In praise of Wayne Selden

wissox

As many are aware, Wayne has undergone a renaissance in his game. I don’t follow him closely enough to know if this is the result of playing on a pretty downtrodden team, thus more minutes available, or if he’s learned something new, but anyways, here’s my tribute to Wayne, an enigma that memorably made his mark his 3rd and last year at KU.

He was the third and last piece of Self’s best recruiting class of Joel, Wiggs and Wayne. He underwhelmed us his freshman and sophomore years. Gladly this set him up as a BMOC for his junior year. He started out hot. Made a ton of threes, was one of the nations leaders for a while, and we were finally seeing the potential he had.

The thing is, we knew it was there. You don’t get to be a top 20 ranked player and not have a lot of potential. We’d see flashes and then it’d disappear in disappointment. His freshman year ended with a 2 point disappointment against Stanford.

In fact, he had a sophomore slump, shooting under 40% on two’s, and his PPG decreased. Season ended with a 0 point dud against Wichita.

Junior Year Wayne Selden is what I’ll remember. Double figure scoring machine, on a veteran team there was a lot of rock to share so his average of 14 points doesn’t sound amazing, but he played well. He scored 33 against Kentucky in a memorable OT match in the AFH. We’ll all remember the dunk in OT. He averaged 18 a game in 4 tournament games, but ended a third tourney with a disappointing 0-5 from three against champ 'Nova.

We weren’t surprised when he announced he was going pro, but he’d left us wanting for more. Kudos to Wayne Selden, one of my favorite Hawks, at least for a season.