The men’s All-Decade Team turned out to have a significantly different look than the women’s team we released last week. I thought I’d take some time right now to address that.

I happen to think that this season we’re playing right now might be the best in our short 11-year history covering Division III men’s basketball. But so many of our best individual talents graduated several years ago. If you started following Division III for the 2003-04 season, you never saw a single member of our first team in a Division III uniform, and you could’ve seen only one member of the top two teams. But it’s hard to argue against what these five accomplished. Devean George is only playing in the NBA, for goodness sakes, while Andy Panko scored more than 2,500 points and is still playing professionally in Spain. Horace Jenkins spent time in the NBA, while Derek Reich was a four-time UAA Player of the Year and Korey Coon was the Jostens winner, started at point guard for a national title team as a freshman and has free throw records as well.

I saw all five of those guys play in person at varying stages. George I remember as a fourth- or fifth-grader, even, a point guard for St. Anne’s running circles around a team of fifth and sixth graders I was helping coach. Panko I saw in his last game — I was broadcasting the Catholic/Lebanon Valley game in the NCAA Tournament opener in 1999 and our crew gave him a standing ovation when he fouled out not long after passing the 2,500-point mark. (Unfortunately, the Leb Val fans took it for sarcasm and, perhaps not coincidentally, someone pulled the plug on our power right after the game ended.)

Former IWU coach Dennie Bridges pays tribute to Coon’s Kids, a memory which has endured with me since seeing a game at the Shirk Center in 2000. The picture on the first-team page is one I took back in the film-and-scanner days. To me, Coon is still the quintessential Jostens winner — the perfect basketball, academics and community service package all rolled into one.

And Jeff Gibbs, who didn’t make the first team, remains one of the most talked-about players of the past decade. His 25-point, 25-rebound performance in the 2002 national championship game against Elizabethtown has to be the most impressive title-game lines in the Salem era. And he was just 6-1.

So are we just waxing poetic and overlooking current players with our list? I don’t think so. There are some players right now who look like locks for the All-2000s Team, when we get that done sometime during or after the 2009-10 season, for example. Ben Strong and Andrew Olson would have to almost be shoo-ins, James Cooper and Larry Welton will get great consideration and who knows, maybe a freshman now such as Steve Djurickovic of Carthage will be on the team.

And my apologies to Willie Chandler, Drew Carstens, Tori Davis and Adam Doll for never having a chance to see them play.

We could’ve named even more WIAC players, believe it or not. It was hard to keep out Sherm Carstensen, who single-handedly carried UW-Eau Claire in the 2000 Final Four after Jon Wallenfelsz got hurt in the sectionals. Nick Bennett was considered. We talked about Calvin’s Jeremy Veenstra, Catholic’s Pat Maloney and Bridgewater’s Kyle Williford. (And just because I’m not mentioning someone now doesn’t mean they weren’t considered. Anyone named a D3hoops.com All-American was looked at.)

As with the women’s team, we encourage your discussion, memories, and more.