Bam!

Huge win for the Rebels Tuesday night and an even bigger performance by senior sensation guard Bam! Doyne. Bam! who was primarily a role playing bench performer through his Rebel career has stepped up this season to be the Rebels leader in points with a very solid season. I remember watching him as a freshman with a Shistavanen Wolfman friend of mine remarking on his speed and quickness. And the fact he looks like he weights 23 pounds. With shoes on. We thought he could one day be a solid player that played good defense but we never expected him to be the scorer he has become. He lead the Rebs again Tuesday night scoring 23 points and hitting crucial free throws at the end to seal the game.

Bam! has really benefited from Coach Kennedy's change in style of play and he has to get credit for bringing it out in him. Additionally the Rebels have show improvement this year with Kennedy and the future looks promising. The best quote I've heard from concern the fact that we don't have the guard depth he would like to run his system.
So instead he's adapting his system to use what talent he's got. Most notably he has a big man that doesn't run as fast as he'd like in Dwayne Curtis. Yet Dwayne has show that he can be a dominate player. So he tinkered his system to get Dwayne involved. Well it worked as he's having a solid season as well and scored 14 points Tuesday with 8 boards in beating State.

Even more importantly I've always said the number one test to see how good your coach is is when he's able to look at what talent he's got and figure out the best system to maximize the talent. When a coach can only run "his system" its usually a bad sign and you'll loose a lot of games where he's not maximizing potential and playing people out of position. It also shows he has the ability to remain creative and thus invent new ways to score if teams are stopping the regular game plan.




A couple of other Rebels had a pretty big game as well. Todd Abernathy came up huge leading the offense with 10 assists to go with his 19 points. Clarence Sanders also added 22 points playing though the most over used metaphor in sports broadcasting as the ESPN crew commented at least 100 times that his streakiness reminded them of a cheap motel shower as either too hot or too cold. Kenny Williams and his Isaac Hayes beard and Jeremy "funnier than Chris" Parnell mainly help the Rebels by just trying to neutralize their Nemesis Charles Rhodes.