Yancy Gates isn't dead, not really. He is still alive, he is still living off campus and can be spotted around town doing the things that you would expect a 21 year old semi famous athlete to do. What I am declaring dead is that faintest of hopes that some day Yancy Gates will manage to harness his talents, the sum total of which can be breathtaking, to some degree and create from those raw materials something beautiful and magnificent. Mind you not Michelangelo's David beautiful, his raw talents aren't that abundant or robust, but you know beautiful. Like a Frank Gehry building or the Basketball game equivalent of Yvonne Strahovski. It is all there in front of him and he is eminently capable of doing just about anything he wants to do on the court if he sets his mind to it. Look at what he did in the cross town blowout, or even look back three weeks to his performance against this very same Saint John's team. The trouble is that he never has his mind set on it. On the court he doesn't seem to have his mind set on doing much of anything at all.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huuuge fan of indecisive behavior, I am an avid practitioner myself. But I don't have talent. Not a whole lot of it, and what little I have isn't concentrated in one area, in one field. Not enough for me to say that this or that activity is what I was born to do. Yancy Gates was born to play Basketball, people with his size or athleticism are meant to play Basketball in a way that few other people on earth are meant to do something. But the problem is that Yancy Gates doesn't seem to want to play Basketball, or more probably he doesn't want to play Basketball the way that Mick Cronin wants him to play Basketball. So he just doesn't play. He could be the best Forward in the conference with some applied effort, but Gates seems content with just kind of going out there and playing.
That would be all well and good if he would play hard. His effort the past two games has been a joke. He floated around aimlessly during his stretches on the court in the DePaul game. He did the same thing today. I am not an avid proponent of body language, I don't put as much stock in that as some other people do in their analysis of Basketball. But Gates body language has been shit, he doesn't seem to care about anything. Today was the perfect example of that, he was completely invisible. He played 13 minutes, missed 1 shot, grabbed 3 boards and that was it. He was even invisible on the broadcast except for his conversation with Ibrahima Thomas after he fouled out. So this is it. I am done with Yancy Gates. It has gotten to the point where his production doesn't justify his appearance on the court beyond garbage time. I will try to remember the excitement, anticipation and he occasional moments of excellence. And truth be told I will defiantly remember those things about him, if only to ram home the fact that Yancy Gates is the most frustrating Bearcat Basketball player ever.