Shooting Guard Al-Amir Dawes announced the cut-down list of his final 8 schools on his Instagram account and included Providence amongst the schools remaining.

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Blessings on blessings 🐍 @tipton.edits

A post shared by Al-Amir Dawes (@a_booqi) on Sep 11, 2018 at 5:27pm PDT

The eight schools remaining include UConn, Seton Hall, Clemson, La Salle, St. John’s, TCU, Wichita State, and the Friars.

Dawes is a 2019 guard out of Newark, New Jersey who unofficially visited Providence on September 5th.  The 6’2” playmaker has also unofficially visited UConn and St. John’s over the past couple of weeks.  It could be the fact that those schools are closer to his hometown or it could be that he’s already begun narrowing his focus to a select few schools although he also plans to unofficially visit Clemson soon.

Per Adam Zagoria, Ed Cooley also made a home visit on Tuesday and knowing our guy Cooley, if you give him a home visit, you’re going to absolutely love the guy.  Dawes also met with UConn and Clemson staffs the next day on Wednesday but I’ll put Ed Cooley up against any single coach in the Nation in a living room.

I would be remiss not to get some highlights of the athletic combo guard out there.  Here he is going heads-up against former PC target Jalen Lecque who just recently excluded Providence from his Final 7 cut-down list.

I like the competitiveness of both guys but even though Lecque seems to have the athleticism advantage (and some crazy length), Dawes seemed to portray more of a complete game.  Lecque is elite at driving and finishing.  Dawes did a little bit of everything.  He went ham from distance, pulled up in the midrange game, and showed off his ability to penetrate both to score and to dish.  At first I thought Dawes was just going to fire from three the entire game since they were going against a zone but he showed how dynamic and complete of a game he possesses.

I’ve read in some articles that he is a three star prospect but that’s certainly not what he looks like to me. Those might have been some older articles because I’ve seen him as a fringe Top-100 guy in a lot of rankings recently.

He has a really smooth game and seems to love that pull up jumper.  You can tell that he has confidence in that shot.  As soon as it leaves his hands, he knows that’s going down.  He almost looks like he’s gliding but his change of direction and crossover get him by his defender so quickly that he’s able to stay composed and under control in traffic.