Interesting comments last week from Dustin Sleva ...
On Shippensburg being picked to finish fourth in the preseason:
"We knew we were better than that, ... it was really us being snubbed for not being recognized as a good basketball school," Sleva said. "IUP has a big, fancy gym and all this money, but they can have all that and we rode out with our five guys looking to use that chip on our shoulder and move forward as underdogs."
Interesting comments last week from Dustin Sleva ...
On Shippensburg being picked to finish fourth in the preseason:
"We knew we were better than that, ... it was really us being snubbed for not being recognized as a good basketball school," Sleva said. "IUP has a big, fancy gym and all this money, but they can have all that and we rode out with our five guys looking to use that chip on our shoulder and move forward as underdogs."
Interesting comments last week from Dustin Sleva ...
On Shippensburg being picked to finish fourth in the preseason:
"We knew we were better than that, ... it was really us being snubbed for not being recognized as a good basketball school," Sleva said. "IUP has a big, fancy gym and all this money, but they can have all that and we rode out with our five guys looking to use that chip on our shoulder and move forward as underdogs."
I'm going to pose an honest question here... Does anybody think Dustin Sleva was never recruited by IUP and he resents that? Could the underlying meaning behind those comments mean that the "big, fancy gym" and the "basketball school" reputation never came calling for his services? He was a great player in high school, and I remember posting links to his highly videos on here saying Joe should be all over him.
Maybe he wasn't..
It just makes sense. I watched Sleva in other games. He didn't act the same way he did in those as he did against IUP. He was emotional and played hard, but that extra curricular stuff and the gestures to the crowd, that stuff wasn't even close to being there.
We posed this question a few months ago... "How did Joe let Sleva out of his backyard?"
Maybe this should have actually been the question...
"Why did Joe not try to keep Sleva in his backyard?"
Ship was awful when he signed there. I could see some resentment. I'd assume Ryan Luther getting the Pitt deal and him ending up at a then lowly Ship didn't sit well, either.
But ... that's not that uncommon. Joe gets every teams best shot.
Ship was the hungrier team despite them blowing huge leads in both IUP games.
In Sleva's defense he took a beating during warmups in that second game. That was a rare jacked up student section and they rode him hard for all 30 minutes of warmups.
His behavior in the first game was very respectful.
Hindsight .... Shame on Joe if he didn't recruit him.
Hindsight aside, there's a pretty good core back next year. Danielak, Hutton and Glover will be seniors. Cobo and Dante enter their junior year and Malik becomes a sophomore. Milo Luciano is supposedly a Dante-style guard and Nkumsah projects as a slightly bigger version of Tevin Hanner.
Obviously the one thing missing on that list is anybody to match-up defensively against Sleva and Haywood Highsmith. IUP doesn't play Shippensburg in the regular season next year but it's highly unlikely to avoid them beyond that point. There's also not a ton of elite speed or shut-down defenders in the six players coming back.
I know most are really focusing on that 2018-19 season. This soon-to-be-announced (highly classified) class is going to tell the tale for 2017-18. My opinion: this is one of Joe's most important incoming classes of his tenure -- not only for this upcoming season but the big 2018-19 season as well.
A few years ago when Cal was going through the downtown sidewalk beating incident, I distinctly remember the iup president telling the media that iup didn't have any problems like that. That condescending attitude has flown back in his face in spades several times since his gloat.
That was President Atwater, and you'll likely get no arguments from IUP faithful--or anyone who had interactions with him, as I unfortunately did--in pointing out that he was an arrogant, self-important, borderline incompetent prig.
As for crime at Cal or IUP, people get all worked up about these events, but in the end the crime statistics on a per capita basis are actually lower than a lot of communities that don't have universities. The few high-profile events, namely homecoming and IUPattys, catch a lot of attention.
As for the troublemakers, plenty of local non-college kids were roaming the streets and filling the sidewalks, including the contingent of skoalboys I observed cruising Philly Streeet, shouting at students--particularly black students--and "rolling coal." The violence sucks, but this kind of thing is the deal with the devil our society makes in return for our collective firearm fetish. I could give a damn about the partying, even if it means cleaning some trash off my lawn (which I didn't have to do because an army of students swarmed through much of the community very early Sunday morning and carried off most of the trash.) But as I said, I don't care about the partying--just leave the guns at home.
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