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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

John Blanchette: It never quite stuck


Local fans will be left wondering what else Rodney Stuckey could have accomplished in an EWU uniform. 
 (File / The Spokesman-Review)
John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review

Our ad hoc committee for basketball debate and beverage consumption has kicked this around more than once – the socio-sportological notion of somehow importing the nation’s top high school basketball player and plopping him down in the middle of, oh, the Bi-County League.

We imagined Wilt-in-1962ish statistics, of course, but mostly the sheer spectacle of it.

What we failed to grasp is that we were already seeing it, after a fashion, in the presence of Rodney Stuckey at Eastern Washington University.

Now that experiment is done – Stuckey having come to the inarguable conclusion that further hoop endeavors at EWU would be either redundant or irrelevant, or both. The would-have-been-junior at Eastern has signed with an agent – the point-of-no-return for the National Basketball Association draft, in which he will be selected somewhere between first and last (that’s my mock draft).

Music appreciation isn’t the same without Mozart, and so losing Stuckey’s considerable entertainment value is regrettable, especially in the depressed state of basketball in the Big Sky Conference. But if the research he and his advisors have done pans out, then EWU will find itself on the NBA map and that’s the kind of thing that makes geography fun.

The TV will be on and Hubie Brown will be going on and on about something and Rodney will hit a jumper and you’ll say to your buddy, “Hey, that’s Eastern’s guy.”

Priceless, in its own way. To say nothing of the more tangible benefits for Stuckey.

But there is, of course, a more sobering thought – the fact that the most gifted player in the school’s history just finished a two-year hitch and the Eagles used the time to get almost nothing meaningful done. And, yes, that includes the player, too.

As lab experiments go, this one blew up – or fizzled, rather – and it’s hard to know exactly why.

Yes, the Eagles crawled back from an 8-20 blemish after the giddy NCAA tournament year of 2004 to go 15-15 when Stuckey was a freshman. But in Stuckey II, Eastern didn’t even qualify for the six-team Big Sky postseason, an embarrassment made even greater when you know that one of the other two teams that didn’t wasn’t even eligible.

Guys from other teams will be in rec league before Rodney’s out of the NBA, but they’ll always be able to say they went played deeper into March. Stuckey will have the paycheck, and they’ll have their pride.

The real insult came afterward, when the conference MVP award that Stuckey won as a freshman was handed to Weber State’s David Patten, a 14-point-a-game plugger who hadn’t even been honorable mention the year before. But what were the Big Sky’s coaches to do? The trophy says “valuable” on it. EWU could have finished out of the money without Stuckey, too – even if he was the one guy in the conference nobody could guard straight up.

Surely this had to be troubling to someone out at Eastern and I’m guessing it was to coach Mike Burns, who both had the good fortune and did the diligent work to land Stuckey in the first place.

The sad circumstance is that, their best efforts notwithstanding, Burns and Stuckey let each other down.

Eastern was never going to be able to recruit five Stuckeys, but there was a responsibility to try to assemble a cast of players who could make one another better and that – despite the in-house claims that the Eagles had never had such a collection of talent – obviously never happened.

In fact, there has actually been a talent drain. Before Stuckey’s freshman year, two of the Eagles’ best players transferred – one becoming an all-conference player and the other who will next year, in better leagues. This year, Burns’ most prized freshman – 25 starts say so – has bailed, similarly disenchanted.

That happens in every program, at least to a point, but the context here is surely a concern.

As for Stuckey, his classroom achievements and style of play argue strongly against the notion that he was a selfish player. But there were more subtle suggestions that maybe he thought he was the one in charge, from his body language during games and timeouts to at least one very telling second-guess in the press about how players were being deployed.

Teamwork extends beyond the end lines. Always has.

In the end, regardless of what the NBA was telling him, there was no reason for Rodney Stuckey to come back, except for a diploma. There is no indication the chemistry, or lack thereof, was going to change. He wasn’t going to be challenged – not by the competition and not by his program. Total accountability was never going to be a part of the equation.

And that’s too bad. But what will be missed in Cheney is the possibility of something great, and nothing more.

The argument over whether Rodney Stuckey would have done himself more good by sticking around for another year as an Eagle misses the point. The question is, did he really help himself coming in the first place?