English must keep shooting
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
Well into the NBA Draft, sportscaster Dick Vitale observed at 12,000 decibels that there were "100 kids" who were convinced they were going to be tail end first-round draft picks and there couldn't be room for all of them.
At the time it seemed eerily like he was talking directly to Carl English.
And, he might as well have been. For as the final second-round selections crawled across the bottom of the television screen, English's name was nowhere to be found.
Not in the first round, where English was convinced he would be taken, nor even in the second, where the consensus of the mock drafts had him going.
The draft confirmed what many had come to fear, that English, for all his exploits at the University of Hawai'i, was a bubble player going in and coming out. That for all his guts and determination in taking this leap of faith, he was somebody good enough to make the draft boards of NBA teams and be invited to workouts, but not compelling enough for some team to throw guaranteed money at or venture a draft pick on.
Maybe, given the NBA's fascination with overseas players, he simply wasn't foreign enough. Perhaps if he had spelled Carl with a "K", changed his last name to Englischer and picked up an accent he'd have had a better shot.
Truthfully, however, he was among the 60 or 75 best prospects in the world — in a draft that unfortunately had room for only 58.
As such, it is easy to point the finger at the people out there who led him on about his chances or gave him bad advice. And, undoubtedly he didn't always get the best of counsel from whoever he talked to beyond Manoa.
But make no mistake, this was English's decision and gambling on the draft was where his heart, if not always his head, had been leading him for a while. It didn't take much convincing to get him to take the plunge.
Ever since he told Sports Illustrated back in January that he was leaning on going pro early, the idea seemed to grow on him. By the night of the Rainbows' Senior Slam in March, it seemed the likely conclusion though he would sometimes pretend otherwise.
English has a shooter's confidence and mindset, which can be both a blessing and a curse depending on the situation. He believes every shot he puts up is going to go in. That is something that usually served him well in the Western Athletic Conference, where the percentages were with him.
No harm in that, of course, unless you walked away from an all expenses-paid final year of college and the opportunity to be the all-time leading scorer on potentially one of the best-ever UH teams to roll the dice on the NBA draft.
Now, the hope is English will do what he did when he missed a shot during the season: Pick himself back up and go out and make the next one.
