I feel for the kid and it's hard to really blame the staff for this one. An Abdul Lewis-like guy would be ideal.
This kid gets seriously injured and then the staff offers him a scholarship? It’s because of incredibly dumb shit like this that the team didn’t have any damn size last year.
Unsurprisingly this is complete BS on multiple levels.
The staff offered him well before his injury. He committed in June of 2016. He got injured in May of 2017, a full 11 months after he committed to St. John's.
He then enrolled at St John's one year early in late August of 2017. This is because the team had a open scholarship they were not going to fill for the 17-18. If you want to blame the staff for that, that's fine, but don't claim that him being on the roster prevented them from getting a big. Had that 13th scholarship been claimed by another player before late August of last year then the staff would not have had Diakite come to SJU a year early.
The staff is not to blame for giving him a scholarship. But here is something to chew on, SJU had 3 kids that signed scholarship papers as part of its 2017 class. Zach Brown, Sid Wilson and Diakite. Combined they will have played 0 minutes for SJU. From 1 class. Whiffing like that on top of missing out on target after top target for 2017 and 2018 is going to rightly bring about criticism.
Better produce this year and next...
I agree. The staff going after Brown in lieu of other options was a huge and avoidable mistake and they deserve all the criticism they get for it and then some. I'm not sure people realize how much that set the program back.
Wilson is a tough case as he was here when the semester started and then left. That also set the program back as he would have been a key bench player for us last season, but to me this one is only partially on the staff as I don't know how they could have handled it any differently.
The staff did 0% wrong in regards to Diakite. He was a top 100 player before the injury. They brought him a year only because they had the scholarship open anyway and now he's leaving hopefully to open the scholarship for somebody that can be used this year. Had they not had an open scholarship in late August of last year it would have been likely that he never stepped foot on campus as a SJU student at all.
Again, there is plenty to criticize the staff about. How they handled Diakite is not one of them.