Basketball: What was supposed to be the "men's CCAA prospects" post

Last week I wrote about some women's basketball players who, by the numbers at least, might be able to make the jump to a higher level of play. Naturally I expected a companion piece to follow on the men.

But as it turns out, all of the qualifying standout players from the '10-11 season fall into one of three categories:

1. Out of eligibility
2. Have already transferred from Lethbridge College to the University of Lethbridge
3. Name is Bol Kong

Group 2 encompasses three players — Dominyc Coward, Morgan Duce, and Logan Reiter — all of whom are projected to put up a PER of about 18 or better (15 being league average). Coward's projected PER (28.7) is best among all CCAA players for which I have stats, and that 28.7 would have put him 6th among players with 300 or more minutes played last year. Maybe a little high, but we'll see how well he does in 2011-12. Duce (21.3) comes in at 43rd, and Reiter's 94th with a 17.9.

Group 1 is, I'm sure, full of many interesting basketball players, but as I am quick to say, this is The CIS Blog, not The Five-Year CCAA Stars Blog, and we must turn our attention elsewhere.

That leaves one Bol Kong. Who has his own label on this site. So let's check in with him. (Refer to the women's post if you need a refresher on the methodology here.)

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Bol Kong
6-6 forward, 4th year, NAIT

Season	Conf	Year	Minutes	Per Game					Per 40		Percentages
				PTS	REB	AST	BLK	STL	PTS	REB	eFG%	USG%
2009-10	NCAA	2nd	389	4.5	1.5	0.6	0.0	0.5	14.3	4.7	57.1%	4.8%
2010-11	ACAC	3rd	656	17.5	6.1	2.2	0.4	2.0	25.6	9.0	59.1%	14.1%
2011-12	CIS	4th	N/A	14.8	4.7	1.9	0.4	2.3	21.6	6.9	57.4%	12.3%

(Kong's listed as 6-8 a guard/forward on the NAIT site and a 6-6 forward on the Gonzaga site. I'm going with the latter.)

Projected PER: 21.8, 40th in CIS.

The Kong saga has much more to it than a line of numbers from NAIT, all due respect to the Ooks. If you're new to it, you can click on the label and read what we've posted, or hop on over to SB Nation's Bol Kong page, or their Gonzaga coverage from The Slipper Still Fits.

Focusing just on basketball for now, he's played at three schools in four years: Douglas College in B.C. in 2007-08, then a redshirt year followed by the year you see above at Gonzaga, and now a year at NAIT. What seems likely is, after he left Spokane, Kong decided to play CCAA for a year since he couldn't go right to CIS from the NCAA. He can of course transfer from an ACAC team to any CIS team, assuming all the academic stuff works out, and we'll see what that means for his last two years of eligibility in Canada.

The projection is based solely on his most recent year; if I included his NCAA stats, he would grade out even better. His effective field-goal percentage puts him among the elite in CIS, and even though he wasn't used much by the Bulldogs, for whatever reason, he still managed to put up 14 or 15 points per 40 minutes against much, much tougher competition than we have up here in modest little Canada.

I don't know why Kong left Gonzaga any more than you do, but when he joined NAIT, his new coach Don Phillips said the following: "There’s probably not a college in Canada that wouldn’t want him, but what I’ve tried to hammer home is the athlete-student approach is done. It has to be student-athlete."

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So that's your projection post for the men's players, essentially summed up by "gee, that Bol Kong is quite the ballplayer."