parso said:
I was wondering if you could give us a scout report on Atsür because most of us have not seen him play extended minutes(I have not seen him play at all)... is he a pure PG or a shoot-first distribute-second kind of PG/SG kind of player. Does he have a quick first step? How about his range and transition game?
Thanks,
Özgür
Hi Özgür,
I would never pass up a chance to talk about my favorite subject, even with a Carolina fan
! How nice to talk to you. You know exactly how the basketball fever is over here then. . .
NC State has been playing a slow-tempo, "Princeton"-styled offense that needs stop-and-pop perimeter shooting guards. Atsür is perfect for that offense. Atsür is deadly from the far corners and has a sweet layup. Not a traditional PG, he doesn't have explosion and quickness. What he does have is hustle, precision positioning and complete ball-control. He knows exactly what his weaknesses are and he knows where opponents will try to take advantage of him. He outhustles them every time.
Some of the intanglibles: sportsmanship - he is always polite to opposing players and coaches, makes lots of friends. You can tell this because when other teams come to play in the RBC Center, the coaches come say hi to Engin and shake his hand. I can never get good pictures of this from where I sit (way up high in the third tier), but Roy Williams from UNC must be a big Atsür fan, because he comes and talks to him every pre-game warmup when we play them. Which I personally think is about the coolest thing ever. I call him the "Ambassador."
-hustle. Atsür always gives up his body for the ball. He's in the bench, he's in the rim, he's in the floor, he's diving.
-teamwork. Atsür is very supportive of his teammates, especially the more emotional ones. He doesn't get worked up and he can calm the guys down who get mad. He played with Julius Hodge, a very explosive player who lost his temper a lot. Engin could calm Julius down. Last year he became a much more visible leader to the younger players and the walk-ons. He will be the only starting senior on the NC State roster next year and the default general of the team, and I know he will do an excellent job leading our team. Believe me, we are going to need it. We lost everybody and we have a brand-new coach next year.
Some highlights from his Wolfpack career to date:
Second-Team All ACC, 2004
All-Freshman ACC Team, 2004
Led NC State in three-point shots 2004, 05, 06
Led NC State in deflections and steals, 2004, 05, 06
(NC State tracks deflections - I don't think other schools do this)
Avg: 10.8 PPG, 41% 3PT, 44% FG, 78% FT, 3.6 Reb, 3.4 Assists, 38.1 mins per game (games in NCAA are 2 20-minute halves)
Career high: 23 points against Wake Forest, 3 March 2006
2005: His sophomore year he came back built up from his conditioning by 15 lbs and prepared to be a top-notch defender in the ACC. He got a lot of yawns. Europeans don't play defense! Then came J.J. Redick and Duke. Atsür gets Redick, a junior who is averaging 28 points a game and seems to be unstoppable. Atsür stays on him like a lovesick puppy. Redick can't shake him, Redick can't shoot. Redick fouls out after managing to shoot only 8 points. It was the lowest-scoring game for Redick all year. Suddenly Atsür gets his name pronounced correctly on tv and the radio by announcers who don't work for NC State!
An anecdote you might like: Chris Corchiani, an NC State basketball legend who played basketball in Turkey and adopted a child from there, brings his son Kevin, now 24, to the games. Kevin and his friends, buddies of Engin, start bringing a huge Turkish flag to the games to wave around, jumping up and down and singing songs in Turkish, and harass opposing teams in Turkish. Supposedly they say "Engin is your daddy" and "Eat ball," but as nobody reporting this knows Turkish, they could be saying something much worse
.
More fun with Engin: Engin stayed part of last summer in Raleigh and played ball at the Chavis league, the oldest rec league in Raleigh where every big NBA star from the ACC has played - Jordan, Olajuwon, Thompson, you name it. Atsür and the Evtimov brothers (Ilian and Vasco) score a combined 40 points in his only outing, but all anyone can talk about is Atsür's haircut - or lack thereof. Engin doesn't cut his hair all summer. On the NC State boards, they start referring to it as the "Euro-fro." Atsür escapes to Turkey for the rest of the summer before he has to hear the endless speculation as to whether he intends to keep the 'fro or cut it back.
Hey, I never claimed that North Carolina is a sane place to live. We are all basketball-mad around here.
2006: Ilian Evtimov, a red-shirt senior, is the leader of the team, but the Raleigh News & Observer, the largest local newspaper, chooses to do its annual one-player-per-local-ACC-team spotlight on MY FAVORITE PLAYER and calls the article "Turkish Delight." The article starts off informing everyone that Atsür has cut his hair because he didn't want Coach Sendek, who is balding, "to get jealous." We also learn that he likes to cook, go snowboarding, play ping pong and soccer, and play practical jokes on his teammates.
Young women everywhere sigh. On to basketball . . . Just one week before Atsür is due to leave to try out for the Turkish NT last spring, State announces it has hired Sidney Lowe, former NC State PG who was on Jim Valvano's 1987 NCAA Championship team, to coach the Wolfpack. Engin tells the media at the press conference he plans to come back for his senior year.
The rest of the Wolfpack Nation sighs in relief.
We all expect that Engin will have to be a more traditional PG with Coach Lowe than he was under Sendek. Last year he spent a lot more time moving the ball up the floor, more driving to the basket and less of the stop-and-pop. In the game against Wake, his best performance of the year, most of his points came when he drove straight down the lane and scored the layup.
To me his greatest strength lies in his ability to figure out what the other team expects him to do, getting in that position so that they think they have him, and then doing something else. He has really learned to read the opponent, the floor and make the calculations he needs to get the bucket.
And now that I have talked your ears off, here's another picture for you of Atsur in his NCSU TMacs, blowing past Justin Gray in that afore-mentioned Wake game:
BTW Atsür shot 78% from the line last year, 84% in conference games.
, and we are eagerly waiting to see those...
I personally consider Manu Ginobili to be a Jedi Master, so if Arslan can do some flying spin maneuvers too, I'd love to see that. Tanjevic just needs to put Atsür on the floor! Engin has some Jedi moves of his own. 
