Hokies Making Major Strides in Two Key Areas

Buzz Williams
Buzz Williams

When Buzz Williams took over at Virginia Tech, he inherited a mess. The Hokies lacked talent at every single position. The two biggest (literally) examples I can give you to prove that point are Joey van Zegeren and Trevor Thompson.

Those were our top two centers at the end of the James Johnson era, and we thought they were making progress and would become good players for the Hokies. Instead, a look at how they are doing at their current school shows that they really weren’t good players at all. They just happened to be the best we had. Joey van Zegeren is playing less than 15 minutes per game for a program that has never made the NCAA Tournament. Trevor Thompson is playing just 11.2 minutes per game for Ohio State.

Buzz cleansed the program of those guys because they didn’t fit the image that he wanted to project on the court. A number of other guys were run off or chose not to stay, including Adam Smith, CJ Barksdale, Marshall Wood, Maurice Kirby, Ben Emelogu and Malik Mueller.

Now there are only three players on the roster who were not recruited by Williams: Justin Bibbs, Jalen Hudson and Devin Wilson. He has almost completely overhauled the roster in a very short amount of time. We’re in much better shape from a talent perspective than we were two short years ago, though we’re not quite where we want to be yet.

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