If you're a hater of the one-and-done, you have to love this NCAA tournament. As of Friday afternoon, this was the number of players on teams still alive projected by Draft Express as NBA first-rounders:
Three.
One is a senior (Buddy Hield of Oklahoma). One is a junior (Demetrius Jackson of Notre Dame). One is a sophomore (Domantas Sabonis of Gonzaga). None of the three is a freshman, meaning: Not one is a one-and-done.
Yes, some freshmen will be taken in Round 1: Duke’s Brandon Ingram could be the first player selected; Kentucky’s Jamal Murray and Skal Labissiere could be lottery picks (although all Labissiere has done to warrant such stature is grow tall); Jaylen Brown of Wheeler High and now California might go among the top five. But this isn’t a March for Hot Young Things. Two projected top-10 one-and-dones — LSU’s Ben Simmons and Marquette’s Henry Ellenson — didn’t make the Big Dance.
A year ago, the Final Four featured six one-and-dones: Jahlil Okafor, Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones of Duke; Karl-Anthony Towns, Trey Lyles and Devin Booker of Kentucky. In 2012, Kentucky won with three one-and-dones: Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague.
On Thursday, North Carolina coach Roy Williams lamented, sort of, his lack of first-rank talent: "Nobody's beating down the door for our guys to go to the NBA draft. If you want to go to the prom, somebody else has got to want to go with you."
Then: “Our guys are very good basketball players who I think have a chance to play basketball for a living. But last year there was nobody on my team that the NBA or the evaluation people said were going to be a lottery pick.”
Basketball is a sport where one great player can rule a nation. Had Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) signed with Michigan and not UCLA, the Wolverines would have won every NCAA title from 1967 through 1969. In the era of one-and-done, a great player can transform a program and then, like the mythical Keyser Soze: Poof, he’s gone.
Without Davis and his fellow freshmen, Kentucky fell from being national champs to losing to Robert Morris in the NIT. It wasn’t that Calipari didn’t land another passel of one-and-dones: He did. He always does. It was that these didn’t fit and then Nerlens Noel hurt his knee.
This Dance, by way of contrast, has been a case of slow and steady winning Ye Olde Race. Take the South Regional. Carolina’s two best players (Brice Johnson and Marcus Paige) are seniors. Indiana’s best player (Yogi Ferrell) is a senior. Notre Dame’s best big man (Zack Auguste) is a senior. Wisconsin’s two best players (Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig) are juniors.
You know what they call a Kentucky player who signs as a McDonald’s All-American and reaches his junior season? A disappointment.
Not that everything in college basketball comes back to the Big Blue, but it was intriguing that Calipari announced this week that his entire team, walk-ons included, would declare for the NBA draft. (A new rule makes it possible for players to withdraw later without penalty.) Said Notre Dame coach Mike Brey: “Putting his whole team in? Well, he’s not getting any pub here lately because he’s not playing. So he’s doing anything to stay out there. The guy’s a master. He’s a master.”
Then Brey offered this: “We love guys that have been with us four and sometimes five years and get better. And I think it’s interesting, the program we’re playing (Wisconsin), they do it the same way.”
If you watched Kansas pick apart Maryland on Thursday, you saw a top-shelf team working without top-end talent. Just counting bodies, Maryland was the stronger side. Four Terps are projected by Draft Express to be picked in June, freshman center Diamond Stone in Round 1. Three Jayhawks are slotted to be drafted, none in Round 1. Kansas won by 16 points. Sometimes mesh trumps manpower.
Conventional wisdom once held that a team needed three NBA-type talents to win an NCAA title. Not one of the 12 remaining teams has three NBA locks. But one is going to win this thing.
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