Potential not all you get with Tiny Gallon
Published: 5/20/2010 8:09 AM
Last Modified: 5/20/2010 8:09 AM
Just a couple weeks after Blake Griffin went No. 1 in the 2009 NBA draft, Oklahoma basketball followers might have read this passage about Tiny Gallon and felt a little better about the Sooners' future...
"At a svelte 6-9, 290-pounds, Gallon may be the most versatile player his size that the college game has seen in a decade," wrote Joey Whelan of SLAM Magazine. "Blessed with quick feet, soft hands and a shooting touch that makes him a consistent perimeter threat, the Oklahoma recruit looks like he stole half of his moves from a player half his size. Oklahoma head coach Jeff Capel has already told the McDonald’s All-American that when he finds himself covered by slower big men to take his defenders out on the wing where he can beat them off the dribble. Imagine that, the biggest man on the floor draining threes and burning opponents on the bounce."
A year later, OU fans are still trying to imagine that.
Gallon drained four threes as a Sooner freshman. He burned oppoenents on the bounce a lot more often, but not enough to make anyone think he was setting some kind of versatility standard.
You didn't see that, or much of anything else for that matter, in Gallon's scoreless game against Missouri. Or in 4-point efforts against Texas and Colorado. Or in OU's game at Oklahoma State, which Gallon missed altogether because of a suspension.
There were flashes of the potential Whelan and so many others saw in Gallon on his road to Norman. The seven double-doubles, including the 23-point/15-rebound performance against Baylor late in the season, were impressive. You'd see that and leave the arena wondering, "Now why can't the kid dial in like that more often?"
Maybe it had a lot to do with another passage in Whelan's article: "Just eight months before Tiny would take the floor at the BankUnited Center in Miami for the McDonald’s All-American Game, he found himself trying to talk his way back into the school he had left his Houston home to attend just one year prior."
“At one point in the summer (of 2008) I had talked to his mother and I informed Keith that I wasn’t going to allow him to come back to Oak Hill,” Oak Hill Academy basketball coach Steve Smith said in the story. “Some kids have discipline and some kids don’t; he didn’t have very much self discipline to begin with.
“He’s a real good kid, he isn’t into anything bad, he was just lazy."
I bring all of this up not because of the latest installment of the Gallon-Jeffrey Hausinger-Oronde Taliaferro saga you see in today's World. Rather, because of an interesting development in the latest mock draft on ESPN.com.
Gallon is in the first round for the first time that I know of. He's the last pick, No. 30 overall, taken by the Washington Wizards, just after former teammate Willie Warren at No. 29 to Orlando.
"Not every team in the league is a Gallon fan," Chad Ford writes, "but a few teams have him ranked very high. I saw him work out in New York and I can see why. He is skilled, can shoot with NBA range and has a big body."
In a way, we're right back where we were a year ago. And if I'm Wizards president/GM Ernie Grunfeld or any other NBA exec thinking about drafting Gallon, I'm having a long, detailed conversation with Jeff Capel. The Sooners coach knows better than anyone there's more than meets the eye... much more... when it comes to Tiny Gallon.
-- Guerin Emig
Written by
Guerin Emig
Sports Writer
