Around the Interweb - Jules Valentin & Basketball Resolutions

From time to time I find blog posts or articles that are off the beaten path for most Wake Forest News. "Around the Interweb" will be my way for sharing these with you and maybe even commenting on them myself. Enjoy!

I had never paid enough attention to know this, but Julian Valentin (of the men's soccer team) is from Lancaster, PA. His hometown paper recently did a feature on him, mentioning the 25 stitches he received for his facial injury from the national championship game and that Roger Espinoza - the player who put his boot in Valentin's face - called to apologize the next day.

Valentin is now preparing for the MLS draft on January 18th, and although I wish him all the best in his professional endeavors, we can all be glad they won't include a career in web design (Apparently made for a First Year Seminar at Wake. good stuff).

On an entirely different note, Paul Rugani from Blue Devil Hoops wrote a post on New Year's Eve that included "New Year's Resolutions" for each ACC basketball team. Regarding Wake Rugani wrote:

"Stop shooting 3s. Wake is under 30% from beyond the arc, but devote nearly 38% of their shots to the 3. Their most accurate outside shooter is Ish Smith, and that is not a good sign. Particularly problematic have been James Johnson (who has had an otherwise fantastic freshman season thus far) and LD Williams, who are a combined 19 for 83.
Will it be kept? Probably not. The Deacons have some guys who love to shoot the long ball - Harvey Hale, Jamie Skeen, Williams, Johnson - and so the attempts are likely going to stay near the current average of 22.75/game. Wake can only hope that Skeen, Williams, and Hale all see their percentages rise to where they were last season."

As much as it pains me to agree with a Blue Devil, I do agree with Rugani. Our three point shooting has definitely been atrocious and we'd currently be better off without it. Unfortunately I also agree that it's not going to change. The team loves the three-ball and although our inside presence is getting stronger, it's still not strong enough to nullify the need to shoot threes. We should be better at it than we are, but the fact remains that regardless of what we should be doing the shots aren't falling. Hopefully with more time our shooting will improve but it needs to happen in a hurry. Coach always says he wants to be averaging over one point per posession, but when we're shooting under 30% we're definitely not getting over 1 ppp from those posessions. Until we can make 1/3 of them they aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. Something's gotta give.

That's all I got for this installment of "Around the Interweb." Hopefully I'll find good material regularly to keep it going!