Throwback Mixtapes: Wesley Saunders

In a running series for The Back Page, contributing writer Patrick Xu breaks down the high school mixtapes of members of the Harvard men’s basketball team. In this post, Patrick looks at junior swingman Wesley Saunders.

To us basketball fans at Harvard the name Wes Saunders, brings a couple of things to mind. The junior guard is consistently called on to take the shot when Harvard’s offense runs stagnant towards the end of the shot clock. He has the funky, Kevin Martin-esque shot, yet still manages to hit more than 50 percent of his attempts from the field and 50 percent from three. He can throw some vicious dunks down (tl; dr: Yale sucks). And he literally looks like he’s never trying on the court. Seriously, search his images on Google. Does he even sweat?

When I checked out some of his high school mixtapes and interviews, I noticed some things have clearly changed but some things, however, clearly have not.  In the first mixtape that I look at, Saunders absolutely destroys one of my favorite high school teams, Salesian, in a championship game. He has numerous powerful blocks, especially at 0:32, where he ruins Dominic Artis’ (a current point guard at Oregon) attempt to finish a pretty sick play.

Another thing we don’t really see too often from both Saunders and the Harvard team as a whole is any sort of pull-up game. Yet, at 0:17, we see Saunders executes it perfectly. We can also see that Saunders’ Kevin Martin shooting form hasn’t changed since high school.

One thing we are used to, however, is Saunders’ athleticism. At 1:13, he absolutely throws it down on two Salesian players with a two-handed slam.  Not quite Sportscenter Top 10 worthy (#sctop10?), but still pretty sick.

I surprisingly couldn’t find many other full on mixtapes of Saunders, but I managed to scavenge for a couple of other pretty cool plays. In this clip, which is mostly an interview on Saunders and his coach, plus a tiny snippet on an apparent golf star Sandra Gal, we see Saunders display more of his athleticism. At 1:17, he pulls off a Rondo-esque ball fake and spin move for the score, and he runs back to D with the same little head nod and weird arm swaying that we’re used to.

At 1:31, we see him pull off a pretty fancy move on the fast break, swinging the ball around to avoid a defender going for the strip before ultimately finishing the lay up. A couple more plays feature much of the same: at 2:31, we see a slick spin move off the rebound. At 1:45, Saunders displays his trademark ability to finish with contact.

The coolest part about this clip, however, probably has to be this quote from Saunders old coach, Miguel Villegas: “I remember his freshman year he would never say anything. He would just come to practice and he did what we told him to do. Sophomore year, he woke up a little bit and he found how to put the ball into the basket and how to step out on the perimeter. Last year, he kind of just blossomed. This year, he’s out there. You can’t stop him now.”

With Saunders having made the sophomore leap last year—going from a small bench role (3.3 ppg) to an All-Ivy first team performance (16.2 ppg)—he is well on his way to going through the same progression here at Harvard.