As most of you know, Nate Ament is a 5-Star forward who is getting a lot of recruiting love from Louisville, Tennessee, Arkansas and Duke. As we’ve mentioned before, you can sometimes get the best sense of how a recruiting race is going from sites dedicated to other schools.
This article from Best of Arkansas Sports takes the sour grapes approach we learned from Aesop’s Fables: it’s okay if he ends up at Duke because he’s not that great after all and probably overrated.
Let’s start here: it’s possible that they’re right. Every year, guys come out of high school and when they get to college, you realize they peaked in high school. You don’t have to look far because Duke has had their share over the years, including Chris Burgess, Shavlik Randolph and, long ago, Robbie West, who the great Howard Garfinkel, who said he was one of only two players he truly missed on.
So could that be Ament?
BOAS thinks it might be, arguing that Nike Hoop Summit “exposed Ament’s flaws.”
It’s too early to say that. What we can say about Ament’s weakness right now is that he’s just very slim. It’s no great surprise: he’s 6-9 and at 185, really slim. And some guys just stay slim. Some, like Reggie Miller and Reggie Williams, become really good NBA players; others never get close.
However, he’s agile and can shoot and Duke has brilliant, high tech training facilities and techniques. To take another slim player, we saw Tyrese Proctor without his shirt on and were amazed. He’s still thin but that guy muscled up. You’d never know with his jersey on.
So take this for what it (probably) is: a realization from the Arkansas camp that they may be falling behind on the Ament recruitment and then a bit of sour grapes.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Duke will win out, but it is interesting that BOAS thinks the Blue Devils are in the lead.
