Indiana Basketball: Romeo Langford was a victim of poor roster fit

Former Indiana Basketball star Romeo Langford was a victim of poor roster fit.

When Romeo Langford was a high schooler, I was convinced that he was destined for NBA stardom. Unfortunately, Langford’s time at Indiana made assessing his NBA potential much more difficult. There is certainly a lot to like about his game, but there are quite a few shortcomings as well. Whenever someone talks to me about Langford, I go back and forth between defending him and his NBA future and conceding that he may just not end up being very good.

Just recently, I heard something that made me feel much more confident in Langford’s NBA career. I’m an avid podcast listener, and a great one out there for NBA fans is the Brian Windhorst and the Hoop Collective podcast. In this particular edition of the podcast, Windhorst was hosting ESPN colleagues Kevin Pelton and Mike Schmitz to talk about impactful young players in the NBA bubble and how they were assessed coming out of college.

In this hour-long podcast, they briefly discussed Langford’s teammate, Celtics wing Jaylen Brown, and how he projected coming out of high school. Brown had a somewhat similar story to Langford. He was a monster in high school who was projected to be a top-five pick in the NBA draft, but he chose to go to a subpar team in The University of California Berkeley where he dramatically underperformed.

Pelton and Schmitz talked about how the situation at Cal hurt Brown’s draft stock. Pelton wasn’t very high on Brown coming out of college, but Schmitz had seen Brown play at the high school level many times and deemed his lack of success to be a result of his team.

Here’s where Langford comes into play. That Cal team — similarly to Indiana — had very little shooting and played two big men at once.

"“[Brown was] playing with multiple bigs that were not floor spacers. Here’s a guy who’s used to having the ball in his hands and getting wherever he wants, and now it’s a clogged lane, there’s not enough shooting, it’s a smaller floor, everyone’s waiting to take charges in college, and his jumper abandons him a bit. It’s a small sample season … thankfully we had a bigger sample to look at.” — ESPN’s Mike Schmitz"

This quote from Schmitz could just as easily have been about Langford’s time as a Hoosier. Every part of that statement was true for Langford just like it was true for Brown. The good news is, Brown has turned into a borderline All-Star the past two seasons and has a bright future ahead of him.

There is no need to hype up Romeo Langford’s achievements in high school. They speak for themselves. He may have slid to 14th in the draft, but he is in good hands with the Boston Celtics. His relatively disappointing season in Bloomington wasn’t his fault. The roster he played on was poorly suited to complement his strengths, and he should not be judged upon that one season when he has done so much else to stand out in high school. I’m 100% confident Langford will become a solid NBA player for this reason.