Two things that everyone I know seems to have an opinion about: Barack Obama and Eric Gordon. And it turns out that even Obama has his two cents to offer on Young EJ, recently telling the Indianapolis Star that "he could use some guidance." What does Sen. Obama believe Gordon needs to receive guidance about? Does he believe that Gordon needed better advice about whether or not to enter the NBA? Gordon seems determined to do so, and despite fading down the stretch of the season, he is still projected as a top 10 pick. It is true that Gordon's shooting accuracy and turnover rate were atrocious during the last seven games of the season. Was it due to the loss of benevolent dictator Kelvin Sampson? The result of having played almost every minute of every game of a more grueling schedule than he was used to? Perhaps the fact that we recently learned, that his wrist was actually broken the entire time he claimed it was just sprained, that caused him to lose the incredible form he exhibited over the first ten games or so of the season. Maybe Senator Obama was speaking as an Illinois resident (and presumably an Illini fan) who thinks EJ got bad advice about reneging on a commitment to Bruce Webber to play for his home state school. Who knows? All I know is that this is the guy we got, and he was a damn special player:
I can think of a few NBA teams that might like to have a freakish athlete like this on their roster. The NBA drafts on potential, otherwise Tyler Hansbrough and Brandon Rush would be top-five picks. And as far as potential goes, Gordon has it and then some.
*Thanks to Young Illiniwek for brining the Obama quote to GDB's attention.
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This probably will not go over well here, but EJ's season at IU just reinforced that he should have gone to Illinois. Yeah, Illinois sucked this year and would not have been that great with him. However, Sampson has no track record of developing guards and that continued this year. EJ showed no improvement from the time he got to IU to the end of the season. He was an incredible player when the season first started and left as a very good player.
His development was obviously hindered by a wrist injury that was more serious than we knew.
No reason to come back next year when there is going to be such a massive rebuilding effort going on. No one is impressed when you drop 40 on someone in the first round of the NIT.
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