Sullivan—who obviously has a much broader perspective—went even further.
“He’s as skilled as any center you’re going to find ever in this league and certainly here,” Sullivan said. “Now, how it’s going to shake out, who knows, but the potential and the upside for him is that he can score out of the low post with a lot of different ways. He can score when a defender plays behind him, which a lot of teams do in our league. He can pivot-face. He can shoot. He can shoot from the elbows. He can shoot from the baseline, be a spot-up player. He’s got very good hands, good passing instincts. He’s a player you can lob the ball to and he can catch it out of his space and he has a presence around the rim.”
“On the defensive end, he can block shots,” Sullivan added. “Shot-blocking is a very difficult thing to teach. If you go through the basketball literature, there’s no books on shot-blocking, There’s no videos on shot-blocking. There’s no information on shot-blocking because it’s such an instinctive thing. He has that capability. He has a natural instinct to block some shots and not foul.
He’s got a potential to realize, but he could really be a special player. His skill package is just…you don’t get that here.”
Brains and Brawn
It’s funny that Sullivan mentions literature, because Cusworth grew up surrounded by it. His father—from whom Brian got his passion for basketball—is a hoops junkie.
“For a guy who never had really any experience other than intramurals, he lives and breathes basketball,” the younger Cusworth said. “If you came to our house and you saw literature and the videos we have on basketball, you would think that he is a coach or that he’s working to be one, but he just loves the game and he’s always had the desire to just learn more about it.”
Perhaps it’s that love for the game that inspires Cusworth’s own work ethic.
At the end of the summer, knowing he hadn’t filled out after his growth spurt, he spent a month at HammerBodies Custom Fitness Clinic in St. Louis. There, he went on a diet of seven meals a day that he still follows and gained over 15 pounds while decreasing his body fat.
The new muscle is just one more thing working in Cusworth’s favor.
Now, all he has to do is wait for his foot to heal, get his timing back and follow through on all that potential.
If that happens, who knows how high Cusworth’s ceiling is?
“There’s no secret that he’s probably the best young center in the Ivy League,” Sullivan said. “There’s no doubt about that. The coaches in the league unanimously feel that way.”
With that kind of upside, Cusworth might even one day become one of those guys that transcends scorecards and renders them useless.
—Staff writer Alan G. Ginsberg can be reached at aginsber@fas.harvard.edu.