Jury’s still out on Canadian basketballer Wiggins
The hype before he arrived was so big, and unlike Andrew Wiggins, it had done this before. The machine knows how to process the allure of potential, so there was Andrew Wiggins on the cover of Sports Illustrated alongside the ghost of Wilt Chamberlain, lacing up his sneakers. There he was, mentioned in the same breath as LeBron James. There is a future No. 1 pick every year, but some of them ascend to a different realm of anticipation. Andrew Wiggins, from Vaughn, Ont., was one of those.
Wiggins’ season at Kansas ended Sunday in the second round of the NCAA tournament, and it ended in confounding fashion. The 19-year-old has been an unreliable stock all season, but after fellow super-prospect Joel Embiid’s back injury Wiggins had shown bigger, brighter flashes: that monster 41-point, eight-rebound, four-steal, five-block game at West Virginia, the 30 against Oklahoma State on 17 shots. His coach, Bill Self, told reporters Wiggins had become “more of an alpha dog or assassin-type guy here of late than he was before. Because Andrew, he wants to fit in. He wants to be a part of a team.”
Against Stanford on Sunday, Wiggins was barely that. He was the shell of his worst self: swinging the ball without great purpose, standing in the corner, hanging off to the side. He only took six shots — another top-three candidate, Duke’s Jabari Parker, managed 14 attempts in his disappointing firstround exit — and none in the last 8:31, when the game was still in the balance. On the final play, with Kansas needing a three to tie, Wiggins cut behind the line and put out his hands for the ball, and teammate Frank Mason hesitated for a second, then took another dribble and handed the ball off to the rather less-heralded Connor Frankamp, who had hit four threes on the afternoon. Frankamp missed.
Wiggins finished with four points, a ghost himself. Stanford’s Stefan Nastic, an unheralded kid from Thornhill, Ont., scored 10 points on 4-of-5 shooting. Brampton, Ont., native Tyler Ennis, another future first- round pick, was also eliminated over the weekend, but he took Syracuse’s final two shots, both good looks. He went down firing, the game in his hands.
Now, Kansas’s offence attacking the Stanford zone was abysmal; Wiggins was not put in a position to succeed, and that’s important. But he didn’t rise above that, either. At points during the season Self told The Kansas City Star that Wiggins needed more pushing than he expected; he said he had tried to make Wiggins mad, and couldn’t.
“We didn’t attack (the zone) well,” Self told a news conference. “We were passive against it. That’s what happens when you’re not real confident sometimes, or individuals aren’t confident, and not having a great game. Things are open, but you’re a little hesitant to throw it.”
About Wiggins, he said, “The kid had a remarkable season. Today shouldn’t offset what he’s done for 34 games.”
Those 34 games, though, showed many sides of a young man who isn’t nearly fully formed, and what he will become remains the central question of Andrew Wiggins. On TSN, Sam Mitchell said Wiggins will be a better pro than a college player and that’s probably true. The kid has talent. His athleticism, his first step, the tools, they’re there. His numbers were a shade below Parker’s this season, and Parker is a polished product. There are NBA executives who wonder whether Wiggins will develop his ball skills and learn to create, or stay a jumper, slasher, and shooter. He was a second-team All-American, and nobody knows what’s inside him yet.
“It’ll be really interesting to see where his personality is,” said Steve Nash, the general manager of Canada’s national team, in a recent conversation. “And the one thing that people really need to remember is he’s a young man. If he gets better the way he has the last two years for the next three years, he’s going to be great.”