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STEVE DeSHAZO: With Maynor gone, new VCU coach Smart must cultivate new team leaders Date published: 10/21/2009 By Steve DeShazo WASHINGTON-- Sooner or later (probably sooner), it's going to happen, and Shaka Smart is already expecting it. A time will come, early in VCU's basketball season, late in a tight game, when the Rams will look for Eric Maynor to make the decisive play--as he did for the past three years.And he won't be there. "It happens already in practice, from time to time," Smart said yesterday. "It's strange for me to say, because I never got to coach him, but I'm looking around for him. "When you think about VCU basketball in recent years, he was the focal point." But Maynor's gone, which means someone else is going to have to make the big shot, as Maynor did in the 2007 and 2009 Colonial Athletic Association title games, or in an epic upset of Duke in the '07 NCAA tournament. UCLA was so sure that Maynor would take the last shot in their NCAA first-round game last March that the Bruins barely bothered to guard the other four Rams. Maynor left VCU as its career leader in scoring and assists and was named to the CAA's 25-year, 25-man anniversary team. Things change in college sports, though, faster than ever these days. Maynor (a rare four-year college star) was a first-round draft pick of the NBA's Utah Jazz. His coach, Anthony Grant, accepted a big pay raise from Alabama--just as Jeff Capel, who recruited Maynor to VCU, left for greener pastures at Oklahoma. That means the Rams will have a new coach (Smart, a 32-year-old former Florida assistant) and must find some new heroes to keep pace in the steadily improving CAA. It won't be easy in a league that has long-tenured coaches like Jim Larranaga (12 years at George Mason) and Blaine Taylor (eight at preseason favorite Old Dominion). "Because Eric was such a great leader, nobody else had to be a great leader," Smart said during the CAA's annual preseason media day at the ESPN Zone. "In the past, he carried a lot of that responsibility."
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