Morning Stock Report: April 16, 2019
Happy Tuesday, Topper fans (or non Topper fans. I’m not here to judge. I’m just a blogger trying to get people to read us).
Happy Tuesday, Topper fans (or non Topper fans. I’m not here to judge. I’m just a blogger trying to get people to read us).
Here’s who’s hot and who’s not across WKU athletics.
Rising
Justin Johnson stock
Justin Johnson is coming back to the states to play basketball as he was announced as one of the newest members of the West Virginia Wildcats for The Basketball Tournament to be played later this summer.
We haven’t given him nearly enough coverage with his overseas season, but Johnson has lit it up in Italy, ranking in the top five in just about every category for his club.
Anderson Miller
I wanted to give Miller some love last week, but it’s still so early in the minor league season that it’s hard to gauge how things are going. And, while it’s still early, Miller is off to a nice start here in the early stages of the season.
With the Double-A Northwest Arkansas naturals, where he spent all of 2018 (120 games), Miller is slashing .360/.429/.400 with an RBI, four stolen bases and four runs scored.
To open the year, Miller has logged hits in six of the season's first eight games and owns the second-best batting average on the Naturals.
Falling
We have our first reader-submitted stock, coming from a great friend of the blog in Rob Brown.
This is actually something I wanted to touch on last week with the departure of Dalano Banton but since I didn’t this is a great way to.
WKU Point Guard play
When Lamonte Bearden sat for the first half of the 2018/19 season, Banton looked far and away the most comfortable running the point. He didn’t always turn in the smoothest performance, but the offense seemed to flow better when he was at the 1.
Now, the Tops are left with the following options at point:
Jared Savage
Josh Anderson
Jeremiah Gambrell
Taveion Hollingsworth
Jake Ohmer
Patrick Murphy
Of those six players, three saw healthy minutes in 2018/19 and two were given the reigns at PG, Anderson and Hollingsworth, and neither looked great.
I don’t know what Murphy has up his sleeve, or if he’s even a point guard, but I’d like to see Stansbury give Gambrell a shot at running the one, at least to start the next campaign. Only saw action in four games and played more than three minutes once, and being hurt on a team where you could learn from a guy like Lamonte Bearden is a tough pill to swallow, but Gambrell has the most upside at the position, even if he remains a raw body due to lost time a season ago.
I’d be more than happy to be proven pleasantly wrong about Anderson and Hollingsworth; I’d actually love if Anderson, especially, turned into a point guard with how explosive and athletic he is.
I’m not quite saying the point guard position is doomed, because we have no idea what the 2019/20 squad will look like (could Harlan Jackson turn into a point guard? Imagine the shooting percentages with him and a hot Ohmer) but as we head into the summer, it’s by far the Tops’ most pressing need on the floor.