Ranking the Most Hyped CBB Freshmen of the Last Decade
There have been dozens of outstanding college basketball freshmen in the last decade, but few were more hyped before their first collegiate game than Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker.
High school basketball is still a far cry from a mainstream sport, but it has grown by leaps and bounds in popularity over the last 10 years, resulting in more opinions on and comparisons of the nation's top players than ever before.
Back when there weren't dozens of recruiting websites and hundreds of YouTube mixtapes to offer weekly progress reports on the nation's top high school players, hardly anyone knew what to expect from freshmen in college basketball. Nowadays, some of the studs are compared to NBA All-Stars before they're even old enough to drive.
But in a world where a dozen players are annually being labeled as the next LeBron James, which ones were the most hyped of all?
Be sure to note the deliberate absence of the word "over" in that question. These aren't the most overhyped players or the biggest busts; rather, they are the ones from which the most was expected upon arrival.
Players are ranked in ascending order of how much drool had accumulated on his scouting report by the beginning of his freshman year.
9. Anthony Davis, Kentucky (2011)
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The Hype
With basketball recruiting drastically more of an industry than it was a decade ago, most top-rated guys are gradually hyped over the course of several years. ESPN already has a list of the top 25 players in the class of 2019—i.e., guys who just finished their freshman year of high school. There have even been reports, including this one from ESPN.com's Dave McMenamin and Brian Windhorst, that 11-year-old LeBron James Jr. already has standing scholarship offers from Duke and Kentucky.
But up until about 18 months before he took the college basketball world by storm, few had heard of Anthony Davis.
He played his first few years of high school ball with Perspectives MSA—a team that went 8-15 his junior year in a league that Michael O'Brien of the Chicago Sun-Times described as one "that receives almost no attention from media or college scouts."
He was a 6'0" guard by the end of his freshman year, then grew like a weed to 6'10" before his senior year. Davis had never played AAU ball until April 2010, but he became a star as part of Tai Streets' Meanstreets club that spring and summer. In the span of a few months, he went from an unknown player with one scholarship offer from Cleveland State to one of the most coveted recruits in the nation.
The Result
To say the least, things went well for Davis at Kentucky. He led the Wildcats to a 38-2 record and a national championship en route to seemingly capturing every individual record ever created. He averaged 14.2 points, 10.4 rebounds and 4.7 blocks per game.
Despite missing at least a dozen games in each of his first four NBA seasons, Davis is a three-time All-Star who signed a five-year, $126.5 million contract before this past season. Both in terms of college and NBA success, no player has proved to be more worthy of the hype than Davis.
8. Renardo Sidney, Mississippi State (2009)
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The Hype
"As long as he keeps his weight down, he has a bright future ahead of him."
After just his freshman year of high school, that was the short and sweet conclusion to the glowing synopsis of Renardo Sidney by Mike Schmidt of DraftExpress.
At the time, he was the top prospect in the 2009 class. He began high school as a 6'9" small forward, but it wasn't long before he packed on 40 pounds and was regarded as a multifaceted star at power forward.
In a nutshell, he became the total package. Sidney had three-point range and great ball-handling skills in addition to the necessary size to back down even the biggest defenders. In the summer between Sidney's sophomore and junior years of high school, Ryan Griffiths of DraftExpress wrote:
"He showed the ability to score from anywhere on the floor, is a man amongst boys in the post, and might have the softest set of hands in the country. If I had to make a comparison right now, a fair one would be to Zach Randolph on the offensive end, simply because as soon as he gets the ball, he becomes a threat to score wherever he may be.
"
(For sake of context, that comparison came hot on the heels of Randolph's most productive NBA season, in which he averaged 23.6 points and 10.1 rebounds per game.)
The Result
The Sidney hype was all but gone by the time his college career began. Over his final two years of high school, body language and size became a serious concern. It got so bad that both USC and UCLA rescinded their scholarship offers to Sidney.
Between impermissible benefits that stunted the beginning of his college career and a fistfight with a teammate that confirmed fears about his body language and attitude, Sidney made minimal impact at the college level and never played in the NBA.
A sad but fitting bookend to his DraftExpress profile, the last entry came in May 2012 with this note: "Sidney quit pretty early on in the workout after being seen grasping an inhaler on the sidelines."
7. O.J. Mayo, USC (2007)
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The Hype
Long before becoming the focal point of an impermissible benefits scandal that led to Tim Floyd's resignation from head coach at USC, O.J. Mayo was a high school phenom NBA folks couldn't wait to throw millions of dollars at.
Mayo was just wrapping up his sophomore year in April 2005 when Rodger Bohn (director of prep scouting for DraftExpress) wrote, "He is hands down the best high school player in the country, regardless of age."
A testament to how far ahead of the learning curve Mayo was, Bohn added, "Due to the fact that Ohio does not allow middle school players to play high school basketball, Mayo played varsity basketball at Rose Hill Christian in Kentucky, where he averaged 21.8 points as a seventh-grader."
The legend of Mayo only evolved from there.
Between AAU ball and such all-star circuit events as the McDonald's All-American game, Mayo was consistently heralded as the most talented player in the building. After the Nike Hoop Summit, one unattributed DraftExpress writer concluded, "People putting out 'pre-preseason' All-America teams and not including Mayo just aren't thinking clearly. Mayo is an instant 20-5-5 presence."
The Result
That DraftExpress scout wasn't off by much. Mayo averaged 20.7 points, 4.5 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game in his one season with the Trojans. With a rotation comprised almost entirely of freshmen and sophomores, Mayo led USC to a 21-12 record and a No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament and became the No. 3 overall pick that June.
He's had some nice paydays and scoring outputs in the NBA, but he never lived up to the hype after college. Not only has he never been an All-Star, but he has yet to record so much as a league-average player efficiency rating in any of his eight seasons.
6. Harrison Barnes, North Carolina (2010)
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The Hype
It has become commonplace in recent years to find a freshman on the Associated Press Preseason All-Americans. Jahlil Okafor made the cut in 2014. Ben Simmons was on the list last year. It wouldn't be a surprise if Josh Jackson receives that honor this November.
But that wasn't always the case. As little as six years ago, no freshman had ever been named a preseason All-American by the AP.
Harrison Barnes broke through that glass ceiling in 2010.
He was turning heads long before that, though. According to a biographical piece on Barnes that Jon Yates wrote for the Chicago Tribune in December 2009, he was blowing people away before he even had his learner's permit:
"His high school coach, Vance Downs, remembers Barnes showing up for his first varsity practice as a freshman. One of Downs' assistants told him he had to check out the new kid, so he walked down to the court and saw Barnes dunk the ball so hard, he almost broke the basket support.
'I turned around just about as fast as I could and walked away because I didn't want a 14-year-old kid to see me in awe of what he just did,' Downs said.
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The Result
Unlike just about everyone else on the list, Barnes stayed in school for two seasons, but he was great for both of them. In fact, he had a 40-point game in the ACC tournament against Clemson as a freshman. But between the NBA threatening to strike for the entire 2011-12 season and North Carolina poised to compete for a national championship, he opted for another year to hone his skills.
But he has been little more than a role player thus far in the NBA, playing fourth fiddle to Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green over the past several years with the Golden State Warriors. He hasn't been a disappointment, per se, but one would hope for more than 10 points per game from someone so highly regarded in both high school and college.
5. Ben Simmons, LSU (2015)
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The Hype
The experts tried to forewarn us about the lack of strength in this year's draft class.
"I think it's really weak, honestly," Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress told SNY on the 4 Quarters Podcast last April. "I'm pretty down on it. I don't see a lot of depth to it right now."
Similarly, ESPN's NBA draft expert Chad Ford declared, "We've had two straight stellar NBA drafts. ... The 2016 draft looks considerably weaker."
But that certainly didn't stop anyone from swooning over the Australian phenom at the head of the class.
"If you understand the game of basketball, I don't know how you can watch him and not see a special, special basketball player," one NBA GM told Ford last summer. "I'd take him over anyone in the 2015 NBA draft. He's just scratching the surface of what he could be."
In the span of five hours in late June, ESPN's Fran Fraschilla called Simmons "the ultimate modern NBA player," and ESPN's Jay Bilas said he had "versatile talent rarely seen"—and told one responder to his tweet that he thinks Simmons has a higher ceiling than Andrew Wiggins.
By the time he started playing for LSU, it felt like a disappointment that he didn't average a triple-double—or even record a single one.
The Result
So far, so good. Though LSU was a colossal disappointment during the 2015-16 season, Simmons was not. He averaged 19.2 points, 11.8 rebounds, 4.8 assists and 2.0 steals per game. He's the only player in the past 23 years to average at least 16.0, 10.0, 4.0 and 1.5, respectively.
4. Jahlil Okafor, Duke (2014)
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The Hype
Three months prior to Jahlil Okafor's 17th birthday, DraftExpress' Jonathan Givony closed out his scouting report on the future Blue Devil by asking if he might be a bigger version of Jared Sullinger.
At the time, it was ridiculously high praise. Though Sullinger has only been a marginally above-average big man in the NBA, that comparison came months after Sullinger averaged 17.2 points and 10.2 rebounds per game en route to first team All-American honors as a freshman for the 34-3 Ohio State Buckeyes.
From that point on, it was an endless barrage of comments on Okafor's high basketball IQ, his soft hands and his nimble feet. Scouts went out of their way to make the point that Okafor wasn't just some big dude who dominated with his height and nothing else, leaving us salivating over his silky smooth potential.
While Harrison Barnes (2010) and Andrew Wiggins (2013) were named preseason first-team All-Americans, CBS Sports, NBC Sports and SB Nation took it one step further with Okafor, crowning him the preseason Player of the Year.
After hearing nothing but good things about the big man for several years, it felt equal parts blasphemous and contrarian when NBA mock draft experts began to suggest in the middle of his freshman season that he might get drafted anywhere other than No. 1 overall.
The Result
Okafor averaged 17.3 points and 8.5 rebounds per game for the national champions and spent the entire 2014-15 season in a heated battle with Wisconsin's Frank Kaminsky for all of the individual Player of the Year awards.
Though the Philadelphia 76ers gave him absolutely nothing to work with on a team that went 10-72, Okafor also had a solid rookie season in the NBA—minus the off-the-court issues. If he can cut that stuff out, he should be headed for a nice career.
3. Jabari Parker, Duke (2013)
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The Hype
May is typically a time of year reserved for NBA and NHL playoffs, but Sports Illustrated made Jabari Parker—still just a junior in high school—its cover story in May 2012.
"The best high school basketball player since LeBron James," read the teaser on the cover. And just a few paragraphs into Jeff Benedict's tale of the phenom, the praise was even higher:
"Jabari handles the ball like a point guard and has a crossover that makes defenders stumble. His first step has been compared to Oscar Robertson's. He can drain threes, yet he goes to the rim with power and uses his 6'11½" wingspan to block shots and snatch rebounds. One NBA executive told SI that if Jabari were eligible for the (2012) draft, he would be a lottery pick in June.
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In the span of a few sentences, Parker was compared to the greatest triple-double machine of all time and lauded as a player so talented that NBA teams would have been lining up to build their franchises around him two years before he was even eligible to be drafted.
A year before that, though, he was named the 2011 USA Basketball Male Athlete of the Year after being named the MVP of the 2011 FIBA Americas U16 Championship. The year before Parker won that award, Kevin Durant won it. And LeBron James won it the year after Parker. It's little wonder he garnered comparisons to two of the best players in the NBA.
The Result
Despite spending most of the season out of position as Duke's de facto center, Parker had a fantastic year with the Blue Devils, averaging 19.1 points and 8.7 rebounds per game.
The NBA portion of his career hasn't gone quite so swimmingly. Parker tore his ACL 25 games into his rookie season and wasn't setting the world on fire before the injury, either. And from a statistical standpoint, year No. 2 with the Milwaukee Bucks didn't go any better.
There's still plenty of time for Parker to turn things around, but for someone often compared to Durant and James, the beginning of his pro career has been disappointing.
2. Greg Oden, Ohio State (2006)
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The Hype
The one-and-done rule went into effect for the 2006 NBA draft, making Greg Oden the first top-rated high school player who was forced to spend a year in college. As a result, the comparisons and superlatives were out of control.
Jonathan Watters was the director of NCAA scouting for DraftExpress in June 2006, and he wrote a little something on each of the players from that year's class who likely would have gone straight from high school to the NBA. The collection of names he dropped in the first three sentences of his report on Oden are insane:
"There isn't much that left to be said about Greg Oden. He would have been the number one pick in this year's draft, and maybe even the year before that as a junior, had he been allowed to enter. His sheer size and power around the basket is sure to evoke memories of days when players like David Robinson, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing were around to challenge Shaquille O'Neal's dominance in the paint.
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The Result
Despite undergoing wrist surgery the summer before his one year with the Buckeyes and subsequently shooting his free throws left-handed, Oden was almost as good as advertised. He averaged 15.7 points, 9.6 rebounds and 3.3 blocks per game in leading Ohio State to the national championship game.
Unfortunately for the Portland Trail Blazers, though, he was never even remotely worth the No. 1 pick in the 2007 NBA draft. He missed the entire 2007-08 season after the first of many knee surgeries, appearing in just 105 career games.
1. Andrew Wiggins, Kansas (2013)
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The Hype
With Andrew Wiggins, the college basketball world hit critical mass on the hype meter.
In April 2012—two months after his 17th birthday and 2 ½ years before he was scheduled to begin his college basketball career—Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress dubbed Wiggins "one of the most talented prospects in the world currently outside the NBA." But that was child's play compared to where things were headed.
Wiggins was the No. 1 prospect in the 2014 class, and after reclassifying to the 2013 class in October 2012, he immediately leapfrogged everyone to get to No. 1 on that list, as well. After months of internet rumblings suggesting that Wiggins was destined to become the next LeBron James, ESPN.com's Paul Biancardi embraced the debate in June 2013 with a side-by-side comparison of their respective high school dominance. Bleacher Report's Jonathan Wasserman conducted a similar exercise a few weeks later.
Both scouting experts came to the conclusion that the comparison was a bit outlandish, but the fact that multiple research projects needed to be carried out on the subject speaks volumes to how highly Wiggins was regarded.
Now imagine if he had remained in the 2014 class for an additional 12 months of hype. He's No. 1 on our list as it is, but he likely would have given sliced bread a run for its money as the best thing ever with another year of hype articles and mixtapes.
The Result
Despite averaging 17.1 points per game for a title contender, it often felt like Wiggins had more to give—an unfortunate side effect of the deluge of hype.
Between the regular-season finale and the Big 12 tournament opener—without Joel Embiid in the lineup to help shoulder the load—Wiggins finally had a pair of performances we expected to see on a semi-regular basis, tallying 71 points, 16 rebounds, eight steals, five blocks and five assists.
But he had just four points and four turnovers in Kansas' second-round exit from the NCAA tournament and has spent the past two years wasting away on the hapless Minnesota Timberwolves. His career PER of 15.2 is just barely above the league average. That's a far cry from Mr. James, whose 18.3 PER as a rookie still stands as his only season with a rating below 24.5.
Advanced stats courtesy of Sports-Reference.com and Basketball-Reference.com.
Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.
