Big 5 Basketball: AJ Brodeur, Penn lead 2018-19 City Series Awards

All-City Series Team

AJ Brodeur – Pennsylvania

Charlie Brown, Jr. – Saint Joseph’s

Nate Pierre-Louis – Temple

Collin Gillespie – Villanova

Shizz Alston, Jr. – Temple

Putting together an All-City Series team was a difficult undertaking for a number of reasons. First, the logistics made this a cumbersome process. While you can find averages and totals quite easily for all of these players for the year and in conference play, none of the major sources of college basketball statistics will do us the favor of organizing the numbers from just the ten games that really matter in college basketball. The official Big 5 website doesn’t do it, either.

To just compile the averages for the series, I had to comb through every box score and dig through game logs of a number of the players. I watched most of the BIg 5 games this season (and attended four of the ten in person), but I really needed all of the numbers to get all of this straight, and even as a Big 5 junkie, it became a bit tiresome.

Then came the issue of the performances of the players once I was able to get a general understanding of the broader picture; there just weren’t a lot of names that jumped off the page. With each team playing a four-game set, the margin for error is close to zero to make this list, and very few players, if any, really dominated the Big 5 this year. Some of the usual suspects either simply didn’t play well enough in the series to earn a nod here, had one or two games bad enough to disqualify them, or missed more than one of the four games.

Big 5 player of the year hopeful Phil Booth only had two great games against Philly schools, and even when he was showing forms of his dominant self against Saint Joe’s and Penn, he wasn’t doing a whole lot besides putting the ball in the basket. Eric Paschall went off for 27 against La Salle at the Palestra, but didn’t hit the double-digit mark in rebounds once.

Quinton Rose scored in double-digits all four games, but he was his usual up-and-down, unpredictable self, doing things like recording all five of his assists in the series in one game against Saint Joe’s, and turning the ball over 13 times in Temple’s four games. Pookie Powell only played in two Big 5 games this year, and no La Salle player made the cut because no one put up consistent numbers. Isiah Deas, David Beatty, and Saul Phiri had great performances in the series, but none did enough to make this list. And even with a great sixth man resume, Deas started against Temple to take him out of consideration.

And some of the biggest performances in the series this year came from guys that were otherwise mostly quiet. Ernest Aflakpui, in one of the biggest individual performances of the season, scored 21 and gathered 15 boards against Penn, but only totaled 12 points and 10 rebounds against Saint Joe’s and Villanova combined.

Jakub Mijakowski, one of the heroes for Penn against Temple, came out of nowhere that Saturday evening, scoring three points in only 13 total minutes in the Quakers’ other three Big 5 games. Bryce Washington shot 8-14 from the field in a double-double effort for Penn against Saint Joe’s, but didn’t reach double-digits in any major category in any other series game.

As for the guys that did make the list, there is probably a good argument against all of them besides AJ Brodeur. There are five or six other players that were seriously considered, some cycled on and off the list before I felt satisfied with it. And yes, as an outed Temple alum, I did consider choosing one of Nate Pierre-Louis or Shizz Alston, Jr., in order to avoid any claims of homerism for choosing two players from a 2-2 team I happen to be a fan of.

But, the more I dug through the numbers, it became clear that they were two of the best backcourt players in the series, and have much better cases than most; Pierre-Louis was one of the best all-around players in the City Series this year, averaging more rebounds than anyone else on this list, doing that standing at 6’4″ from the guard position, on top of averaging over 13 points per game. Alston averaged over 14 points, almost 6 assists, and shot 94.4% from the free throw line (although he’s second here to Gillespie‘s 96.3%).

I almost didn’t include Charlie Brown because he didn’t play against Villanova, but he had the gaudiest numbers of anyone with 21.3 points and 7.3 rebounds per game, and probably had the top performance of the Big 5 season in a losing effort to Penn, when he scored 27 and collected 12 boards.