The Floyd Street Tribune: Tackling Louisville's 'wiggle room,' Denny Crum Hall and more
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This is a familiar feeling for Louisville fans, and I don’t say that to add any salt to the wound, but it’s now October … and everyone is ready for basketball. So, let’s discuss the game of basketball because, after all, Louisville is a basketball school.
I can’t wait for more glimpses of the team so I can start delving deeper into certain topics and actually see how it plays, but I hope you’re enjoying these rapid-fire columns as much as I am in the meantime. We can bounce around topics. Let’s do it again.
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* Wiggle room. What a saying — it sounds like a place my 8-month-old would absolutely love to hang out. And it’s the phrase that stuck out to me most when Kenny Payne met with reporters last week to discuss the opening of Denny Crum Hall.
“We are not a team that has a bunch of wiggle room,” Payne said. “We're a team that, every single day, we have to do it with fight and love and togetherness, and it started back in the summer. I hate to say it like this, but I am more intrigued with the process than I am with the Ws and Ls. For me, it's about winning or learning and nothing else.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but again, let’s take “wiggle room” first for 800, please. This is absolutely correct, and a good acknowledgment by Payne of where his team is. Louisville is like those and/or equations from school: Louisville will be good if … El Ellis is awesome and plays 35 minutes a game and Jae’Lyn Withers is the creative playmaker he was expected to be out of high school and Sydney Curry becomes a double-double candidate every night and Kamari Lands is as good as advertised.
That’s a lot of ands. If you get all four, Louisville … might be solid? If you get three of those, OK. If you get two of ‘em, good luck.
Which is all to say Payne knows he has to find a way, with its 10 scholarship guys, to maximize the potential of each of them. Not potential in terms of their careers or long-term goals — just potential in terms of this season. For example, Roosevelt Wheeler looks like a player who could develop into a 12-and-7 kinda guy in the ACC, but this season, Wheeler needs to be an energy big off the bench who gets you, what, 10-15 minutes? Then, U of L has to replicate matching that potential 10 times over, from the expected stars in Ellis and Curry to the newcomers. And even if all that happens, there is still reason to wonder if there’s enough there to be an NCAA Tournament team.