ATLeagle {l Wrote}:Donahue can manage a game, but to say we are on the same path as Skinner is premature. Troy Bell was a game-changer. Rahon and Hanlon are nice players, but neither are going to have Bell's impact. The team played better but you cannot hold onto moral victories and lose to Bryant in the same season.
I completely disagree. I by no means believe Donahue has shown he will achieve Skinner's results. I do however think the parallels by season show that anyone lauding Skinner's tenure and therefore effectively adopting his trajectory to competitiveness as acceptable is either dishonest or stupid if they are judging Donahue to be a failure already.
Obviously, hindsight shows Bell (freshman year was 2nd in bigeast in pts), to be a top 5 all time BC player (best I've seen) and my opinion is that neither Rahon (6th in assists in the ACC so far this season) nor Hanlan (16th in scoring, 22nd in assists, 31st in rebounding, nor Anderson (he is an impressive 4th in pts/game and 3rd in rebounding, which is an aside because he is not a freshman but I didn't realize how good his numbers were) will get to that level. Why I don't see this is fatal is that you have one likely All ACC player in Anderson (if he keeps this up its a virtual lock) and two that could be at some point in their careers in Hanlan and Rahon (less confident but they will be very solid). Troy had nothing like that as a supporting cast. Uka was a very good undersized big man who really did an awesome job, but it took awhile, I mentioned this in another post but I think a healthy Clifford could project to be a superior player. Harley, X and Walls were not on the level of what I expect Rahon and Hanlan to be. So yes, Bell was a game-changer but that doesn't defeat the comparison in my opinion, it would if I was saying Donahue will see better results than Skinner as opposed to saying it is dumb to discount progress so far.
I have two comments on the Bryan loss. 1) the best player was injured and ineffective, this is a reality and if Bell was hurt against a lesser opponent in 1999 I find it likely the same thing would likely have happened; 2) I don't really understand why a bad loss means you can't have a moral victory in the same season. That equation doesn't make sense to me. Again it is a rebuttal of something no one has said (except maybe the shaddix/bceaglesfan coalition). They have not proven they are going to be good yet, but CAG's post that NC State was a disappointing effort makes no sense to me. This team is so far ahead of last year. The question at this point is whether last year was so awful that it doesn't matter. I say I don't know yet.