Beginning Monday, Quade Green will be at the City of Palms Classic in Florida.
That same event also happens to feature Class of 2017 Kentucky targets Hamidou Diallo, Mohamed Bamba and Kevin Knox.
Don’t be surprised if Green tries to play Pied Piper by getting in their collective ear about joining him at Kentucky next season.
“That’s what I think drew Kentucky to him,” Neumann-Goretti coach Carl Arrigale said Thursday on The 4 Quarters Podcast one day after Green dropped 37 points, including 24 after intermission, as his team beat Philadelphia rival Imhotep Charter, 87-73. “I think when they were going around recruiting these other kids, everybody wants to play with him. Everybody loves his mentality and the way he plays.
“So I think he will have some influence with some guys. Him and Mo are pretty close. Mo was at Quade’s announcement the night Quade announced, and I’m sure they’ll catch up down at City of Palms. I know he’s pretty close with Diallo, too. So I think he’s working a little bit behind the scenes. I’m sure he’s made some phone calls and some text messages and some stuff with those guys. He wants some players around him so he can be who he wants to be. So I’m sure he has an idea of who he wants to play with.”
⛽️⛽️ Plan A. @Q_Green1 #8Eye pic.twitter.com/YALY5ecPNd
— 8Eye™ (@JaimeBoyer) December 15, 2016
As first reported by ZAGSBLOG’s Dennis Chambers the night he chose Kentucky, the 6-foot Green said he was going to get to work recruiting Diallo, Bamba and Knox to join him.
Nick Richards, who signed with Kentucky several days before Green and attended the Michigan State-Kentucky game at Madison Square Garden with him, said he can’t wait to play with Green next year, too.
“Right away, I thought national championship, to be honest with you,” a smiling Richards told me Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden.
None of that surprises Arrigale about Green.
“You can see he has respect from guys on the national level,” he said. “He’s a winner, he tries to win every game, he tries to win every play. He wants to win every battle that he’s in out there. So I think guys will want to go play with him, gravitate towards that situation.”
Speaking of winning, Green showed his dominance big-time with his 37-point outing on Tuesday against Rhode Island-bound point guard Daron “Fats” Russell and Imhotep.
“We played on a neutral floor [Wednesday] night, he went for 37, 24 in the second half,” Arrigale said. “They knocked him on the floor almost every chance they got and he kept getting up, kept making plays. In the fourth quarter it was ridiculous. He had a 27-foot stepback that kind broke their back. Threes, drives, foul shots. He doesn’t get credit as a shooter.
“He shot 52 percent from 3 his sophomore year, 47 percent last year for us, playing mostly off the ball…He was our primary shooter the last couple years so he doesn’t get credit for that because in the EYBL he played with all those guys…He’s just tough. He wasn’t going to let us lose last night.”
Green doesn’t play to do much losing at Kentucky, either.
Kentucky currently has a four-man class with Green, Richards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and P.J. Washington. But Kentucky coach John Calipari is on record saying they plan to sign “five or six.”
“They’ve already got a pretty good class to begin with,” Arrigale said. “When he was recruiting Quade, he mentioned they might need to bring in six, maybe seven because they’re going to get depleted. And just watching them it sure looks like he’s right. It looks like those guys are all going to be gone.”
Photo: Philadelphia Inquirer
