PHILADELPHIA — Come Saturday night, Allan Ray will grab his red marble composition book and his black-ink Sharpie pen, get comfy on the living room couch in his Atlanta home, and fire up his television and his Twitter account for his favorite pastime. Ray was a member of Jay Wright’s first recruiting class at Villanova, a group that entered the university in 2002 and included Randy Foye, Curtis Sumpter, and Jason Fraser, the class that changed everything for the program.
But it’s not his 2,025 career points or his upcoming induction into the Big Five Hall of Fame that make Ray such a marvelous person to follow on social media. He’s an open and accurate source of deep insight into the strategies that Villanova wields, into the statistics and trends that promise to tell the tale of a particular game against a particular opponent. Take the Wildcats’ last two opponents: Michigan and Houston. Had you read Ray’s posts, you wouldn’t have been surprised to see 6-foot-7 Jermaine Samuels’ driving past 7-foot-1 Hunter Dickinson again and again, one left-handed layup after another leading to a 22-point night for Samuels and a 10-point Villanova victory.
“Michigan has a HUGE problem in ball screen defense when Hunter Dickinson is involved,” Ray wrote the night before the game. “IMO he is a liability in P&R and 1on1.”
