It’s never too early for next year.
With freshmen forwards Jake O’Brien and Jeff Pelage settling into a now veteran-laden roster — all healthy this preseason — Boston University men’s basketball coach Dennis Wolff is keeping an eye on the future.
With senior guards Matt Wolff and Marques Johnson and juniors Corey Lowe, Carlos Strong and Tyler Morris all poised to move on, the Terriers plan to avoid entering a talent debt and have reloaded their backcourt, securing verbal commitments from B.J. Bailey (Mays Landing, N.J.) and Daniel Munoz (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) pending admission to BU.
Bailey, a shifty 6-foot-3 combo guard from Holy Spirit High School, averaged 9.8 points and 3.53 assists per game on the way to a 27-3 record and a Cape-Atlantic League championship — but as they tend to do, the numbers fall short of describing talent.
“We had two big kids last year,” Holy Spirit assistant coach Kyle Dyne said, “about 6-foot-8, 6-foot-9, and we had [B.J.] there to distribute the ball to them. This year now he’s the main guy. We moved him over to shooting guard to get him more shots.”
The team is not only moving Bailey to shooting guard, but changing the entire offense from post-oriented sets to spread-and-run. The more shots this affords him, the more the points go up. And in the world of high school basketball, more points means greater pedigree, all the more emphasizing the importance of earning a player’s interest early.
Wanting to stay closer to home, Bailey had reservations about Boston, but Dyne said no city came close to it in Bailey’s reviews. It was not just because of the refurbished Commonwealth Avenue.
“I liked [Wolff] a lot.” Bailey said. “With some coaches it seems like they don’t care about their players, but he wasn’t like that. He was into me, and he spent a lot of time and showed that he wanted me to go to school.”
It’s not hard to see why.
Bailey, who Dyne said consistently takes on the challenge of guarding the other team’s best player, does not hesitate to look you straight in the eye and release some music for any coach’s ears.
“I am every day. I do what I am required to do,” he said.
Attitude is one thing — one very important thing — but just as it does at every level, it always comes down to what happens on the court.
“Physically, they’re on a different level than me,” Bailey said of the current Terriers. “They’re pretty good, though I think I can play with them.”
High praise was not hard to come by.
“He really has it all. He shoots the ball extremely well from the outside. He’s a very good slasher. He’s got that ability to, [at] the rim, just be able to hang and adjust and move to get the ball up,” Dyne said, adding that the ball usually winds up in Bailey’s hands during crunch time.
Joining Bailey in what could – if both are accepted – become the Terrier backcourt of the future is Munoz from St. Thomas Aquinas High School. A “true” point guard at 6-foot-1, Munoz is described on his school’s website as, “A good floor leader with a superior skill set and basketball IQ. He has deceptive quickness with the ability to go by defenders.”
The future may be a fickle creature, but with Bailey and Munoz, the Terriers are doing what they can to make sure that, at the very least, their deck will not run out of cards. The hope is, however, that it is stacked with aces.
