The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Big East came up small in 2020 NBA Draft
The Big East was the best conference in the nation last season.
Don’t take our word for it, take a look at the conference NET rankings. The Big East was No. 1, followed by the Big Ten, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC, ACC and the American. The league had four teams (Creighton, Villanova, Seton Hall and Butler) in the final AP Top 25 of the season.
And yet among the “Power Six” (or even “Power Seven”) conferences at the 2020 NBA Draft on Wednesday night, the Big East was the worst. Only two players from Big East teams were among the 60 selected in the two rounds: Villanova’s Saddiq Bey, the league’s only first-rounder, and DePaul’s Paul Reed, who was the third-to-last player picked.
That means the Big East had half as many players selected as the Mountain West, and the same amount — gasp! — the AAC, the Huskies’ home the past seven seasons. And the AAC boasted a pair of firstrounders. That oughta sit well with UConn fans.
Conversely, the SEC had 12 draft picks, followed by the Pac 12 (10), ACC (nine), Big 12 and Mountain West (four each) and Big Ten (three).
Perhaps even more telling, however, is the Big East players who weren’t selected. Myles Powell, the league’s reigning Player of the Year, and Markus Howard, the Big East’s all-time leading scorer, both went undrafted. So did Ty-Shon Alexander and Naji Marshall, both of whom entered the draft after their junior seasons and would have made their respective teams, Creighton and Xavier, much stronger this season.
So what gives? Once again, NBA teams draft largely on athleticism and potential and aren’t overly concerned with what kind of college career a player had. In fact, seniors are often shunned in the draft, particularly in the first round. Why waste a pick that comes with guaranteed money when you can likely sign a seasoned player like Powell or Howard as an undrafted free agent in the hours after the draft?
It feels like more and more, the NBA draft is dominated by physical specimens who play one season for a middling Power Five team, put up decent numbers and proceed straight to the lottery. Of the 48 American college players selected in this year’s draft, about half played on teams that almost certainly weren’t going to the NCAA tournament last March, barring a miracle in their respective conference tourneys.
Great four-year players like Powell, Howard, Ryan Boatright get left on the outside looking in.
This year’s No. 1 overall pick was Anthony Edwards, who “led” Georgia to a 5-13 record in the SEC as a freshman last season. In an interview just before the draft, Edwards said he’d rather be playing football, doesn’t even watch basketball and “loves” the sport only because it’s what he does. The No. 2 overall pick was James Wiseman, who played just three games last season at Mem
phis before issues surrounding his recruitment led him to quit the team to get ready for the NBA.
Juxtapose that against a guy like Christian Vital, who put his heart and soul into every second he was on the court. But Edwards is a 6foot-5, 220-pound guard who can score from anywhere on the floor (and doesn’t particularly care for defense). Wiseman is a 7-foot center busting with potential. So, they’re No. 1 and 2 overall, and Vital is playing in Germany.
Incidentally, it makes you wonder whether UConn’s James Bouknight would have been selected on Wednesday night had he decided to declare after his freshman season. Gotta believe someone would have taken a late-first round flyer on the 6-5, super-smooth athlete.
Drafting on size and potential is nothing new, really. It’s why Hasheem Thabeet was the No. 2 overall pick in 2009 and Boatright never really got a sniff of the NBA. Who was a better college player, Andre Drummond or Khalid El-Amin? Who was an NBA lottery pick (correctly so, it turns out) and who spent most of his career playing overseas?
This doesn’t take anything away from the Big East as a conference. It says more about the NBA. Former Providence Journal columnist Bill Reynolds once wrote, “The problem with the NBA is that there’s a place for Chris Dudley and none for Pepe Sanchez.” Same holds true today, just change the names.
The Big East has routinely been one of the top five leagues in the country since the split in 2013. It will be good again this season, thanks in no small part to the return of UConn. It’s got a pair of potential first-rounders in Bouknight and Villanova’s Jeremiah RobinsonEarle, both sophomores.
The best basketball might still be played in the Big East. But many of the players with the potential and “upside” NBA scouts drool over will play in other leagues.
WHEELER KEEPS ROLLING
Last week’s Big East men’s basketball notebook listed the various Connecticut products currently playing Division 1 basketball. Regretfully, we forgot to mention Stamford’s Aaron Wheeler, who is beginning his junior season at Purdue.
Wheeler, a 6-foot-9 junior who sat out his first season at Purdue as a redshirt, averaged 3.6 points and 4.2 rebounds per game last season for the Boilermakers. He played for two years under Mike Walsh at Trinity Catholic before transferring to St. Andrew’s, then Brewster Academy, where he was named MVP in the 2017 National Prep Championship game.
Wheeler was recruited heavily by Dan Hurley (when Hurley was still at Rhode Island) and Providence’s Ed Cooley, along with Pittsburgh, Seton Hall and Temple, before ultimately opting for Purdue.
His father, William, Jr., was a 1,000point scorer at Manhattan, and his uncle was a co-captain at Yale.