The House of Blue

I don't think there has ever been a true Center to possess the quickness that Noel possesses both laterally and vertically. He also has cat quick hands. He's a very unique player. He'll be all over the court as a professional. I can't wait to watch him. As he gets stronger he'll really dominant around the basket due mostly to his superb quickness.

Beast mode.... Engaged

It's kind of interesting, you can attack him as a post player similar to they did with AD.

However, you have high risk of him knocking the ball out. If he masters those two techniques, wow they might just say don't even feed the ball to the post. LOL

sorry bout that moon

I think he's actually a much better post defender than Davis. Davis struggled to defend guys one on one down there all season.

What about Jarnell Stokes? Is he in a sophomore slump or what? Kid hasn't improved at all at UT. Needs to go ahead and transfer to UK. HA HA.

Several things, from what I'm told by people close to that program:

1) You can't underestimate how much not having Jeronne Maymon alongside has hurt his game. There is no one to take some pressure and attention off him. Opponents no longer have to help off him. He's found the going tough because of that,

2) He is pouting because Tennessee isn't playing well and he's being asked to work harder and play harder than he's had to in the past. He's raging against the machine to a degree.

Let's not taint this awesome topic by talking about UT player. :-P

HA HA sorry.

For reference, Anthony Davis had 74 blocks through 16 games.

I'm by no means a basketball scout but it does appear to me Noel is better in terms of poking the ball free, picking a guy clean on the perimeter, swiping at the ball before you ever get to point of needing to be able to block a shot. He's phenomenal at that stuff. His instincts may be even better than Davis' on the defensive end. I think Davis was better at closing ground and his timing in terms of blocking shots (and clearly better offensively, which should be expected given he was a guard who grew into his body late) but they do a lot of the same things in terms of affecting a game in ways other than scoring.

The $ is awefully tempting and most of the guys that can do the 1 and done have never seen that much money, I know I havent so if they can get a good contract I say go but it would be great to have seen most of Cals 1 and dones come back for their soph. year. I think that all the freshmen go in the upcoming draft although a couple really do need another season at UK.