La Salle Men’s Basketball – Surviving in the NIL World
May 5, 2024 5:33:28 GMT -5
bigjohnny2, crayzeeguy, and 4 more like this
Post by JoeFedorowicz on May 5, 2024 5:33:28 GMT -5
Let me be very clear here that this is not an indictment of anybody that works for La Salle University. This is just me providing my opinion on something that I’ve thought TOO MUCH about. I’ve never run a university. I’ve never run a university’s athletic department. I’ve never coached a men’s basketball team. So, it with that naïveté that I wrote this.
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I clicked all the way back on this board to get a better idea of when it started and though the board has been around for two additional years, it sat dormant until October 2012 when the old board went “up in smoke.” The topics we were discussing at that time were:
• La Salle’s weak guard play
• ESPN not picking up La Salle games
• Return of the gold jerseys
• Me posting too many Philahoops articles
This was the beginning of a great era for La Salle basketball, a fact that probably helped this board to remain viable and relatively lively for the next dozen years. Since the magical Sweet Sixteen run, La Salle is on their third coach, our third president, our fourth Athletic Director, baseball has gone and come, we had a global pandemic AND the entire ecosystem of Men’s Basketball recruiting has completely changed.
You look at the posts in the last month or so and they are as such:
• Jack Clark, former Explorer, is taking his third NIL deal for a new team at VCU
• Jhamir Brickus, La Salle’s best player, taking a reported $350k to go to Villanova
• Me, the admin of the message board, relaying a plea for contributions to La Salle’s NIL collective
And a ton of complaining about the current state of the NCAA and the NIL. Everybody is just about through with this all but, admittedly, I think a lot of that stems from La Salle not being able to play the game that other schools they’re competing with are playing. More on that shortly.
I’ve really struggled not with NIL in general, but with La Salle’s attempt to swim in those waters. I think players should be paid and I think “Name, Image and Likeness” is probably the best way to do this. There were a couple posts questioning whether this was actually NIL:
What is the Name, Image, or Likeness for which the student-athlete is being paid?And this is true. Players aren’t always being paid to sell cars or HVAC systems for local businesses. Some, like Caitlin Clark, are being paid by Nike or Gatorade. But some are just being paid and often, they’re being paid by NIL Collectives. I am not going to go into a diatribe about these collectives which, because the NCAA did not set up better guidelines for how this is supposed to work, have spread like wildfire across all major and mid-major college sports.
I believed that the collectives were going to work like Super PACs in politics were supposed to, where a group raises money to do what they want with but cannot associate or strategize with the beneficiary of that money. But Super PACs are paying legal bills for former presidents. Their founders have worked in campaigns for current presidents. Direct coordination is happening, and it is against the law. What is going on with NIL Collectives, where Baker Dunleavy explicitly runs the NIL process at Villanova. Where La Salle designates someone to work on who gets what. All of that just stinks of being against how this was supposed to work.
That’s all I’m going to say on that though. This is the world of collegiate athletics, and we can complain about it all we want, but nobody cares what a couple of people on a message board for a bottom third Atlantic 10 team think. Players are getting paid. Alumni and others are paying them. Coaching staffs are deciding who gets what. That’s the baseline. That’s the environment. Let’s move on.
I purposefully waited until the portal closed before I posted this because my beliefs regarding La Salle’s use of the collective do not run in parallel with those working for the school. I understand the need for the money to compete in the Atlantic 10 (have done thousands of words on that already). I understand that to retain La Salle’s best players, there needs to be NIL deals waiting for those that can and will go elsewhere. I understand that this is how things are supposed to work. But I didn’t give any money to the collective. Let me explain why.
I do fine. I have a wife and two kids with a good job and live in a nice house in a good school district. I give a little bit to the school every year because it makes me feel good, but anything more than that would be noticed and until things get better…it’s the way that it is. This year, the school also asked me for money for the new arena, the collective AND La Salle’s Day of Giving. All within a couple months. La Salle’s alumni base is large, but not state school large. It is not as invested as a Penn State. Or an Ivy school. Or even St. Joe’s. This is due to a lot of things including an apathetic development staff that existed for decades and is gone…but La Salle can’t just put out the call for more money and get people to send in the checks.
And the collective came third. It had to in my mind because blindly giving money to a team, one with holes who gets picked to finish last or second-to-last in the Atlantic 10 every year and has no chance to make the NCAA tournament? Seems like good money after bad. And that sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but it is the way that I viewed it. And in talking to a couple people who graduated around me, they agreed. A lot of them had no idea the collective even existed. There’s only so many times you can go to the well and I just didn’t see it.
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Almost 1000 words of preamble. An introduction to what I think is the state of La Salle Men’s basketball from a macro standpoint. Where I think the NIL world is right now and almost where I think it is going. Now we pivot.
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I mentioned earlier that there are some people that believe La Salle must do this to be successful. But what defines success? If we’re going to operate with the guidelines that La Salle is staying in the Atlantic 10 (they are), is 10-14 place in the A10 every year…just hoping to make the tournament semifinals…is that success? I’ve been trying to figure out what the analogy is for La Salle basketball in the Atlantic 10. Is it F1? Where La Salle is just trying to move from 16th to 14th in the standings for things to be successful? Is it Premier league soccer (which I know less about) where they just want to finish in the top 8 and ultimately, avoid relegation. Or is it MLB, where they’re a low payroll team looking for a couple surprising starters and a big bat to make a postseason run?
I don’t know. I’d love it to be the latter. I worry that it is one of the formers. So as I was sitting around after I wrote the NIL post, all I could wonder about is whether there was a different way. Is there a way for an Atlantic 10 team to compete without playing the NIL game. Or not playing the NIL game strongly. And I think there is, but it would require a University-level focus that I do not know is possible to pull off. And even then it probably won’t work. So here we go.
We all know that I’ve made my beliefs known about shooting three pointers. I still think that La Salle’s success last year could have been enhanced if they embraced a bombs away mentality. I’m sticking with that, but it is not the core part of my plan. La Salle has, since Giannini was coach, tried to fill its roster with Atlantic 10 players that have flaws. Once, for a two-year period, the stars aligned so that these A10 bodies played beyond their expectations, and we had the best year in decades.
What’s changed since then? The money. While I’m not saying it’s impossible to get a Ramon Galloway or Ty Garland or Earl Pettis in the transfer market for La Salle, getting all of them in that stretch should be viewed as impossible when other teams can cut bigger checks. Retaining Tyreek Duren (a good comp to Brickus) and Jerrell Wright would be impossible. La Salle used to be a place where kids would want to come home and play after a year or two somewhere else. Now, that expectation is met with “also if the money is good.” Which stinks, but it is what it is.
So we look internationally. La Salle’s 2023-24 roster had seven international players on it. Four of those guys didn’t play more than 30 minutes in the season so let’s not talk about them. Of La Salle’s eight “contributors”, three were international guys not eligible (I think) for NIL deals. But one left. And how good are the other two? Is La Salle going to be Iona of the early aughts? Just bringing in international players? Is that going to fit in North Philadelphia? In the Big Five? Are you going to be able to have a fan response to that?
So this is where I just say it. I don’t think La Salle should play the game. Play basketball, but don’t play the “give a ton of money to the best guy” game. Because what does it get you. You give all the money to Brickus and you have a sub-six-foot guard with a couple losing seasons and a third-team All-A10. You give it all to Shepherd (which I would have) and you have a guy that is not a proven commodity at this level, despite the tools to be so. The number I kept hearing about a goal for the year was $300,000. That doesn’t even get you your best player back. And that is the whole bag.
La Salle isn’t alone in this problem. Here are posts from various message boards:
- Davidson
- George Mason
- Rhode Island,
- George Washington
Nobody has it figured out, so we can continue to do this dance hoping to strike gold for one year only to have that player leave and go somewhere else. So to quote WarGames: “The only way to win is not to play.”
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, JOE!?
I’m not saying to close up shop. I’m saying that La Salle should make the concerted effort to do something different. To not play the lesser version of A10 basketball that we’ve seen over most of the last two decades and break the mold. Try something different. Here’s what I mean.
The Coach
This is not a Fran Dunphy problem. My guy has been doing his thing for 40 years and he’s not the guy to do a different thing. But it would start with the next coach. I’ve been hearing that there’s a lot of discussions about the “next guy” in the building and differing opinions over who that should be and who should be making the best judgment there. Some of it actually doesn’t sound great. I do not know who that should be, but if I was Ash Puri (see the beginning of this, I’m not), the number one thing I’m looking for from a coach would be “how does your system help La Salle win championships with lesser players.” Because that’s what La Salle is relegated to because of both NIL and other circumstance. Players without the athletic attributes. Without the stars. These are the guys that La Salle has been getting and it is going to be the guys La Salle gets until winning becomes consistent and the money shows up.
I’m not going to suggest a guy. I like Davidson’s model, but it has not proven that it can win post-NIL so I don’t even know if it still works. They got the guys that did the thing they wanted their guys to do. Played ok defense and shot a ton of threes. That might not be the perfect solution but have a plan that goes beyond “get players, run flex, get lucky.”
The Players
A buddy of mine and I have a debate over whether the Philadelphia Catholic League is the best high school basketball league in the country. He’ll toss me a different one and we’ll look it up and we always come away with the idea that teams 1-6 or 1-7…the depth and skill of the teams in the league is just unmatched anywhere else. And you know what all of those teams have? Players that don’t all go to Kentucky. Same thing with the local public schools. Or the charter schools. Or the South Jersey schools. Low-Level D1 and local D3 programs are littered with guys that played on these top-tier high school teams but just didn’t land for some reason. You don’t need them to be All A10 guys. You just need them to do what the coach needs them to do to run the system. Can you play a little defense? Can you make three pointers? You’re in.
Name, Image and Likeness
This is the toughest part and the part that I think is the hardest.
Imagine this: La Salle turns NIL into a communist endeavor. You make the team; you get a piece of the pie. Same piece as the next guy, or the other guy. 12 players on the team. 240k in the bank. You’re all getting 20k. Make that the selling point and be done with it. And when I say selling point, I think La Salle should sell the hell out of that idea.
That might be crazy, I don’t know. But I think that La Salle has to play in the NIL game without appearing to be trying to play in the NIL game. Because we’re never going to win it. The good players are going to leave. The future players aren’t going to come. It is just how it is going to be. If you can be forward with it…say “this is what we have and this is what you’ll get”, I think you can move past trying the score the biggest fish and just get the right kind of fish.
I don’t think you can win with no NIL. But I don’t think La Salle should be selling their NIL to get the best players. I think it should be to compensate the players that the coaches think are going to win games. And those players need to be guys that don’t have six-figure offers elsewhere. Because you might get one of those guys, but you probably can’t afford two of them for multiple years.
And this is going to lead to guys leaving. If Darnell Harris showed up tomorrow and shot 48-percent from three…he’s out of here. He’s going somewhere else. And instead of whining and bitching about it, you find the next under-recruited guy that can shoot well. La Salle becomes the minor league for other programs because guess what…it already is and there is nothing outside of a gigantic NIL donation that is going to change that.
My belief? Embrace it for what it is and build a plan around that.
Conclusion
This is it though guys. If La Salle is going to stay in this league and continue to pay worse players less money, they’re going to continue to finish in the bottom four and we’re going to keep playing on Tuesdays and complaining about how much it sucks. Or the school / team tries something different. I’d like to see it before I stop caring about the program. I’m not there yet, but a couple more years of bad finishes and bad records and getting blown out by teams in your conference and it just becomes hard to get up for the team anymore. And if you follow that up with emails for money for the school, the team AND the collective. I don’t know, it sure would see better if there was a plan in place to make something work.
And I trust the people running the show. From everything I hear, both the President and the AD truly get it. I just wonder if they are doing things the way they know how and, like being the GM of a football team, doing weird shit gets you fired. But the people who frequent this board are dwindling. They’re not being replaced. If I had to guess, there wasn’t a single poster hear who graduated in the last five years. I could be wrong. But you’re losing biggest fans without replacing them because there just isn’t a good reason to care if you’re 22-years-old and your college’s most prominent team won two A10 tournament games during your tenure. And thus continues the death spiral.
Thanks for reading. Go Explorers.
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I clicked all the way back on this board to get a better idea of when it started and though the board has been around for two additional years, it sat dormant until October 2012 when the old board went “up in smoke.” The topics we were discussing at that time were:
• La Salle’s weak guard play
• ESPN not picking up La Salle games
• Return of the gold jerseys
• Me posting too many Philahoops articles
This was the beginning of a great era for La Salle basketball, a fact that probably helped this board to remain viable and relatively lively for the next dozen years. Since the magical Sweet Sixteen run, La Salle is on their third coach, our third president, our fourth Athletic Director, baseball has gone and come, we had a global pandemic AND the entire ecosystem of Men’s Basketball recruiting has completely changed.
You look at the posts in the last month or so and they are as such:
• Jack Clark, former Explorer, is taking his third NIL deal for a new team at VCU
• Jhamir Brickus, La Salle’s best player, taking a reported $350k to go to Villanova
• Me, the admin of the message board, relaying a plea for contributions to La Salle’s NIL collective
And a ton of complaining about the current state of the NCAA and the NIL. Everybody is just about through with this all but, admittedly, I think a lot of that stems from La Salle not being able to play the game that other schools they’re competing with are playing. More on that shortly.
I’ve really struggled not with NIL in general, but with La Salle’s attempt to swim in those waters. I think players should be paid and I think “Name, Image and Likeness” is probably the best way to do this. There were a couple posts questioning whether this was actually NIL:
I believed that the collectives were going to work like Super PACs in politics were supposed to, where a group raises money to do what they want with but cannot associate or strategize with the beneficiary of that money. But Super PACs are paying legal bills for former presidents. Their founders have worked in campaigns for current presidents. Direct coordination is happening, and it is against the law. What is going on with NIL Collectives, where Baker Dunleavy explicitly runs the NIL process at Villanova. Where La Salle designates someone to work on who gets what. All of that just stinks of being against how this was supposed to work.
That’s all I’m going to say on that though. This is the world of collegiate athletics, and we can complain about it all we want, but nobody cares what a couple of people on a message board for a bottom third Atlantic 10 team think. Players are getting paid. Alumni and others are paying them. Coaching staffs are deciding who gets what. That’s the baseline. That’s the environment. Let’s move on.
I purposefully waited until the portal closed before I posted this because my beliefs regarding La Salle’s use of the collective do not run in parallel with those working for the school. I understand the need for the money to compete in the Atlantic 10 (have done thousands of words on that already). I understand that to retain La Salle’s best players, there needs to be NIL deals waiting for those that can and will go elsewhere. I understand that this is how things are supposed to work. But I didn’t give any money to the collective. Let me explain why.
I do fine. I have a wife and two kids with a good job and live in a nice house in a good school district. I give a little bit to the school every year because it makes me feel good, but anything more than that would be noticed and until things get better…it’s the way that it is. This year, the school also asked me for money for the new arena, the collective AND La Salle’s Day of Giving. All within a couple months. La Salle’s alumni base is large, but not state school large. It is not as invested as a Penn State. Or an Ivy school. Or even St. Joe’s. This is due to a lot of things including an apathetic development staff that existed for decades and is gone…but La Salle can’t just put out the call for more money and get people to send in the checks.
And the collective came third. It had to in my mind because blindly giving money to a team, one with holes who gets picked to finish last or second-to-last in the Atlantic 10 every year and has no chance to make the NCAA tournament? Seems like good money after bad. And that sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but it is the way that I viewed it. And in talking to a couple people who graduated around me, they agreed. A lot of them had no idea the collective even existed. There’s only so many times you can go to the well and I just didn’t see it.
- - - - - - - - - -
Almost 1000 words of preamble. An introduction to what I think is the state of La Salle Men’s basketball from a macro standpoint. Where I think the NIL world is right now and almost where I think it is going. Now we pivot.
- - - - - - - - - -
I mentioned earlier that there are some people that believe La Salle must do this to be successful. But what defines success? If we’re going to operate with the guidelines that La Salle is staying in the Atlantic 10 (they are), is 10-14 place in the A10 every year…just hoping to make the tournament semifinals…is that success? I’ve been trying to figure out what the analogy is for La Salle basketball in the Atlantic 10. Is it F1? Where La Salle is just trying to move from 16th to 14th in the standings for things to be successful? Is it Premier league soccer (which I know less about) where they just want to finish in the top 8 and ultimately, avoid relegation. Or is it MLB, where they’re a low payroll team looking for a couple surprising starters and a big bat to make a postseason run?
I don’t know. I’d love it to be the latter. I worry that it is one of the formers. So as I was sitting around after I wrote the NIL post, all I could wonder about is whether there was a different way. Is there a way for an Atlantic 10 team to compete without playing the NIL game. Or not playing the NIL game strongly. And I think there is, but it would require a University-level focus that I do not know is possible to pull off. And even then it probably won’t work. So here we go.
We all know that I’ve made my beliefs known about shooting three pointers. I still think that La Salle’s success last year could have been enhanced if they embraced a bombs away mentality. I’m sticking with that, but it is not the core part of my plan. La Salle has, since Giannini was coach, tried to fill its roster with Atlantic 10 players that have flaws. Once, for a two-year period, the stars aligned so that these A10 bodies played beyond their expectations, and we had the best year in decades.
What’s changed since then? The money. While I’m not saying it’s impossible to get a Ramon Galloway or Ty Garland or Earl Pettis in the transfer market for La Salle, getting all of them in that stretch should be viewed as impossible when other teams can cut bigger checks. Retaining Tyreek Duren (a good comp to Brickus) and Jerrell Wright would be impossible. La Salle used to be a place where kids would want to come home and play after a year or two somewhere else. Now, that expectation is met with “also if the money is good.” Which stinks, but it is what it is.
So we look internationally. La Salle’s 2023-24 roster had seven international players on it. Four of those guys didn’t play more than 30 minutes in the season so let’s not talk about them. Of La Salle’s eight “contributors”, three were international guys not eligible (I think) for NIL deals. But one left. And how good are the other two? Is La Salle going to be Iona of the early aughts? Just bringing in international players? Is that going to fit in North Philadelphia? In the Big Five? Are you going to be able to have a fan response to that?
So this is where I just say it. I don’t think La Salle should play the game. Play basketball, but don’t play the “give a ton of money to the best guy” game. Because what does it get you. You give all the money to Brickus and you have a sub-six-foot guard with a couple losing seasons and a third-team All-A10. You give it all to Shepherd (which I would have) and you have a guy that is not a proven commodity at this level, despite the tools to be so. The number I kept hearing about a goal for the year was $300,000. That doesn’t even get you your best player back. And that is the whole bag.
La Salle isn’t alone in this problem. Here are posts from various message boards:
- Davidson
- George Mason
- Rhode Island,
- George Washington
Nobody has it figured out, so we can continue to do this dance hoping to strike gold for one year only to have that player leave and go somewhere else. So to quote WarGames: “The only way to win is not to play.”
BUT WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, JOE!?
I’m not saying to close up shop. I’m saying that La Salle should make the concerted effort to do something different. To not play the lesser version of A10 basketball that we’ve seen over most of the last two decades and break the mold. Try something different. Here’s what I mean.
The Coach
This is not a Fran Dunphy problem. My guy has been doing his thing for 40 years and he’s not the guy to do a different thing. But it would start with the next coach. I’ve been hearing that there’s a lot of discussions about the “next guy” in the building and differing opinions over who that should be and who should be making the best judgment there. Some of it actually doesn’t sound great. I do not know who that should be, but if I was Ash Puri (see the beginning of this, I’m not), the number one thing I’m looking for from a coach would be “how does your system help La Salle win championships with lesser players.” Because that’s what La Salle is relegated to because of both NIL and other circumstance. Players without the athletic attributes. Without the stars. These are the guys that La Salle has been getting and it is going to be the guys La Salle gets until winning becomes consistent and the money shows up.
I’m not going to suggest a guy. I like Davidson’s model, but it has not proven that it can win post-NIL so I don’t even know if it still works. They got the guys that did the thing they wanted their guys to do. Played ok defense and shot a ton of threes. That might not be the perfect solution but have a plan that goes beyond “get players, run flex, get lucky.”
The Players
A buddy of mine and I have a debate over whether the Philadelphia Catholic League is the best high school basketball league in the country. He’ll toss me a different one and we’ll look it up and we always come away with the idea that teams 1-6 or 1-7…the depth and skill of the teams in the league is just unmatched anywhere else. And you know what all of those teams have? Players that don’t all go to Kentucky. Same thing with the local public schools. Or the charter schools. Or the South Jersey schools. Low-Level D1 and local D3 programs are littered with guys that played on these top-tier high school teams but just didn’t land for some reason. You don’t need them to be All A10 guys. You just need them to do what the coach needs them to do to run the system. Can you play a little defense? Can you make three pointers? You’re in.
Name, Image and Likeness
This is the toughest part and the part that I think is the hardest.
Imagine this: La Salle turns NIL into a communist endeavor. You make the team; you get a piece of the pie. Same piece as the next guy, or the other guy. 12 players on the team. 240k in the bank. You’re all getting 20k. Make that the selling point and be done with it. And when I say selling point, I think La Salle should sell the hell out of that idea.
That might be crazy, I don’t know. But I think that La Salle has to play in the NIL game without appearing to be trying to play in the NIL game. Because we’re never going to win it. The good players are going to leave. The future players aren’t going to come. It is just how it is going to be. If you can be forward with it…say “this is what we have and this is what you’ll get”, I think you can move past trying the score the biggest fish and just get the right kind of fish.
I don’t think you can win with no NIL. But I don’t think La Salle should be selling their NIL to get the best players. I think it should be to compensate the players that the coaches think are going to win games. And those players need to be guys that don’t have six-figure offers elsewhere. Because you might get one of those guys, but you probably can’t afford two of them for multiple years.
And this is going to lead to guys leaving. If Darnell Harris showed up tomorrow and shot 48-percent from three…he’s out of here. He’s going somewhere else. And instead of whining and bitching about it, you find the next under-recruited guy that can shoot well. La Salle becomes the minor league for other programs because guess what…it already is and there is nothing outside of a gigantic NIL donation that is going to change that.
My belief? Embrace it for what it is and build a plan around that.
Conclusion
This is it though guys. If La Salle is going to stay in this league and continue to pay worse players less money, they’re going to continue to finish in the bottom four and we’re going to keep playing on Tuesdays and complaining about how much it sucks. Or the school / team tries something different. I’d like to see it before I stop caring about the program. I’m not there yet, but a couple more years of bad finishes and bad records and getting blown out by teams in your conference and it just becomes hard to get up for the team anymore. And if you follow that up with emails for money for the school, the team AND the collective. I don’t know, it sure would see better if there was a plan in place to make something work.
And I trust the people running the show. From everything I hear, both the President and the AD truly get it. I just wonder if they are doing things the way they know how and, like being the GM of a football team, doing weird shit gets you fired. But the people who frequent this board are dwindling. They’re not being replaced. If I had to guess, there wasn’t a single poster hear who graduated in the last five years. I could be wrong. But you’re losing biggest fans without replacing them because there just isn’t a good reason to care if you’re 22-years-old and your college’s most prominent team won two A10 tournament games during your tenure. And thus continues the death spiral.
Thanks for reading. Go Explorers.
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