Not a surprise
Whaley knew Carlton would succeed at Houston
Isaiah Whaley was right there with Josh Carlton, literally and figuratively, when Carlton decided he was going to transfer from the UConn men’s basketball team to Houston last spring.
Carlton wasn’t sure about the decision, and in fact, Whaley believes, didn’t want to leave UConn.
“He asked me if it was a good decision,” Whaley told Hearst Connecticut Media on Sunday. “I told him it was. I always told him I thought it was a great fit for him.”
Others didn’t agree, wondering how Carlton would fit in Kelvin Sampson’s system at Houston. The Cougars hadn’t really had a 6-foot-10, back-to-the-basket big like Carlton during their recent run of success.
But Carlton wound up working out perfectly, averaging 11.8 points and a team-high 6.3 rebounds while earning first-team all-AAC honors and helping to lead the Cougars to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight, where they lost to Villanova on Saturday night.
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Whaley said of Carlton’s success. “I actually knew he was going to have a good year for Houston. Josh fits Houston’s system really, really well, because he’s a strong, strong player and gets offensive rebounds, and that’s always been their M.O. I knew he was gonna succeed there, because he’s always been a hard-worker, he’s always been very coachable.”
It wasn’t always an easy process.
“I think he actually really wanted to come back (to UConn),” Whaley noted, “but it wouldn’t have benefitted him as well for him to come back. It really worked out well for both parties.”
Indeed, after backing up freshman Adama Sanogo off the bench as a senior last year, Carlton began this season coming off Houston’s bench.
“At first, I think there were moments where he felt like he should have started right away,” Whaley recalled. “He was kind of doubting his decision, did he make the right decision? But once he started getting more of an opportunity, he started to really embrace it and showcase how good he was.”
Indeed, after two of the Cougars’ top players, Marcus Sasser and Tramon Mark, were lost for the season due to injury, Carlton was inserted into the starting lineup and became an integral part of the team.
Whaley and Tyler Polley, who began their respective UConn careers with Carlton back in 2017, were in
daily contact with Carlton over the past couple of weeks. Most of the conversations had to do with life in general. About the only basketball-related topic Carlton broached with his ex-teammates came prior to the Villanova game.
“We told him, just don’t go for any shot-fakes, because they’re gonna shotfake you to death,” Whaley recalled. “That really was our major advice.”
Sound advice. Ultimately, it didn’t work out as Carlton scored just four points in 14 minutes and Villanova vanquished Houston 50-44, depriving the Cougars of a second straight trip to the Final Four.
After the game, Whaley texted Carlton: “You had a great year, you did your thing.”
Carlton responded, jokingly: “What do we do with this life without college basketball right now?”
“I was like, ‘I don’t know,’” recalled Whaley, whose college hoops career ended with UConn’s firstround NCAA tourney loss to New Mexico State on March 17. “It’s weird, because now you’ve got so much time to yourself.”
For Whaley, that means finishing up his schoolwork, finding an agent and, most of all, getting a chance to rest up after a long season filled with injuries along the way: a sprained wrist for much of the season, a sprained Achilles tendon and sprained ankle early in the season and, of course, that scary fainting spell in the Bahamas that brushed off as simply a matter of not being on top of his nutrition like he should have been.
And for Josh Carlton, it likely means a lot of the same things. Through it all, he can take solace that, after some initial doubts, he made the right decision to transfer from UConn to Houston.
“I think it really worked out really, really well,” Isaiah Whaley added, “for both parties.”
DEVELOPING TALENT
Carlton’s player arc is somewhat emblematic of Hurley and his staff’s accomplishments (and occasional whiffs) in player development. In Hurley’s first season at the helm, Carlton made a huge jump from freshman to sophomore, nearly doubling his scoring and rebound averages and earning AAC Most Improved Player honors. Hurley was rightly very proud of that.
Carlton leveled off after that, however. Once Sanogo arrived on campus in the summer of 2020, he beat Carlton out in practice on an almost daily basis — quite convincingly, according to those who witnessed — and ultimately beat him out for a starting job.
After showing plenty of promise as a freshman, Sanogo became a first-team All-Big East selection as a sophomore and is currently one of five finalists for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Center of the Year Award.
And Carlton went off to Houston, shed several pounds and thrived under Sampson. Win-win.
Could Sanogo and Carlton have co-existed in Storrs? Probably not. As post-up centers with good footwork and deft moves, they boast similar skillsets and probably wouldn’t have meshed well on the same floor. Look at what Purdue did with Zach Edey and Trevion Williams, or Providence with Nate Watson and Ed Crowsell — talented big men who rarely, if ever, shared the court together.
Clogs things up, and pairs together non-3-point shooting threats in a sport that’s become all about shooting the 3.
By and large, Hurley has done a good job in developing talent. James Bouknight was a national top-70 recruit when Hurley & Co. swiped him away before the prying eyes of Kentucky and Duke could catch a glimpse. Two years later, Bouknight was an NBA Draft lottery pick. That’s a lot more impressive development than what schools like Kentucky, Duke and Memphis do, taking in NBA-ready freshmen for one season without much need to develop them.
Hurley has done a good job developing players like Bouknight and Sanogo. Christian Vital, R.J. Cole and Tyrese Martin improved under Hurley’s tutelage. Andre Jackson certainly took a nice leap from his freshman to sophomore year. But Hurley doesn’t always get it right.
Whaley, for instance, was collecting cobwebs at the end of the bench for Hurley’s first 11⁄2 seasons, and who knows if he ever would have gotten a shot had guys like Polley and Akok Akok not been injured and Sidney Wilson not been sent to the dog house.
Hurley also showed a stubborn trust in Brendan Adams over two seasons until it ultimately became apparent Adams just wasn’t going to work out at UConn.
Injuries certainly set back the development of guys like Akok and Alterique Gilbert. Jalen Gaffney and, to a lesser extent, Polley have regressed over the past couple of years.