The Floyd Street Tribune: Curtis Williams commits and a stylistic trend is forming
Inside: Louisville's recruiting evaluations have a common thread. Let's dive into why.
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With Curtis Williams, a trend continues to build
What do the following numbers mean to you?
6-10, 6-8, 6-8, 6-5, 6-6 and 6-6.
I’m guessing — and I’m really going out on a limb here — that because you’re reading a Louisville basketball newsletter and I just listed a bunch of heights under a headline about Curtis Williams, you probably know where I’m going with this. Just a hunch.
Those numbers are the heights of the recruits Kenny Payne and his staff have either signed or gotten commitments from in the past six months. Notice a trend?
Louisville basketball is building its roster identity around athleticism, length and role versatility, and the commitment of 6-foot-6, 200-pound wing Curtis Williams this week just continued the foundation-setting process. Williams, much like his fellow Class of 2023 pledge Kaleb Glenn, is a long-armed, positionally flexible player who will give Louisville a shooter and a solid rebounding wing. When you mix those two with players like Kamari Lands (6-8, 200), Devin Ree (6-8, 180), Mike James (6-5, 215) and JJ Traynor (6-8, 190), you have a litany of options who play across multiple spots. That’s very much the point, a strategy heavily influenced by NBA thinking around lineup versatility, which makes sense after Payne’s experience with the Knicks and with where the game is trending.
This, from 247Sports director of scouting Adam Finkelstein’s detailed analysis of the Williams commitment, hits this entire point:
Payne spent last season with the New York Knicks and the way in which he is building this Louisville roster shows traces of an NBA mindset that values multiple big wings who are interchangeable in the middle of the line-up, potentially able to defend multiple positions, and maximize spacing on the offensive end.
Williams and Glenn fit that prototype. As too do current freshmen Kamari Lands and Devin Ree. Whether you refer to them as combo-forwards or big wings, they’re the type of versatile building blocks that allow Payne to put them on the floor in multiple types of line-ups and afford him maximum versatility when building out the rest of his roster.
All of that also recalls Danny Manning’s comment earlier this summer on my podcast, when he said Louisville fans shouldn’t be surprised by the Cards rolling out tall lineups that have 6-8 shooting guards.
So, why is this the strategy? Milt Wagner recently gave us a good start in answering that question.