Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State coach Scott Nagy figured a player like Mike Daum only comes along once in a coaching career — or at least that’s what he thought before Grant Basile showed up on the Raiders’ recruiting radar.
Daum averaged 15.2 points as a freshman in Nagy’s last season at South Dakota State and then scored 25.1, 23.9 and 25.3 per game his last three years.
He has the seventh-most points in NCAA history with 3,067 — just ahead of Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird and Elvin Hayes. The all-time leader is Pete Maravich with 3,667 (in three seasons).
No one expects that kind of production from the 6-foot-9 Basile, of course, but he has many of the same traits that made Daum a prolific scorer.
“When we recruited Grant, we saw a lot of Mike in Grant,” Nagy said. “Mike was 6-9, had great hands. He struggled his first year, and we redshirted him. Grant’s was a different struggle with an ankle injury (resulting in a medical-redshirt year). But we see a lot of the same things: very talented offensively, and Grant is probably a little better defensively.”
Basile is still working on his first 1,000 points, but his multi-faceted game is giving opponents fits.
