The Chronicle’s Latest Profile: Stanley Borden

Stanley Borden is someone we’d like to know more about. He apparently played well in Europe and is part of the Portuguese National program, presumably through his mother.

He came to Duke as an unrecruited 7-footer, which is pretty unusual and only played a minute. We recall former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski saying that he had never seen a player as happy as Borden was when he got into the game.

The Chronicle’s latest profile is of Borden and while you can’t entirely rule out his developing into a solid player, the odds are certainly against it. It just doesn’t happen very often with walk-ons, even seven footers. In fact, the only seven-foot walk-on who we can think of is Dikembe Mutombo, who came to Georgetown on an academic scholarship before John Thompson persuaded him to give basketball a try. He’s now a Hall of Famer (very worrisomely, he was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor).

We’d be really happy if Borden became a rotation player at some point. He may also be particularly helpful to someone like Christian Reeves, who may see him often in stations and drills.

Hall of Famer?

Well it doesn’t hurt to dream.