A Diamond for the Badgers

The members of the basketball program will be getting rings for their latest Big Ten championship, and now it appears they'll be getting the Diamond to go with it.

(Hah! I've still got the sportswriter's cheesy lead gene!)

Mark Stewardt of the Journal Sentinel is reporting that Diamond Taylor committed to UW last night. This one's important - I have no doubt we'll get the bigs and swingmen we need to be successful, but guards are just so important.

Sounds like Diamond, who I'm pretty sure sat by Andy and me at the Washington State football game in September, has really improved rapidly in the last year or so. Check out this blogger, who says that while the class of 2009 is the weakest in recent Illinois history, Diamond is at the top.

The other things you have to like about this kid are the fact that he plays for St. Joseph's (Hoop Dreams), a big-time program with a legendary coach in Gene Pingatore; and his dad is an assistant coach at Bolingbrook and runs a fundamentals camp, which has a website that plays rap music, which sort of startled me writing this at 10:30 p.m. I think Shaq is the artist currently dropping rhymes, "I Know I Got Skillz."

Nice to see the tradition of UW guards named Taylor continue, with Diamond following in the footsteps of Kammron and Jordan. But Diamond thinks he's more like Devin Harris, which we'd be OK with too.

Now if we can reel in Jamil Wilson, ranked #6 nationally on this list, to round out this class, I'd be thrilled.

-Follow up note from a guy mentioned yesterday: Madison Memorial's Vander Blue almost had a double-double tonight against Oshkosh West: nine points and nine turnovers. Memorial went into the fourth quarter with a 23-point lead and let it dwindle to four before pulling it out. How many teams get outscored 34-14 in the final quarter of a game and win? Jeronne Maymon was the man again with 29 points.