Welcome to a little different Monday Thoughts (but aren’t they all?). Today, I’m going to talk about Hokies men’s basketball’s freshman phenom, Neoklis Avdalas, and then fill you in on Tech Sideline’s ongoing issues with our platform.
Neoklis, Indeed
Here’s a little factoid you can use to impress your friends. According to names.org:
Neoklis is a masculine given name of Greek origin, formed from neo- “new” and klḗs/kléos “glory, renown,” thus meaning “new glory” or “new fame.”
How appropriate, because Virginia Tech freshman phenom Neoklis Avdalas has suddenly found himself with new glory and new fame around the college basketball world after dropping 33 points, five rebounds, six assists, one block, one steal and just two turnovers in Saturday’s win over Providence.
First of all, the game was a thriller, a 107-101 overtime win that was played at a high level offensively by both teams. (Defensively? Not so much.)
One game after a tepid outing against Charleston Southern, Avdalas served notice early, scoring 12 of Virginia Tech’s first 20 points and 17 of the Hokies’ first 30. He finally slowed down after that, “only” scoring 16 of Virginia Tech’s next 77.
Because the game streamed on Peacock (as part of the Big East’s media deal, I guess), many of you didn’t get to see it, so here’s a highlight package of Neo’s scoring day:
Notice I say “scoring,” because none of his passing highlights are included, not the least of which was a nifty lob in the lane to Tobi Lawal for an easy bucket.That’s Neo Avdalas at his finest, and he picked a good game to do it, because the Providence Friars were hitting as well. It was an entertaining college basketball game, one that deserved a larger audience.
The lack of a large broadcast audience didn’t stop Avdalas from making waves nationally, and now he’s got “new fame” around college basketball. Here’s a sampling. First, a tweet that has received 6.8 million views and is still racking them up:
http://twitter.com/PDTScouting/status/1987315547306918396
This YouTube video from The Field of 68 hasn’t gotten that kind of traction, but the commentators here are impressed:
And simply searching on “Avdalas” on Google turns up this listing:
Saturday’s performance was fun, but the question is, “Where do we (does Neo) go from here?”
The most important point to make is that Neo’s game against Providence won’t be common. Here’s his full line:
- Points: 33
- FG: 13-23 (56.5%)
- 3FG: 5-8 (62.5%)
- FT: 2-4 (50.0%)
- AST: 6
- REB: 5
- TO: 2
- AST/TO Ratio: 3.0
Here are his combined stats from the exhibition against Duquesne and the first game against Charleston Southern:
- Points: 19 (9.5 ppg)
- FG: 7-26 (26.7%)
- 3FG: 2-14 (14.2%)
- FT: 3-7 (42.8%)
- AST: 10 (5.0 apg)
- REB: 8 (4.0 rpg)
- TO: 4 (2.0 tpg)
- AST/TO Ratio: 2.5
Now take a look at his per-game stats from last year with Peristeri of the Greek Basketball League (18 games, 19.2 minutes per game — stats here):
- Points: 218 (8.8 ppg)
- FG: 55-122 (45.1%)
- 3FG: 22-54 (40.7%)
- FT: 22-30 (73.3%)
- AST: 24 (1.25 apg)
- REB: 47 (2.6 rpg)
- TO: 16 (0.89 tpg)
- AST/TO Ratio: 1.5
The Providence game is an outlier of a shooting game for Neo, at least at this point in his career. Fans who are expecting him to dominate game to game are going to be placing too high of an expectation level on him. That’s one viewpoint, based on historical stats.
The counter-point, however, is that he’s young, only 19 years old, and is brand new to the college game. (He was also playing against grown men over in Europe.) The more he plays, the more he’ll get acclimated to college ball, and he’s also going to play more games and get more minutes than he’s used to, which will arguably accelerate his development.
The Peristeri stats are from 2024-25 — last year, in other words. The previous season, when he was 17, he played for Karditsas in the same league, and the thing that jumps out at me about his stats that season is his 3-point shooting: 3-for-15 (20%).
So in one year, he went from not being able to hit anything from beyond the arc to making over 40 percent. What is his ceiling this year? Good question.
However you slice and dice the shooting, the real problem Neo presents for opponents is that his court vision is exceptional, as is his passing ability. In the couple of games I’ve seen him play, he has made multiple difficult passes with pinpoint accuracy and no danger of getting picked off.
He can throw the skip pass because he’s 6-9 and can see across the court. Against Charleston Southern, he threw a very difficult 40-foot pass that resulted in a layup in an open-court situation. In this game against Providence, his lob in the lane to Tobi Lawal was a risky pass that lesser players can’t throw, and not only did Neo put it on the money, but only Lawal could get it, and he caught it cleanly and laid it in (and got fouled).
We’ll see if Avdalas can recreate Saturday’s magic later this season. Last season, Duke’s Cooper Flagg (similarly sized at 6-9, 205), the 2025 Naismith Award Winner and top pick in the NBA Draft, only exceeded 30 points in one game, putting up 42 on Notre Dame. He later hit exactly 30 in the NCAA tournament.
Neo is smooth, in control, never in a hurry and accurate with his passing. Mike Young’s 2021-22 ACC championship team (I like typing that) was very good at ball movement to create the open shot. Avdalas adds another dimension, a point guard who can create in the open court and is a matchup problem in the halfcourt well beyond what 2021-22 point guard Storm Murphy was. It’s going to be a lot of fun to watch him and his teammates develop throughout the season.
Tech Sideline’s Technical Issues
It’s no secret that Tech Sideline has been experiencing technical problems for months now, and at times, they have been pretty serious.It has always been a challenge to keep TSL and the other sites that reside on our network architecture (TheSabre.com, RamNation.com, NetBuffs.com and BoneyardBanter.com) up and running consistently. They are a patchwork of custom and off-the-shelf software patched together:
- User management/billing: aMember
- Content and pages: WordPress
- Message boards: custom, in-house proprietary software
We’ve always been able to keep things up and running pretty well, but the last 14 months or so have been brutal. I’ve mentioned a lot of what I’m about to say before on the boards and in articles, but I’ll repeat it here, and remember that I’m not a technical person and I might be off on some of the nitty-gritty details.
At the beginning of the 2024 football season, just as Virginia Tech kicked off at Vanderbilt, someone launched a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against Tech Sideline, bringing the message boards to their knees for days.
It’s easy to do: you rent time/space on a few cloud servers and then use them to bombard the target with web requests. Then later, rent different cloud servers and do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In the year-plus since then, too many DDoS attacks to count have been carried out against Tech Sideline. Whoever is doing it really knows what they’re doing. They found a piece of code that they activated remotely (an API call), creating serious issues. We have deployed various countermeasures, mostly through Cloudflare, including the annoying “Verifying that you’re human” check that you see so often, especially on your phones.
(By the way, A.I. is now getting to where it can now prove that it’s human on those verification tests, thus rendering them useless.)
The perpetrator also eventually found a particularly juicy piece of code to trigger, one that handles the passing of login information among the various code bases used on our site. That one was particularly destructive.
We also woke up one morning in May to discover hundreds of huge, garbage message board posts created by literally dozens of new registrants on the web site — actual human beings who were registering new accounts and filling up the message boards.
This is also easy to do: pay a roomful of guys in a third-world country a few hundred bucks to register for the site and trash the boards for a few hours at a time. These people were particularly clever, in that they somehow figured out a way to get around a piece of code we had put into each message board that prohibits brand-new posters from posting. They bypassed this code and filled the boards up with garbage that took us hours to get rid of.
So for the last year-plus, our meager programming resources have spent most of their time fighting off these attacks, not fixing existing bugs or creating new features. The result has been a deterioration of the performance and reliability of our sites.
That attack I mentioned earlier that centered on login code led our programmers to rip all of that code out and create a brand-new, more modern way of handling logins (the details of which I won’t get into). The deployment of this new code a few weeks (a couple months, maybe?) ago created a lot of instability in our entire system, leading to all sorts of issues. Most of you have experienced those issues, including yours truly.
What makes the problem worse is that we don’t have full-time programming resources. As I have mentioned many times, we have poured our money into content generators (where Tech Sideline now has five full-time employees) and not into programming/IT (zero full-time employees).
The result? These attacks and the resulting issues require full-time attention and resources to properly combat, but that’s not what they’re getting. They’re getting part-time resources that are doing their best but are often simply unavailable and sometimes overwhelmed.
This is a business-model decision that was made years ago and has come home to roost. That’s why you see so many bugs in our system — the 503 backend fetch errors, the Bad Gateway errors, the inability to access the pay boards at times, the slow website at times.
We can fix all of these problems, and we continue to chip away at them one by one, but at the same time, whoever is doing this continues to create new problems for us, and the pipeline keeps getting stuffed full.
Ultimately, I think it requires a long-term permanent solution, but that solution is not sitting just around the corner, and it isn’t cheap. So please know that we’re doing the best we can.
And on that cheery note, see you later this week when we record our Florida State preview podcast.