College Basketball National Player of the Year Down to 3 Candidates

As the college basketball regular season winds down heading into postseason play, the sport’s landscape starts to take shape, allowing the prognosticators to masquerade around as if they were Nostradamus and offer their forecast of any and everything under the moon.

As it stands today, any team not donning the blue of Kentucky or the orange of Syracuse still has something to either play for or lose as it relates to the national scene. This makes it very difficult for the fortune tellers to do their job, but keeps things very interesting to say the least.

The National Player of the Year race isn’t quite as muddled as the postseason picture, as three players have really weaved their way through the labyrinth and emerged as the favorites to take home the honor.

Anthony Davis, freshman—Kentucky Wildcats (28-1): 14.3 points, 9.8 rebounds, .658 FG%, 4.8 blocks and 1.5 steals

Thomas Robinson, junior—Kansas Jayhawks (24-5): 17.8 points, 11.9 rebounds, .537 FG%, 1.8 assists, 1.1 blocks and 1.1 steals.

Draymond Green, senior—Michigan State Spartans (24-5): 15.6 points, 10.3 rebounds, .449 FG%, .402 3FG%, 3.6 assists, 1.5 steals

Each of these players is the visible leader of their team, all of which are currently ranked in the Top 5 and have their eyes set on a potential No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. This is critical in helping to separate them from other worthy candidates, for it serves as the de facto tiebreaker when viewing players with similar stats.

College basketball is no different from any other sport, in that they expect the Player of the Year or MVP to come from a successful team. This is why we have seen players like Creighton’s Doug McDermott—whose numbers stack up against anyone in the country with 23 points, 8.1 rebounds, .607 FG%, .479 3FG% and .801 FT%—fall out of contention recently, coinciding with his team’s struggles.

I personally called for McDermott to win the award in January, but Creighton has since taken a few steps back and now sits at 25-5 in a Missouri Valley Conference that they would have had to completely dominate for McDermott to have kept his name in the running.

With no clear-cut favorite and few opportunities remaining for Davis, Robinson and Green to separate themselves from the pack, it really will boil down to personal preference when the vote takes place, and it’s anyone guess how that will play out.

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