{"id":645,"date":"2006-11-10T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-10T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/the-year-of-maarty-leunen-begins-now\/"},"modified":"2006-11-10T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-10T11:00:00","slug":"the-year-of-maarty-leunen-begins-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/the-year-of-maarty-leunen-begins-now\/","title":{"rendered":"The Year of Maarty Leunen Begins Now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight is the real tip-off of college basketball, with a majority of schools (or nearly so, I haven&#8217;t counted) beginning their season. As usual, I&#8217;ll be trying to document the surprises that slip under the national radar. If my calculations are correct, one of those will be Maarty Leunen of the Oregon Ducks, a team that may take the college hoops world by storm despite getting a combined one vote in the two major pre-season polls. (My track record of predicting Pac 10 hoops is particularly pathetic, however.)<\/p>\n<p>If they do, the praise will go to Aaron Brooks and Malik Hairston, but I&#8217;ll be giving attention to Leunen, the 6-9 junior who had 35 boards in 56 exhibition minutes against Lewis &amp; Clark and Southern Oregon. That&#8217;s 25.7 rebounds per 40 minutes. You may be questioning the level of competition, but those teams provide a good proxy for the Ducks&#8217; preseason schedule.<\/p>\n<p>Maarty Leunen is what this site is all about. He doesn&#8217;t score enough to get national attention, but he&#8217;s plenty quirky enough to get my attention. A great defensive rebounder (12th in the country last season), yet a below average offensive rebounder.<\/p>\n<p>The Menace of the Defensive Boards begins his season tonight, starting at power forward for Oregon in a tussle with Lehigh at 7 pm PST. I&#8217;ll be watching you, Maarty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight is the real tip-off of college basketball, with a majority of schools (or nearly so, I haven&#8217;t counted) beginning their season. As usual, I&#8217;ll be trying to document the surprises that slip under the national radar. If my calculations are correct, one of those will be Maarty Leunen of the Oregon Ducks, a team [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}