Jordan Clayton Starting Tonight?!?!?
- Thread starter cedricmelons
- Start date
It's not like we have a choice, That said he had a nice game. For his first game time all year to have no turnovers and 5 assists. He was only 2-7 (to be expected) but he did hit his two FT More ready to play than KJ. And if you had to burn his shirt nice to see he deserved the minutes
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I’d love to know the story on the communication between Collins and Clayton about playing and burning his redshirt. I can’t believe that Clayton would be willing to use a year of eligibility to play eight games. It is an incredibly selfless decision by him to help the team but if I were his parent, I’d strongly advise against it. The only way it makes sense to me is if Clayton is certain that he does not want to play a fifth year of college basketball.
I am recalling now that, in the Bardo interview in the summer, Coach James singled out Clayton as having improved a ton. This would seem to mitigate some concerns about him getting starter status.
He is on scholarship, so I think he has to play when needed. If he still wants to transfer, he just elevated his options.
Clayton may be listed an inch shorter than KJ, but his body is just more B1G ready right now. He logged 20 minutes and was involved in 20% of possessions - that's both career highs (B1G games) for him, and to have 5 assists vs ZERO TO - is really solid. He should start next game - and hopefully he'll hit that open 3.
My one qualification on his ratio is that from what I saw, he didn't really drive into the paint very often, if at all, so he avoided the situations where a lot of turnovers can happen. He's not my guy until he does that consistently and well.
Clayton did a phenomenal job considering he had not played one minute the entire season and fully planned on a redshirt until a week ago. With that being said, I think the zero turnovers were mostly the result of being very conservative. Clayton brought the ball up against limited to zero pressure and made the first pass to initiate the offense. I think he went inside the arc only 3-4 times. That PG “game manager” role can be effective if you have other guys that can score on their own but unfortunately we don’t have that now. So we’re going to need Clayton and Windham to do more creation and facilitation to score enough points to compete.
