I found Will’s series on Andre Ray quite interesting. To me, Andre always seemed to be a player that was caught in the wrong system. He was the closest thing I have seen the last couple of years at Tech to a Duke player, the possessor of skills very similar to those of Chris Carrawell and Nate James. He sure wasn’t used the same way, however, and that, to me, is a real shame.

The sort of up-tempo style that maximizes athletic ability and is run by Duke and now Virginia in the ACC, and in the Big East by Connecticut, which has used it to become the dominant Big East program for the last decade or so, is taking over. Teams move quickly down the floor and into their offense. Players are in constant motion, moving all over the court, hopefully quicker than defenders can react, and the result is often a lay-up or wide open jumper.

In the Big East, the old Georgetown physical bump and grind that marked the conference’s first decade of existence has been largely abandoned as even the Hoyas discovered that it is a lot easier to run a half-court and inside oriented offense built around centers like Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning when Ewing and Mourning still have eligibility and are actually on the floor. John Thompson was no fool.

Most everybody in the BE is scrambling to emulate the style Jim Calhoun runs at UConn, much as most of the ACC is instituting offensive packages quite similar to what Mike Kzryzewski has at Duke. Despite Jake Voskuhl at Connecticut (who in my opinion was much less integral to the Huskies than Hamilton or El-Amin -- look what happened when Hamilton left), the scheme de-emphasizes the big man and shifts the focus to the wing players.

Ricky Stokes is no fool, either. He has taken one look at what’s ahead of him and quickly re-constituted Tech’s roster, latching onto as many players he could get his hands on in one recruiting season with a level of athletic ability a bit higher than what he inherited. This is a little late for Andre Ray. It would seem that while there are a lot of coaches around who would have recognized and possessed the coaching ability to develop Andre, Bobby Hussey was not among them.

I am loathe to claim anyone who chose our school selected the wrong one, but one thing seems clear: Andre Ray sure came to Tech at the wrong time. From 1977 to 1986, we did have a coach who believed in attempting to maximize athletic ability: Charlie Moir. In his coaching career at Tech, Moir experienced considerable success running the offense that is very much in vogue today. He could never recruit a quality big man, so he developed an offense that discounted the position’s importance.

Moir’s was an offense that primarily revolved around the wing. He basically had three teams while at Tech, all featuring similar players: Wayne Robinson/Marshall Ashford, Dale Solomon/Jeff Schneider, and finally, Bobby Beecher/Dell Curry. He got into trouble when the next projected pair, Terry Dozier and Mike Porter, didn’t pan out. But that’s another story.

Tech was a very fluid and active team in those days; Dale Solomon was really the only legitimate post player of the inside guys and he was too short for the position. Robinson and Beecher were the more athletic and mobile big men you see today.

Moir also had something else in those days: a seemingly endless supply of quick, athletic forwards. Tic Price, Les Henson, Keith Colbert and Perry Young (and I’m probably leaving somebody out) all got up and down the court in a hurry, played solid defense, could create a shot when need be (especially in Young’s case) and often found themselves with wide open baseline jumpers as defenses attempted to converge around one of the ‘stars’. These guys were indispensable to Moir’s success, and Andre Ray would have fit right in as that type of player.

That offense today is called the Triangle, largely due to the success Phil Jackson had with it in the NBA with a guy named Jordan. It is the same basic offense Charlie Moir ran at Tech. Needless to say, I don’t feel Moir has come close to getting his just due at Virginia Tech, but that’s also another story. Andre Ray was the perfect player for the Triangle, or whatever it is called at other places. He possessed the whole package, physical gifts as well as the intelligence to recognize what he was seeing on the floor. If he had come along a decade ago, when Coach K’s recruiting sights weren’t set quite as high as they are these days, he would have fit perfectly into Duke’s Motion. He never found a role in what was essentially the same offense his entire time at Tech.

Ray could have been a basketball version of what Frank Beamer and his staff routinely accomplish: find a little-known but athletic recruit and mold him into a star. It didn’t happen, and that is a shame. In my opinion, we have wasted the college careers of first Bimbo Coles, then Ace Custis (to a slightly lesser degree; Ace got to play in one NCAA) and now Andre Ray. Andre is out of chances, but, as Will pointed out, he has a degree from a fine school to fall back on. How many more chances will Tech get at what could be very good basketball players?