The Stephen effect

QC Sports Blog on the Droney commitment: So, why is this important? No knock on Davidson, but players didn’t choose Davidson over Big East and ACC schools in the past. There may be an exception or two, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Players with an 89 ESPN rating used to look elsewhere. Curry and the recent success have changed that.

End of the clip

Stephen: “That last shot against Kansas ...”

Decision time

WSOC says it’s tomorrow morning at 11:30. AP too. Here’s the QC Sports Blog.

An open letter

Queen City Sports Blog to Stephen:

At the end of the day, it’s your decision. I wish you the best of luck in making that decision. I know you’ll do what’s right for you. You should have no shame about going to the NBA if that’s what you truly feel is right. You’ve already done so much for Davidson. It’s awesome how you and your teammates galvanized alumni and catapulted the school on to the national stage.

Watching from Charlotte

QC Sports Blog:

Speaking of the whole issue about Steph possibly going pro, I will write a letter to him on this blog once the season is over begging him to stay.

Elon last night

Fourth game in eight days. Third league game in five. Don’t mind us. Just coming through.

Burlington: Twenty seconds later, Curry tossed in the first bucket in what became a 39-point pile as Davidson, the gold standard of Southern Conference men’s basketball, buried Elon 83-68 to polish off another victory Wednesday night at Belk Arena.

“We couldn’t guard him. He almost single-handedly beat us by himself, really,” Elon forward Ola Atoyebi said of Curry. “We just let him play. We weren’t physical enough on him. We let him get going, and once he gets going ... .”

By now, most of America probably knows how that statement ends.

Charlotte: There are times when Davidson guard Stephen Curry simply takes charge of a basketball game and you sense that the other team really doesn’t have a say in the matter.

Will Bryan: Steph did his thing again. It actually made a message boarder eek that he’s back (he’s back?!?). Dagger three at the end of the half off a 50-50 ball that made new Elon assistant Wes Miller slam his clipboard and Bob McKillop nod.

Also: AP. ESPN. Elon. Davidson. Stan Olson’s observations. Above the Rim. QC Sports Blog.

Adjustments

The Queen City Sports Blog: If you had Stephen Curry, would you not use him as much as possible until someone found a way to slow to him down? I have heard increasing criticism the last few weeks about the number of shots Curry takes and how Davidson is a one man team (to the likes of “no wonder he scores so much a game; it only takes him 40 shots a game to do it too”). Well, the strategy of taking the bulk of your team’s shots and even hitting less than 50% of them worked pretty well for Michael Jordan throughout his career. If I had arguably the best player in college basketball on my team, I would try to get the ball into his hands as much as humanly possible and make the other team stop him. Now that Purdue was the first team in two years to figure out how to slow Curry down (no, I don’t count the Loyola episode as being a real game), McKillop will have to devise a way to create more balance on offense. Until the Purdue game, however, there wasn’t anything wrong with his strategy.