Gary Parrish of CBS Sports has gone ahead and ranked the Top 30 pro prospects for 2009, with Blake Griffin, Demar DeRozan and BJ Mullens as his top three.
Devin Ebanks, an incoming freshman at West Virginia from Long Island City, N.Y., chimes in at No. 24.
West Virginia coach Bob Huggins thinks the 6-foot-9 Ebanks, whose chose the Mountaineers over Memphis, Rutgers and Texas, can eventually fill the role of the departed Joe Alexander, who went No. 8 to the Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA Draft.
“We’re counting on Dev to come in and kind of take up a little bit of the slack of what we lost with Joe,” Huggins said. “We’re not foolish enough to think he’s going to come in and take up where Joe left off because Joe was pretty good at the end of the year and he had such great strength. I think as Devin gets stronger, he’s the same kind of guy. He can play inside and he can play outside. He scores over smaller guys and can take big guys off the bounce like Joe did, so we’ll do a lot of the same things for Dev that we did with Joe.”
Alexander spent three years in college. How long will Ebanks spend? One only?
“He’s going to have to get stronger,” Ebanks said. “I don’t know. He could be one-and done. I’ve never been able to work him out, so I don’t know.”
Time will tell….
