Friday, December 18, 2015

UNLV's Stephen Zimmerman -- unfortunately, the Rebels aren't playing here in 2016

Ken Pomeroy calling it as he sees it: "#64 Arizona State 66, #62 UNLV 56 (4.2%), Wednesday. A lot of smart basketball people say UNLV is “talented”. To my knowledge, basketball is the only vocation where saying one is talented does not mean one has ability. If an artist was constantly putting out crappy works of art, we wouldn’t say that artist was talented. If a singer made our ears hurt we wouldn’t say that singer was talented. Yet Stephen Zimmerman is making 42% of his 2’s and people call him talented. Look, Zimmerman will eventually make many dollars playing basketball, probably in the world’s best league. And at some point it will be appropriate to call him talented. But right now he is still learning. Sadly for Dave Rice, he will probably not be coaching Zimmerman when he regularly demonstrates talent. Anyway, this was not Zimmerman’s best work (though with nine points he was UNLV’s leading scorer), and Arizona State overcame a 14-point deficit with 16:48 left to win easily, outscoring the Rebels 35-11 the rest of the way."

It would be of great benefit to all parties involved if the 7-foot Zimmerman played with a plus point guard but that's not the reality this season at least. Besides the basketball education that the Nevada coaching staff in trying to impart to the freshman, Zimmerman needs to physical up in order to reach his full potential. It appears now that he's Dirk Nowitski-very lite but, all in all, he's just in the first half of his initial season of college ball.

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