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BENNETT'S MINUTES: So what's next for Jalen Moore?
Jalen Moore has a lot of really important things in his life coming up in the next couple of months.
He will play in some all-star games, still needs to pick a college and also needs to finish out his senior year.
But he’s tired, and those things are going to have to wait a little while.
“I’m not sure about college yet,” Moore said after Saturday’s regional championship game, which Cloverdale lost 58-52 to Indianapolis Scecina. “I want to take it slow. I want to get away from basketball for at least 2-3 weeks and just relax. My body is worn out from this year.”
Here is a look at topics pertinent to Moore:
The legacy
Moore finished his career with the third-highest single-season total in state history with 1,033 points.
There is a chance he could get bumped down a notch by New Albany’s Romeo Langford, who is 90 points behind Moore. Langford’s squad will play top-ranked and undefeated Warren Central in Saturday’s Seymour Semistate.
If the Bulldogs win both that game and the state championship game a week later against either Carmel or South Bend Riley, and Langford averages more than 45 points per game, he will pass Moore on that list.
Moore’s total of 2,440 points ranks him 11th all-time in state history, just two spots and 56 points behind former Clover teammate Cooper Neese.
Cloverdale is the only school with two of the top 11 career scorers.
The near future
Although anyone who knows Moore and his work ethic would guarantee that his self-imposed break from basketball won’t actually last anywhere near three weeks, Moore doesn’t have a planned activity until April 7.
That day, he will compete in the North-South Indiana All-Star Classic at Martinsville (7 p.m. tipoff).
There are plenty of other all-star games that dot the schedule, and he will likely hear from others as they approach.
The only statistical race still ongoing, besides the single-season record, is the race for the state’s leading scorer. Not surprisingly, Langford is also the opponent in that endeavor.
Langford has scored 923 points in 26 games for an average of 35.5 points per game, while Moore finished with 1,033 points in 28 games for a 36.8 average.
Should Langford get the 91 points he needs to pass Moore for the single-season record, he would also surpass his scoring average.
Last year, Langford finished first at 28.7 points per game and Moore was fourth at 25.7.
Indiana All-Stars
One of those future possibilities is the Indiana All-Star team.
Many people from all walks of my life ask about Moore’s chances for making the Indiana All-Star team. By getting so many questions, there appears to be some doubt about his chances.
I guess my question would be: How can he not make it?
Being the state’s leading scorer, if that happens, is no guarantee. Since 1980, 13 players who have led the state in scoring have not made the all-star team. Several of the ones who did have gone to play in the NBA, such as Steve Alford, George Hill, Eric Gordon and Tyler Zeller.
But the 1,000-point season is much more favorable for Moore. The two players ahead of him on that list were both named Mr. Basketball (Dave Shepherd and Alford). Of the other two players to reach that milestone, George McGinnis was also Mr. Basketball and Trevon Bluiett was runnerup.
Moore isn’t going to win Mr. Basketball. The purchase order for Langford’s trophy was probably sent in last year or the year before.
But based on the few players in the history who have hit this number, this statistic definitely works in his favor.
To be fair, scoring records these days are a little easier to come by than they used to be. Besides the advent of the 3-point field goal, players now play in far more games than before. A previous limit of 20 regular-season games has been raised by 10 percent to 22, and up to two additional games can be played beyond that number in a mid-season tourney.
Besides Moore and Langford, four other players reached the 2,000 point plateau this year and another just missed.
Still, his career numbers surpass all of those players except Langford and Purdue-bound Eric Hunter Jr. of Indianapolis Tindley.
“I’m looking forward to playing in all-star games,” Moore said Saturday, “whether it’s the senior All-Stars or some of the other ones. If I get picked, I do; if I don’t, I don’t.”
Like several of Moore’s opposing coaches this season, Cloverdale coach Patrick Rady has no doubt about Moore’s candidacy.
“Jalen Moore is an Indiana All-Star in my book,” he said. “His body of work speaks for itself, and I think hopefully the committee will look at the whole body of work. We did everything we could to strengthen our schedule, and this is the farthest Cloverdale has been in 35 years. What he did is a big part of that.
“After what he has done over the past three years, he deserves to be an Indiana All-Star.”
Hoosier Basketball Magazine sponsors a Top 60 workout in April prior to the selection of the team, and he’s a lock to be chosen for it.
College choice
Moore’s list of offers still includes Olney Central College and Lincoln Trail College, which are both junior colleges in Illinois.
IUPUI coach Jason Gardner was at Saturday’s regional, watching Moore and Scecina’s Manuel Brown play both games. Indiana State and Ball State have also both inquired.
Eastern Kentucky was also interested earlier this year, but its coach was fired after the recent season.
A new entrant in the hunt is Sante Fe College in Gainesville, Fla. Its coach is from Indiana, and likes to recruit players from his home state.
“I’m really looking forward to playing college basketball and continuing my legacy,” he said. “I’m starting to see more colleges. At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t getting much interest.”
Similar to when opposing student sections chanted “overrated” and other things, Moore admits he has taken personally the lack of college interest in relation to his production.
“I have put in so much time on the court and in the weight room,” he said. “It just continued to make me want to go even harder and harder. I know I’m underrated. I know I am. I don’t care what anybody says.
“I’m never going to settle, wherever I get a scholarship,” Moore added. “I’m going to play as hard as I can and work as hard as I can.”
Moore’s size may work against him in the eyes of some coaches. What they have to decide is if his quickness, use of both hands and ability to draw fouls to get free throws outweighs that unchangeable factor.
A comparable player in many ways would be sophomore guard Jordan Barnes of Indiana State, a native of St. Louis. Barnes stands 5-foot-8 and weighs 152 pounds, relatively close to Moore’s numbers.
One huge difference between the two players is that Barnes hit 41.8 percent of his 3-pointers and made an average of 3.7 treys made per game — fourth best in the nation.
Moore, meanwhile, hit 59 of 196 from 3-point range this year for 30 percent. He was considerably better on Saturday, making 5 of 10 between the two games against Scecina and Shenandoah — two of the best defenses he faced all season.
I think a year or two at junior college, to prove he can defend much bigger guards and boost that 3-point percentage, would be the best scenario for him — and I hope it’s at Olney.
OCC coach Mike Burris has been to seven or eight Cloverdale games this year, and when he puts that much interest into a player both sides always benefit.
This year’s OCC point guard, Josiah Wallace of Marshall (Ill.), was an all-region player and is headed to Eastern Illinois next year.
Hopefully Moore is the next in that line of successes.
Hoop notes
• After a whirlwind of wall-to-wall sports coverage over the past six or seven months, I will finally be able to take some time off over the next week.
Still going to get my hoop fix on Saturday, watching Scecina vs. Forest Park and Danville vs. Evansville Bosse in the Washington Semistate at the Hatchet House — one of my favorite gyms.
It’s also no accident that this time off coincides with the start of the NCAA tourney. The event has become, in my eyes, similar to the Academy Awards in some ways.
Instead of awards being given to movies I’ve never heard of, I watch games of teams whose players I have mostly never seen before.
There are always a few who stick out as being interesting to watch, and I join their bandwagons from afar.
My “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon” lineage is fair for this year’s tourney.
Ironically, two former Indiana State assistant coaches I know — Clemson’s Dick Bender and New Mexico State’s Lou Gudino — play against each other in the first round at San Diego.
Another former player of mine, Mike Roberts, is the associate head coach at North Carolina-Greensboro and is making his first NCAA tourney appearance.
Bender also has a DePauw connection, serving an assistant coach for the Tigers in their national runnerup season. One of the players on that team was Brad Brownell, now the Clemson head coach.
• Interestingly enough, 15 of the 16 teams in last year’s eight semistate games have been eliminated, with only Evansville Bosse still alive.
All eight semistate games this weekend can be seen at ihsaatv.org.
Besides the 4A semistate matchups mentioned earlier, here are the other games:
3A — Culver Academy (21-6) vs. New Castle (27-2) at Lafayette; Danville (22-4) vs. Evansville Bosse (24-4) at Washington.
2A —Westview (28-1) vs. Oak HIll (24-5) at Huntington; Indianapolis Scecina (19-9) vs. Forest Park (24-4) at Washington.
1A — Fort Wayne Blackhawk (26-2) vs. Southwood (24-3) at Huntington; Morristown (26-2) vs. Barr-Reeve (24-4) at Seymour.
• Lafayette Jeff coach Scott Radeker was fired recently after recording a 17-8 season with the Bronchos. He went 97-88 in eight years there.
If that name sounds familiar, he was a highly-successful coach at North Montgomery prior to going to Lafayette.
Interestingly enough, North Montgomery coach Eric Danforth resigned after the season due to health reasons.
Speculation has already begun about whether Radeker would be interested in a return to the helm of the Chargers.