basketball season preview, part 2

Moving on with the second third of the UVA roster, including its two biggest stars.

#13 - Anthony Gill - Sr. PF

Nothing in life is guaranteed, so you're allowed to be nervous about whether this coming season can be as brilliant as the last two.  But you're not allowed to be worried about whether a healthy UVA squad will still be a winning team.  Anthony Gill is half the reason.

Gill is a brute force of nature in the post, and unguardable by the average ACC big man.  It takes a hell of an athlete to keep him in check, because he's one of the most powerfully strong basketball players in the country.  It's fortunate that he's a respectable free-throw shooter, because he draws a ton of fouls.  He averaged almost five free throws a game last year, and that's even with opponents finally realizing that hacking him isn't much of a strategy.  Gill is also a tremendous force on the offensive boards, which, combined with Mike Tobey doing the same, is an incredibly potent weapon - it lets Tony Bennett have his cake and eat it too, with stifling transition defense and second-chance points.

Simply put, Gill is the focal point of the frontcourt and one of the ACC's top players.  He's not a flashy defender like his predecessors Akil Mitchell and Darion Atkins, but regardless he's going to draw the top assignments on both ends of the floor.  He'll have to fight double-teams on offense and take on everyone's best in the post on defense.  Even though he moved into the starting lineup last year, this is still an extra step of responsibility for him.  Worry all you like about that, but your dose of Xanax for that is that the rest of the ACC has to figure out what the hell to do with him.

#15 - Malcolm Brogdon - Sr. SG

Heart and soul of this team, sure - but every team has a heart and soul, or at least, most of the good ones.  (We could all name a few soulless teams.)  Malcolm Brogdon's a bit more than that.  With apologies to Joe Harris, whose journey from Chelan to ACC champion embodied Virginia's rise to the scene, Brogdon is the quintessential Tony Bennett recruit and player.  He doesn't just fit the mold, he is the mold.  Much of this was encapsulated in a Sports Illustrated article that went way, way in depth into what makes Brogdon tick.  His family collects advanced degrees like Halloween candy, and Brogdon himself is unselfish and almost fanatically dedicated to improvement - both on the court and off it.  Never has Tony Bennett betrayed more truth about his move from Wazzu to UVA than when he simply says, "I came to Virginia to be able to recruit players like Malcolm."

Brogdon has enough skills as a ballhandler, enough quicks, enough hops, but unlike most star guards in the sport, none of these are elite qualities.  Where he stands out is - like Gill - his strength.  Brogdon is big for a college guard and probably the most physically strong backcourt player in the nation.  This means he, too, draws a lot of fouls, and his near-elite free-throw shooting makes opponents pay for it.  He's more of an average three-point shooter than his free-throw shooting would suggest, but he's good enough you have to respect it, and he fearlessly shoots two-point jumpers as well - which is nominally a very inefficient shot that Brogdon turns into one of his best.  And on the other end, his on-ball defense is simply terrific - partly because of his strength and partly because he's taken all of Tony's coaching to heart.

Now that he's a senior, what he can do best to help his team is to demand the ball in crunch time and go full-speed angry bull at the rim.  Brogdon lacks much deception in his ballhandling, but he's better than he thinks he is at slashing and driving.  Because, quite simply, he can shoot through whatever you swing at him, and draw and-1s with ease.  Maddeningly, he didn't fully realize this even up through the last game of the year; if he had, the MSU game would've ended up a lot different.  When he figures out that it would take Bill Laimbeer to stop him from scoring in the lane, he'll routinely swing close games his way.

#21 - Isaiah Wilkins - So. PF

Marial Shayok is the player whose second-year improvement I'm most excited to see, but Isaiah Wilkins's improvement is the most critical to the success of the team.  Indisputable, that.  UVA has a tremendously experienced frontcourt just with Gill and Tobey alone, but it won't be a deep frontcourt without Wilkins.

In last year's season opener, Wilkins was all the rage - eight points, five boards, three assists, two blocks, and two steals.  Unfortunately, there was no repeat performance, though in large part because of the emergence of Darion Atkins.  Offensively, Wilkins struggled the rest of the way, and he was clearly a step slower than the veterans in the complicated defense.

Best-case, Wilkins can be the player he was against JMU.  He's got potential to be a terrific shot-blocker, and he's put on a few pounds which should help his defense as well as keep him from getting shoved out of the lane on offense.  He can shoot the occasional three - in fact he was two-for-three last year - so in an ideal world he's a matchup nightmare, able to stretch the floor and be comfortable on the outside and yet do all the dirty work required of a big man.  We've seen him do all of that, but only in flashes.

How consistently he's able to play like a true power forward will help to dictate usage elsewhere.  It's a problem if Wilkins isn't putting it together, because it means playing Mike Tobey in less-than-ideal matchups.  It's too much to expect for him (yet) to be the high-flying defender that Mitchell and Atkins were, because he's only a sophomore.  But take that JMU performance and turn it into 12-15 minutes a night of that, and UVA's frontcourt instantly becomes one of the most formidable in the conference.

#31 - Jarred Reuter - Fr. PF

Not much is expected of Reuter this year.  He'll be at the back of the bigs rotation.  It's not likely he'll redshirt - Tony is limited to eleven scholarship players because of the commitment to redshirt Mamadi Diakite and the requirement to redshirt Austin Nichols.  Reuter should get some minutes mainly to spell the starters, probably those ones in the first half about two-thirds of the way through where we usually see the back-of-the-rotation players.  Some games he might not play at all.

He won't be counted on to generate offense.  Reuter's game is to bang and crash down low.  Just rebound, occasionally put a hammer on someone trying to score, and set good screens.  As time goes on we'll see how his game develops, but for now, this team doesn't yet need him to play a featured role.  Some contributions here and there on defense and a few bruised opponents is all he'll need to make his mark.

the recruit: Jarred Reuter

Name: Jarred Reuter
Position: PF
Hometown: Rochester, MA
School: Brewster Academy (NH)
Height: 6'8"
Weight: 235

24/7: 89, three stars; #36 PF, NH #5, US #147
ESPN: 79, three stars; #35 PF, NH #1, East #38
Rivals: three stars
Scout: three stars

Other offers: Iowa, Pittsburgh, Boston College, St. John's, Providence, South Carolina, Rhode Island

This coming season, for the first time in I don't know how long, UVA has a full complement of scholarship players.  And then, only one of them - Darion Atkins - graduates.  This means that for that 2015-2016 season, Tony Bennett could be extremely choosy about whom he extended a scholarship offer to.

Tony sat on those offers for a while, evaluating and evaluating (and truthfully, focusing his efforts mainly on the crucial 2016 class, which is gonna be a really big one), and pulling the trigger on Jarred Reuter near the end of July.  The courtship didn't take long.  Reuter started talking seriously to the UVA coaches around the beginning of the month, and had found his college home scarcely a month later.

Reuter is an interesting story.  First off, he reclassified very early, after his freshman year of high school, and transferred that summer for a fresh start.  (He's since transferred again, but remained in the 2015 class.)  At that time, he was attracting a ton of attention.  Articles from back in 2011, 2012 refer to offers from Indiana and Florida, and IU especially was keeping tabs on him for a long time.  Reuter was headed for the big-time, five stars, Duke, the whole works - that was the feeling then.

This summer, Reuter named a top five of Iowa, Providence, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and UVA.  (That he did so immediately after receiving a UVA offer was a very good sign for the Hoos.)  There are some decent teams there - three of them in the tournament this past year - but it's decidedly not a five-star top five.  What happened?  A few things conspired to leave Reuter in the dust for a while.  First, an injury, which is what compelled him to transfer and reclassify in the first place - his original school required him to play football, and he got hurt doing so.  Second, size, both upwards and outwards.  As a 6'8" freshman, the possibility that he might grow into a 6'10, 6'11" junior was naturally very intriguing.  But instead of adding inches, he added pounds, and not good ones.  By the end of his second freshman year he was up to 250, much of it bad weight that he's since gotten rid of.  Reuter is now basically exactly the same size he was four years ago, though presumably stronger.  Failing to grow is partly what caused some of those early suitors to lose touch.

Here's another thing that's been constant ever since way back when.  Consider the following excerpts from various scouting articles over the past few years:

August 4, 2011 (Rivals): "He has a bullish side. Think a young, yet-to-be refined Tyler Hansbrough."

July 12, 2012 (Rivals): "Watching early videos of Reuter definitely bring memories of Tyler Hansbrough to mind because of the similar size, style and relentless aggression inside the paint."

August 2, 2014 (ESPN): "Reuter's game is similar to that of a poor man's Tyler Hansbrough in that he is a power player inside with a terrific motor."

Just a couple examples there.  There's more where that came from.  OK, so he's Psycho T Jr.  And frankly, it's impossible to miss the theme of physicality in reviewing all the evaluations and articles.  Some of them seem to be trying to outdo each other with flavorful hyperbole, making references to the WWE and knocking heads together and so on and etc.  At that point, you start to get the idea they mean it.  Reuter has also been described as a high-quality passer and screener - and the screener thing is interesting because that, too, has been present in evaluations for a long time, and Reuter himself brought up UVA's screening offense as one reason why he felt like he'd found a fit in Charlottesville.

In terms of a fit on the depth chart, Reuter walks into a crowded situation as a freshman, and may even redshirt.  Mike Tobey and Anthony Gill will be seniors.  So will Evan Nolte, who by then may well have evolved into more of a four than he is now.  Isaiah Wilkins and Jack Salt will have a year under their belt.  Lot of competition, much of it extremely well-entrenched.  (And Tony was up front about this, by the way.)  Afterwards, though, graduation is going to lay a big hit on that depth chart, and Reuter's path will be wide open.  Eight players exist on the future 2016-2017 depth chart (Reuter's sophomore year) and only three of them, Reuter included, are true bigs.

Furthermore, Reuter is likely to be awfully polished by the time he gets here.  The private prep school leagues up in New England are terrifically competitive, and just have a gander at the Brewster Academy roster.  12 players on there, and 10 will be playing D-I basketball.  Georgetown, UCLA, Kansas, Memphis, and so on.  (The only two without a college listed are Reuter and '15 classmate Donovan Mitchell, who is a borderline top-100 prospect and also going to play D-I ball.)  Reuter is already going against some of the very best.

The really fun part is that everyone already thinks that playing UVA is as fun as a root canal.  This has been stamped into the collective consciousness of college hoops.  Welcome to Charlottesville, please check your offense at the door, it will be returned to you on the way out.  Jack Salt already comes with the reputation of a banger. It's been kind of muted because, coming from New Zealand, he's been developing outside the recruiting spotlight, but physical's the word and then some.  In a few years he'll likely be playing alongside Dick Butkus Reuter here, and then we'll go from squeezing the life out of teams to beating it out of them.  Reuter may not ever be a high-powered scoring presence, but if he continues to rebound, do all those semi-invisible things like set screens of crushing death, and leave opponents black and blue in the process, he's likely to be a huge fan favorite when all's said and done.