Adam Finkelstein

  For decades now, the state of Rhode Island has had one, and only one, dominant prep power. Mike Hart’s St. Andrew’s squad has stood the test of time. They’ve won multiple NEPSAC championships and literally hundreds of games while producing college stars like Rakim Sanders, Tony Robertson, Michael Carter-Williams, and Cole Swider. And while the Saints...

Legend Geeter is the first member of Providence’s 2021 recruiting class, and while he doesn’t have a ton of national fanfare, he fits a prototype that has been extremely successful under Ed Cooley in recent years. Cooley has thrived with physical, versatile forwards who he can move around the court likes pieces on a chess...

He’s just scratching the surface of his potential. His best basketball is still in front of him. He has a high ceiling…or a big upside. There’s a lot of clichés, and candidly I’ve used them all, but essentially, they’re all just different ways to articulate the same point…that a prospect is still relatively early in his total...

The University of Rhode Island completed their 2020 recruiting class over the weekend with a commitment from Ileri Ayo-Faleye, who graduated from Pennsylvania's Cedar Crest High School and played his grassroots basketball for the York Ballers. Ayo-Faleye was virtually unheard of at the beginning of the high school year and didn’t have a scholarship offer...

If you’re a consistent listener of The Upside Podcast, then you’ve probably noticed that I often ask guests, especially college coaches, about their favorite books. There are a lot of very successful coaches who are also avid readers, and given the chance to pick their brains, I find it interesting to find out what resources...

  On Monday, May 25th, Memorial Day, I was “off the grid” for most of the day; not connected to social media or the news. So when I began scrolling through my feed to catch-up on Tuesday morning, my timeline was flooded with headlines about both George Floyd and Amy Cooper. My most immediate reaction was sadness,...

In recent weeks, we’ve gone back to “re-rank” the classes of 2017 and 2018. The exercises have proven to be both popular among our readers and useful internally as it helps to pinpoint commonalities among players that were either over or under-rated. The vast majority of the time, rankings tend to reflect a prospect’s market...

Last week we “re-did" our 2018 rankings, highlighting the vast changes that have taken place in one of the most celebrated high school classes to come through New England in recent years. Predictably, lots had changed, not just because of variations in the players' respective rates of development but also because the game itself had...

Earlier this year, when Providence was preparing for a match-up with Creighton and their star point guard Marcus Zegarowski, we took a deep dive on how the Massachusetts native and Tilton School alum had blossomed into one of the best players in the Big East in less than two years and, in so doing, also differentiated...

After breaking down the top recruiting classes in the Atlantic 10 last week, this week we'll turn our attention to the BIG EAST, again considering both the high school and transfer ranks to assess incoming classes. Marquette Post-Markus Howard era begins with BIG EAST's best recruiting class The Golden Eagles scored in the early signing period by...