Virginia Tech got a balanced effort offensively and easily dispatched Furman 75-54 on Tuesday night. The Hokies are now 4-3 on the season, while the Paladins dropped to 2-3.
The Hokies got double figures scoring from five different players…
Jarell Eddie: 14 points
Marshall Wood: 13 points
Will Johnston: career-high 12 points
Adam Smith: 11 points
Joey van Zegeren: 10 points
Freshman point guard Devin Wilson added six points, and he also dished out 11 assists. That was the most assists in a game by a Tech freshman since Dell Curry did it way back in his rookie season. Wilson had eight assists in Saturday night’s loss to Seton Hall.
The Hokies won easily despite the absence of three players…
Ben Emelogu: The freshman guard was out with concussion-like syndromes.
Marquis Rankin: Rankin, who hasn’t played all season, has gone home for Thanksgiving.
Cadarian Raines: Raines played the first three minutes of the game, but never came back in.
After the game, head coach James Johnson said the team needs Raines to play better. That’s why he didn’t play much on Tuesday night.
The Hokies return to action on Friday against Radford. Tip-off is scheduled for 2pm, and the game can be seen online on ESPN3.
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If what has been said on here (I know, internet chat) about Rankin is true, Coach JJ needs to kick him off the team. It isn’t going to be good for the team leadership/dynamics if you allow someone to sit on the bench and not play because they aren’t the starter. Either suit up or get the suitcase out.
None of us know the full story, nor are we likely to. I trust Coach Johnson to handle it properly. He’s already shows that he’s not going to tolerate any “me first” attitudes.
Rumor is Marquis Rankin is visiting his former Hokie teammate Robert Brown in Birmingham for a few days over the break.
I haven’t been able to watch a second of our team play, but how do the freshies look compared to the Delaney, jtt, Allen, bell class?
In my non-professional opinion I think they are right around the same level, but probably for a lot of different reasons.
Wilson and Delaney are similar in where they are at, but Wilson has slightly different things to work on that Delaney did. Wilson apparently has a bad outside shot, as we see him take very few long FG or 3pt shots, and when he does, they rarely seem to go in. I may be way wrong on this, but I think Wilson would be much more productive if our half-court offenses weren’t so slow and “messy”. By slow I mean that there is a lot of sets where there are 4 guys standing in their respective spots while the PG dribbles the ball in his space. By “messy” I mean that we don’t run screens very well, very few pick ‘n rolls, and our passing is often lazy or telegraphed to the defense.
Trevor Thompson and Allen both are showing/showed a lot of upside in their freshman year. Thompson has very good size and athletic ability, but he needs to get his confidence up, much like Allen did. Luckily he doesn’t have the same weight problem Allen did. And hopefully he’ll never catch the minor attitude problem that Allen did. Hopefully practicing with/against Cadarian will help them both get more confident and beef up their power moves to the basket. Is it just me or did Cadarian’s hook shot seem to get left back in the ’12-’13 season?
Emelogu looks great! He still suffers from the freshman “stupidity” sometimes, but he has shown some very good minutes, great shooting ability, and I can’t remember seeing his effort drop off like often plagues some of our players. He just needs to get smarter about some of his passes and how he plays defense with this year’s ticky-tacky touch-foul calling.
Big CED on the sideline?? James Johnson trying to motivate him or is he injured? I hope it’s not the latter!!
I think big CED is capable of more than he is doing, and we will need that extra effort when we get to ACC play. Maybe he will see the light!!
I’m a huge fan of Raines, but not sure if we can count on him to perform big at this point. The guy is big, has skills, and perhaps the motivation move will work, and we won’t hear that he is injured??
Any other scenarios in play here?
The gist that I got from sitting close by to the Hokies bench is that JJ was angry with Cadarian for something he did or didn’t do on the court. So JJ benched him for the time being. Then at a later point, JJ told him to get ready to go back in, but Cadarian refused to go back in, being mad that he was benched earlier. Some of the assistants immediately called him out, saying things like “None of that!” or “Stop it [his nickname]!”. So my guess is they kept him out the rest of the game for his attitude.
If this is true, then I would have expected a lot more maturity AND LEADERSHIP out of CR. Raines may very well be the key to whether we have a good team or not. We desperately need the inside game to improve to compete in the league.