Yes, but what would Jim Boeheim have said if he was successful at recruiting Andrew Wiggins or Jabari Parker?
There’s plenty of talk about teams tanking this season for the chance to draft Wiggins, Parker, Julius Randle, Joel Embiid and the other elite players expected in the upcoming draft. You need franchise changing players to win in the NBA and if you’re a mid-to-small market NBA team the draft is how you need to get those kinds of players. In short, Milwaukee is doing the right thing.
But legendary Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim doesn’t see it that way and said so to Zagsblog on SNY.TV.“There’s no player that’s out there on the horizon that’s a Tim Duncan or a LeBron James,” the Hall of Fame Syracuse coach told SNY.tv by phone Thursday.]
“I’ve seen all these guys play. I think they’re very talented players. They’re not that kind of player. They’re not transcendent players that are gonna make your franchise into a 10-12-15-year winning franchise because you’re there. I don’t see that.”
Did he feel that Paul George was going to be one? Boeheim is a guy that certainly knows the game and has impeccable credentials, let’s just say that most scouts (not all, but a strong majority) disagree with Boeheim here.
This class of freshmen also brings up the one-and-done rule debate again (one the NBA tabled in the last collective bargaining agreement negotiations then never picked up) and the relationship between the NBA and it’s free farm system.
If I were an NBA coach like Boeheim I’d hate one-and-done, too — the longer you can keep your elite talent around, the better for your program. Know that NBA owners would love to help out college coaches there and make it two-and-done because they think the more time to scout guys the fewer mistakes they make and the lower their risk (history has shown that not to be true, there were busts long before high school kids could commit).
Nobody is fond of the current system; it’s the ultimate compromise where nobody feels they really won. And because of that we may be stuck with it for a while.