option?  No, but he would have been a starter for sure and one of my main options, just not THE main option.

Also, with a redshirt, even with a WE of 21, he'll hit all those projections that you put up there.  Not a doubt in my mind.  I also may have recruited a low WE guy or two in my short coaching career and might have just a bit of experience with those type of players.  My point about the 21 vs 30 WE is that by the time Bhay's guy is a Junior, I would certainly expect him to have his WE up to at least 30 and was just wondering why Salag would advise against him based on that when he's got a guy on his roster with a similar WE himself.

Again, guess we'll have to agree to disagree, but as you stated earlier, looks like the majority think this guy will make a fine D2 player, so let's just leave it at that and call it even.  Best of luck with your new strategy at Hamline, hope everything works out for you there (and for what it's worth, I absolutely agree with what you're trying.  That strategy beat me in an NT game not too long ago, in a game I fully expected to dominate.  Of course, it could have just been a bad roll of the RNG dice for me also.  All I know for sure is that I ended up losing by three with a team that should have given me D2 title number 9, dammit).  :^(