Very Quick Opinion: Starting Venoy Appears a Mistake

I’m not sure how often Coach Romar will reevaluate which point guard he’s going to start this season. He could start Venoy Overton for a few games, see how it works, and make a switch if it’s not. He could also choose to go back and forth, starting whichever player is doing best at a given time. But, I think promoting Venoy Overton from super-sixth-man to starting point guard this early is a mistake, given that Abdul Gaddy will now be the player to come in and spell Venoy, instead of the other way around.

Venoy has always played with an untamed mindset at UW, or at least that’s the mindset I’ve inferred from his play. As last season wore on, everyone watching the team saw Venoy carve out a role for himself — instant energy and hard-nosed defense. It wasn’t that the recklessness we sometimes saw really went away, it was just that the good stuff (defense and intensity) started to outweigh the bad (turnovers and too many ill-advised razzle-dazzle passes).

If our highly-touted freshman point guard was cut from the same mold, it’d make perfect sense to start Venoy. But Abdul Gaddy is being billed as something of an anti-Venoy: more disciplined with the ball, a better floor leader, and with less need to find his own shot. Going from a frenetic, potentially more mistake-prone pace early on to what we assume will be Gaddy’s slightly more deliberate, careful running of the offense seems odd to me, like solving a problem before it exists.

It’s early, and my opinion will most certainly change after seeing both play a few games. But, for the moment, I think Coach Romar is selling short his own brilliant stroke from last season in creating the role he did for Overton, and also risks alienating Gaddy, billed as such a unique talent with a ceiling higher than Venoy’s.