One school in CT has a dozen NCAA Tournament connections
Putnam Science Academy coach Tom Espinosa sat there at home early Sunday evening with his sons T.J. and Bryce as CBS unveiled the brackets for the men’s NCAA Tournament.
“Maryland pops up and my kids are going, ‘Eric (Ayala) is in!’ ” Espinosa said. “Drake pops us and it’s, ‘Darnell (Brodie) is in!’
They know all the guys. It just kept going. Then my phone started blowing up.”
When the brackets were filled, Espinosa counted 10 of his former players in the tournament. Ten. On Monday, there were addendums. There are 12 with ties to PSA when you count Sean Durugordon, an early January enrollee at Missouri who has yet to play, and Mamadou Diarra, a UConn graduate assistant whose career was cut short by chronic knee problems.
If there is a school around the nation with as many — Brewster, Montverde, another prep? — they are welcome to publicize it. It’s the most PSA ever has had.
“I’m so happy for the kids, obviously,” said Espinosa, who built the program from scratch in 2002. “It’s exciting. We’re proud
of what we’ve done. It couldn’t have happened without the great support of the administration and coaches who worked hard to recruit and develop the players. We’ve been lucky with some great kids who bought into our program.”
UConn fans obviously know about Akok Akok, limited after last year’s Achilles surgery. There’s Ayala, the 6-foot-5 guard who’ll lead Maryland against the Huskies on Saturday. There are Kyle Lofton and Osun Osunniyi at St. Bonaventure. There’s Tyson Etienne, the AAC Co-Player of the Year, at Wichita State. That’s five.
There’s Brodie at Drake, Gabe McGlothan at Grand Canyon, Josh Gray at LSU, Abou Ousmane at North Texas and Vlad Goldin at Texas Tech. That’s 10.
Some are freshman reserves. Some are upperclassman stars. Some guards. Some bigs. Some played on the PSA 2018 national prep champions. Some on the 2020 cochamps (no final game because of COVID). Some played as undergrads at PSA, some as post-grads. From New York to Russia, they show up to the tiny campus on Maple Street in this tiny town in the northeastern corner of the state.
Turkish investors bought the property in 2000 and opened PSA as an all-boys school two years later. When PSA nearly closed in 2015, Dr. Tieqiang Ding saved it. PSA is now co-ed.
To get the full experience, you need to pull up at about 3 o’clock on a September afternoon. Do not expect to be overwhelmed. That’s the beauty of it. You push open the glass door, step through the lobby of what once was an all-girls Catholic high school and enter directly into a gym that you’d expect to host a CYO tournament.
Stage on one end. A line of seats on one side. The players’ benches on the other. And on the new court? Some of the best young players around. The games in the winter certainly draw coaches, but it is September before the college season when the biggest names show for intense intra-squad pickup games.
“It’s exciting for a lot of reasons,” Espinosa said. “We’ve just moved onto campus and just starting to
get going. These pickup games don’t look like pickup games. You don’t have to motivate the kids. What makes it so great is the size of the gym. These coaches people would recognize are sitting there right on top of you watching.”
On a big day there may be 50 from 35 schools gathered. Multiple coaches from a staff will come. If there’s no more room, they stand in the corner or sit up on the stage. Jim Boeheim. Jay Wright. Jim Calhoun. Dan Hurley. Ed Cooley. John Calipari. Sean Miller. Shaka Smart. The list goes on and on. Among the biggest names, Coach K, Rick Pitino and Roy Williams have not been.
Scoochie Smith, who became a star at Dayton, was the first former Mustang to play in the NCAA Tournament. He is a seminal player in program history.
“Scoochie got our name out there and helped us with recruiting,” Espinosa said. “Then Hamidou Diallo and Mamadou Diarra brought us to the level where we could almost get anybody here and win at the highest level.”
Remember how hard UConn chased Diallo before he chose Kentucky and left for the NBA after his freshman season? The 2019 NBA slam dunk champion still could be playing in college if he wanted.
“How crazy is that?” Espinosa said.
Well, he would have gotten Calipari into the tournament.
Lofton, St. Bonaventure’s leading scorer, had 23 points and Osunniyi, the Bonnies’ leading rebounder, had 14 points and 12
rebounds in the A-10 championship victory over VCU. They will play LSU, where Gray is a 7-0 freshman backup.
“Osun had originally committed to La Salle, coming here from a small school in New Jersey,” Espinosa said. “He was sort of a hidden gem. I remember his family coming up, they were so excited. I can tell you Osun really struggled his first semester here. But that second semester he really took off and ended up the MVP of the 2018 national championship game.
“A coach from Merrimack, which was Division II at the time, said we should really look at Kyle. They didn’t offer him, because he couldn’t really shoot it. So Kyle didn’t even have a Division II offer coming out of high school. We thought he was really good. You see where he is now, people are talking NBA radar. Unbelievable. Yeah, the knock on him was he couldn’t shoot.”
Lofton shot over 40 percent on 3s as the point guard on the 2018 national champs and, Espinosa pointed out, he hit four of five 3s against VCU.
Brodie played two years at PSA, struggled to find minutes at Seton Hall and found his stride at Drake. He’s averaging nearly eight points and a team-high 7.2 rebounds. In a play-in game Thursday he will come face to face with Etienne, who’s averaging 17 points for Wichita State.
“Tyson is the hardest worker we have ever had,” Espinosa said. “Special.”
Ayala, who leads Maryland at 14.9 points a game, was one of PSA’s premier guards for two years. Oregon, Memphis, UConn before Espinosa said it kind of backed off, lots of schools wanted him. Syracuse wanted him in the worst way. He chose Maryland. He also chose to do his post-grad year at IMG Academy.
“Over the years, we’ve gotten kids as post-grads after they’d been somewhere else for two years — and vice versa,” Espinosa said. “Being at the same boarding school for three years, it’s almost good for the coaches and players to move on.
“When he called and explained it, we agreed it was best for him. Eric is a great kid. I still talk to him and his mom.”
AAU coaches make recommendations to Espinosa, yet more and more it’s college coaches. PSA will recruit players in late March, April, May. Those are the crazy months. He tries to have a team set by July, saving a couple of spots for the late summer or early fall.
“We get these kids first time away from home, from their families and friends, the city,” Espinosa said. “They go through a lot. There’s adversity. And you’re the one there for them. You grow together. It can be tough. I can’t tell you how many times kids have struggled and wanted to pack and up leave.
“There’s no prom. There are no dances. They’re not with their buddies at home. It’s a whole different life. Most of them have big goals and dreams, so they’ve already sacrificed. This is a different sacrifice. Not just our prep school, if you make it through, you’ve grown a lot as a person, a player, a student.”
On his current team, Bensley Joseph, rated the No. 2 player in New England, is going to Miami. Alexis Reyes: East Carolina. Mohamed Sanogo: Florida International. Nana Owusu-Anane: Brown. Nic Louis-Jacques: Colgate. Bryce Harris: Howard. Elijah Hutchins-Everett: Penn State. Leon Williams: Gardner-Webb. Josh Bascoe: Bucknell.
Espinosa said they were in the dorm Sunday watching the brackets announced. They know they’re next.
NEW YORK — Big Blue and The Big Cat finally have a deal.
Leonard Williams and the Giants agreed on Tuesday to a 3-year, $63 million contract extension with $45 million fully guaranteed, a source told the New York Daily News.
The deal locks up the Giants’ top pass rusher, and it reduces his 2021 salary cap hit to $11 million, according to a source, clearing immediate cap space for the team to spend elsewhere.
Both were necessities and priorities for the Giants, who wanted to secure a key player and needed more money to spend in free agency.
Williams, 26, gets a $21 million average annual salary. Classifying him as an interior lineman, that ties him with the Colts’ DeForest Buckner for second in the league in average annual value behind only Rams four-time defensive player of the year Aaron Donald ($22.5 million).
Classifying Williams as a defensive end ties him for fourth in the league with the Cowboys’ DeMarcus Lawrence ($21 million) behind only the Chargers’ Joey Bosa ($27 million), the Browns’ Myles Garrett ($25 million) and the Bears’ Khalil Mack ($23.5 million).
Williams, acquired in a fall 2019 deadline trade from the Jets, had a career year in his first full season with the Giants.
The former sixth overall pick racked up a careerhigh 111⁄2 sacks and 62 quarterback pressures, per Pro Football Focus, both ranked No. 7 in the NFL.
He added 30 quarterback hits and 57 tackles, including 14 tackles for loss. And he capped the season with a career-high three sacks in a Week 17 win over the Dallas Cowboys, which earned him the NFC’s defensive player of the week award entering his pivotal offseason.
Williams played the 2020 season on the $16.126 million non-exclusive franchise tag after the Giants failed to reach a long-term deal with him last spring.
The team placed the tag on him again last week, this time for a $19.35 million tender, but with the intention of working out a long-term contract the entire time.
Williams’ agents used their ample leverage, however, to get a deal done closer to the Giants’ deadline of 3:59 p.m. Wednesday.
NFL teams have to be cap compliant by that time. So while the Giants could have twisted themselves to get under the cap with that enormous $19 million salary, realistically they needed Williams on a long-term deal to use bonus money and extra years to lower his 2021 hit.
While they went toe-totoe in the Williams negotiations, edge rushers flew off the top of the free-agent
market, with the Giants reportedly striking out on the Rams’ Leonard Floyd.
Now that assistant GM Kevin Abrams got the Williams deal done, the Giants have a clearer idea of exactly what money they have to spend to upgrade the rest of their roster at positions such as receiver, corner, edge, linebacker, returner and offensive line.
In fact, the second that Williams’ deal became public, the Giants also agreed to terms with former Bengals receiver John Ross, 25, on a reported 1-year, $2.5 million deal that includes $1 million guaranteed, per NFL Network.
Dave Gettleman, on one hand, finds some validation in Williams’ production after the GM took a lot of heat for trading a 2020 third-round pick and a 2021 fifth for Williams in October 2019.
On the other hand, Gettleman made that trade trying to jump start his 2-6 Giants in a season that eventually saw head coach Pat Shurmur fired. And then, by failing to get Williams signed last year, the player’s cost went up.
These are the kinds of missteps that can squeeze a salary cap so the Giants can’t afford to retain homegrown talent like defensive tackle Dalvin Tomlinson — even though the competition was just a two-year, $22 million deal from the Minnesota Vikings.
Granted, the NFL’s salary cap shrinking by $15.7 million due to pandemic shortfalls didn’t help, either.
But the Giants also failed to retain Tomlinson when they chose to spread their money around on depth players like RB Devontae Booker (max $2.75 million), DT Austin Johnson ($3 million), TE Levine Toilolo ($1.6 million restructure), WR C.J. Board (TBD minimal salary) and OT Nate Solder (TBD pay cut).
The roster’s depth is an issue and needs addressing, but doing so at the cost of a durable and reliable Giants second-round pick like Tomlinson is tough to swallow.
The Giants’ negotiations with Williams’ camp were difficult in part because of the discrepancies between
Williams’ tag salary and this spring’s free-agent pass rush market — and also because of how Williams defines his position and value.
The franchise tag is $13.88 million this year for defensive tackles and $16 million for defensive ends. The top eight free-agent edge rushers averaged a maximum of $15 million per year on their new deals agreed to Monday.
But Williams’ tag salary as a defensive tackle this year was $19.35 million, as 120% of last year’s $16.126 million tag. That tag could have been $21.34 million if he’d won two outstanding grievances with the NFL players’ union asking to be classified as a defensive end, not a tackle.
And while the top five NFL tackle salaries average $19.6 million, the top five defensive ends average $22.3 million per year. And since Williams is the Giants’ best pass rusher, he believed he should be paid and classified as that.
Williams always has had a strong case in his grievances about position classification, which applies to both his fifth-year option salary with the Jets and Giants in 2019 and his franchise tag with the Giants in 2020.
Williams was drafted as a defensive end out of USC in 2015. He made the Pro Bowl with the Jets as a defensive end in 2016. And he often has played defensive end for James Bettcher and Pat Graham in the Giants’ 3-4 and multiple front schemes the past season and a half.
The Giants knew Williams would cost a lot to sign long-term, but the difference between the $13.88 million defensive tackle tag and that $22.3 million average salary for the NFL’s top five ends provides a good idea of the wide wiggle room that existed in these talks.
Williams’ grievances never were officially filed by the NFLPA, but they also hung over the negotiations as a potential threat of additional leverage. And walking the Giants closer to Wednesday’s cap deadline held the franchise’s feet to the fire.
Thankfully, the deal is done — finally.