(And I remember one conference game–against whom, I can’t remember–where Daye took the ball at the top of the arc, crossed over his defender, drove the lane, then gave a wrap-around pass to an open teammate. On my old blog I called him El Fenomeno for just those kinds of plays.)

Daye in my opinion was under-utilized at Gonzaga, a victim of the team not having much of an identity on offense. The biggest misconception about Daye is that he is a power forward. He’s not. He’s a small forward. He played the position is whole life and the reason people thought he was a power forward was because of his height. The same thing is going on in Detroit. Kuester wanted to play him at power forward, but he doesn’t have the body or instincts to play the position. Once they moved him to the wing though, he has thrived and has played his much more natural game around the perimter than down in the post.

Yes, Daye came with a lot of hype, but there were a lot of games he came out and showed that if he played his natural position, he could have dominated more. I also agree with Scott that Daye would be unreal on this team. People forget about the matchup problems he presented for teams and how good he was at blocking shots (not a good overall defender, but great at blocking shots). It’s a shame people hated on him all the time, all because of stupid reasons really.

In my opinion, I think the disappointment concerning Davis and Kong stems more from us Gonzaga fans overvaluing a lot of these Canadian recruits without thinking about the jumps they are going to make at the American collegiate level (which in my opinion, is a really big jump, more than any other country, because other countries, European ones in particular, have very competitive youth leagues without any practice limits).

As for Daye, I think most Joes hated him because they thought he was a whiny punk on the court. Throwing his hands up in disgust, getting a sour look on his face at every foul, etc. Very much “un-Zag like.” (Even though Mark Few’s the king of sour looks at ever foul.) And I think the fact that he’s playing significant minutes in the NBA now makes them forget that he didn’t live up to their expectations at GU. (By the way, if he were a senior on this team, this team would be incredible and about three current players would be having lights-out seasons.)

All that is primarily to agree with you, of course, not to quibble with the awesomeness of the column. But I suspect this is something we just have to live with, but also be mean to and quash at any given opportunity.

On a different note, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Austin Daye. Isn’t he a perfect example of someone who got character-raped by JZF on account of not fulfilling sky-high expectations? Speaking for myself, I remember thinking of him in some sort of algorithm that went “Austin Daye is similar to but less than Kevin Durant. Kevin Durant fries my brain with his awesomeness, so if we just downgrade that a little, Austin Daye ought to be a pretty awesome first-team all-American some time soon.” But, although he was very very good, he never really lit it up. I was sad and lived with it; others hate him for it and go to sleep clutching David Pendergraph dolls. So it goes.

Gray was WA player of the year in high school. Not to say his career at GU was disappointing, but if you looked back at all the hype when he was coming in you’d think it was.

With all that said I’m still excited to see GBJ play (partially because he’s an in state recruit). I’m just not going to cuss him out if he doesn’t live up to the hype.