Oklahoma State Makes Top-Five for 2021 Brooklyn, NY Point Guard
STILLWATER -- Mike Boynton and Co. have once again made their way back up to Brooklyn, NY and have made the cut for 2021 point guard Jaquan Carlos.
Carlos is a 6-1, 160-pound three-star point guard out of Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, NY. As you can see from the graphic, Carlos has Oklahoma State, Fordham, Hofstra, Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech. According to his Rivals profile, Carlos has received offers from Bryant, Cincinnati, UConn, DePaul, East Carolina, Iona, North Carolina State, Pittsburgh, St. John's, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.
I couldn't find where Carlos held an Oklahoma State offer, but I checked with someone close to the program and while he doesn’t hold an OSU offer, Boynton and Co. are actively recruiting him. So it’s possible he could get offered at some point in the near future.
As you can see from the video, Carlos has the ability to get to the basket with ease and has a knack for hitting heavily contested layups and finishing through contact. He also has good ball-handling skills and can score with either hand. He can score at all levels, but needs to work on his mid-range and outside shooting.
It's difficult to find any non-shooting or driving footage of Carlos, and a few recruiting sites list some of his strengths and weaknesses, but they only talk about his scoring ability. So, only being able to find videos of him scoring makes it difficult to know about his passing and defensive abilities.
Through this point in the recruiting cycle, Boynton and Co. don't have any commitments and according to Boynton, that's OK.
“I'm really aggressive recruiting personally, and losing out on the opportunity to be out and meet people and evaluate guys face-to-face has really challenged me in two ways: 1.) on if I was going to be willing to change my approach, and I haven't convinced myself that that's good for me yet; the other part of it is not to get impatient and not panic, because there's a lot of good players certainly around the country, but everywhere. So, you don't want to get into a situation where you panic and you make a mistake, because it's one thing to miss out on a good player, right? That doesn't hurt you as much as people think. What hurts you much more is taking a player who's not necessarily good enough. Especially if it's a younger guy and now you've got him in your program, not that every kid's got to be the best, but you don't want to have scholarships used up on guys that can't translate to what you're doing.
"I've tried to be really, really patient, and we've tried to still do as much as we can virtually, but it's been hard on me just because I love being involved in that process day-to-day. It's really helped us put together the classes that we have the last couple of years and it'll probably reflect that we probably won't sign a bunch of guys early, if any to be honest and I'm OK with that. I want to make sure that we get the right guys in here at the end of the day."
