Under-the-Radar Contenders for College Basketball Player of the Year in 2016-17
The 2016-17 college basketball season is just around the corner, at which time teams from all over the country will begin the journey to make the NCAA tournament and play for a title. Along the way, the best players in the game will be evaluated for various awards, including those such as the Naismith and Wooden awards given to the national player of the year.
Recent POYs such as Oklahoma's Buddy Hield, Wisconsin's Frank Kaminsky and Creighton's Doug McDermott entered their respective winning seasons as a strong contender for those awards. Each year, there are plenty of well-known candidates for national honors—the kind who will pop up on early watch lists and thus get a head start on the rest of the field.
But to think those are the only players with a real shot to win the award is foolish. We've picked out 10 guys who may or may not make that initial list, but with a big year, they could be right in the mix when the season ends.
Nick Emery, BYU
1 of 10
BYU's fast-paced offense is a strong breeding ground for prolific scorers, and offensive production is a key part of being considered for national honors. Since 2003-04, only two Wooden Award winners have averaged fewer than 20.4 points per game, with last year's winner (Hield) scoring 25 a night.
The 2010-11 winner was BYU's Jimmer Fredette, whose 28.9 scoring average was the highest of any Wooden winner since Purdue's Glenn Robinson (30.3) in 1993-94. That was as a senior, while in his first college season, Fredette averaged just seven points per game.
Nick Emery averaged 16.3 last season as a freshman for the Cougars, which tied for 13th-best among freshmen in 2015-16, but most of the players above him were their respective team's primary scorer. The 6'2" guard was BYU's second-leading scorer, behind the now-graduated Chase Fischer, and he's the only one of BYU's three guys who averaged at least 15 who returns.
In a position to be the focal point of BYU's offense, which ranked ninth nationally at 83.6 points per game last season, if Emery scores in bunches and leads the Cougars to a strong season, expect him to get national player of the year consideration.
Marcus Foster, Creighton
2 of 10
Marcus Foster spent two chaotic seasons at Kansas State before his tense relationship with head coach Bruce Weber came to a head. He was dismissed from the team in March 2015, not long after going scoreless in 19 minutes of the Wildcats' Big 12 tournament loss to TCU. A month later, he ended up at Creighton.
He averaged 14.1 points with Kansas State, but his numbers dipped as a sophomore, when his run-ins with Weber led to missing three games because of disciplinary action. The year off has enabled the 6'3" guard to reset himself and restart his career, where with the Bluejays he might not need to be as heavily relied on in 2016-17.
Creighton returns three of its top four scorers, including point guard Maurice Watson, a player who can take pressure off Foster but also be someone he can feed off each game. And Foster has shown he can get hot, scoring 20 or more points 12 times at K-State, including a career-best 34 in February 2014 against Texas when he was 13-of-16 from the field and made five of eight three-pointers.
Jack Gibbs, Davidson
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When Stephen Curry played for Davidson and led the Wildcats to the Elite Eight in 2007-08, he lost out on POY honors to North Carolina big man Tyler Hansbrough, who was part of a national championship team. The following season, despite averaging 28.6 points per game, because Davidson didn't make the NCAA tournament, it was Oklahoma double-double machine Blake Griffin who won the Wooden.
Davidson's latest diminutive scorer faces a similar uphill battle for national recognition, but not to the same extent. At that time, the school was in the Southern Conference, and now it plays in the Atlantic 10, winning the regular-season league title in 2014-15 when Jack Gibbs was a sophomore. He averaged 16.2 points per game with that team and then exploded to 23.4 per game last season.
Another prolific season is in the cards for the 5'11" Gibbs, who topped the 40-point mark three times in 2015-16 along with seven other games with at least 30.
In making bold predictions for the start of the 2016-17 season, Bleacher Report's Kerry Miller posited that someone will hit 50 in a game for the first time since February 2013. He used a photo of Gibbs as an example of someone who could hit that number.
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Ethan Happ, Wisconsin
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Ethan Happ had himself a pretty good redshirt freshman season in 2015-16, averaging 12.4 points and 7.9 rebounds on 53.8 percent shooting. The 6'8" forward was integral in the Badgers' hot streak in the second half and Sweet 16 berth, contributing 15 points and 8.5 rebounds per game during March.
It was enough to warrant Happ's appearance on the Big Ten's preseason all-conference team, a 10-man list that featured two other Wisconsin players: forward Nigel Hayes and guard Bronson Koenig, with Hayes tabbed as the preseason player of the year.
If Hayes is able to shake off the shooting struggles he had most of last season, he no doubt can live up to that hype and also vie for national POY honors. But if his funk continues, Happ will likely be the one having to pick up the slack in the frontcourt and thus start to get the spotlight pointed in his direction.
Wisconsin's Frank Kaminsky won the Wooden Award in 2014-15 after breaking through the previous season. Happ was a part of that team as a redshirt, though part of his strong debut can be traced to having worked against Kaminsky in practice.
V.J. King, Louisville
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The Wooden Award doesn't include freshmen on its initial watch list but adds them at midseason if a first-year player is having a big season. It's not hard to project which such freshmen will get midseason consideration—just look at the national recruiting rankings.
V.J. King is on there, rated 20th overall in the 2016 class as a 6'6" wing, though he hasn't garnered nearly as much attention as the freshmen set to debut at Duke or Kentucky or individual prospects like UCLA's Lonzo Ball, Kansas' Josh Jackson or Michigan State's Miles Bridges. Yet if Louisville is going to be a player in the ACC and make another postseason run, King figures to be heavily involved.
The Cardinals' top three scorers from last season have moved on, with junior guard Quentin Snider's 9.4 points per game the most of any returner. King could slide right into the wing slot that leading scorer Damion Lee held last year and thus be in position to make a major splash in the ACC and across the country.
Lauri Markkanen, Arizona
6 of 10
Arizona head coach Sean Miller signed a top-seven recruiting class that went heavy on guards, and even after Terrance Ferguson opted for an overseas contract over college, he's still loaded in the backcourt. The Wildcats' potential weakness is in the paint, where the graduation of big men Ryan Anderson and Kaleb Tarczewski leaves them thin.
That opinion is changing with each opportunity to glimpse what Lauri Markkanen is capable of on the court. A 7-footer from Finland who didn't play high school ball in this country, he was mostly a mystery until footage of him dominating during the FIBA U20 European Championships surfaced this summer. That showed him dunking, blocking and rebounding like someone his size would normally do but also draining threes and running the floor to drive the lane.
Sophomore guard Allonzo Trier is Arizona's best bet for Pac-12 and national player of the year honors, but don't count out Markkanen if he's able to carve out a big freshman season.
Emmett Naar, Saint Mary's
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The power conferences continue to dominate college basketball, producing every national champion since 1990-91 and most of the national players of the year as well. But players from outside the top leagues have claimed individual praise five times since the turn of the century because their performances were just too hard to ignore.
Creighton's Doug McDermott, BYU's Jimmer Fredette, Utah's Andrew Bogut and Saint Joseph's standout Jameer Nelson each won the Wooden Award, while Gonzaga's Adam Morrison shared the 2005-06 honor with Duke's J.J. Redick.
Forty percent of those non-power winners are from teams currently in the West Coast Conference, from where Saint Mary's hails. The Gaels have been an underrated mid-major power for some time now and have a strong roster coming back, with Emmett Naar the top choice to emerge from the pack and get into the national POY mix.
The 6'1" guard averaged 14.1 points, 6.3 assists and 3.7 rebounds as a sophomore for a Saint Mary's team that won 29 games but didn't make the NCAA tourney because of a weak schedule. Don't count out the Gaels this year if they get in, and with Naar at the forefront of such a push, he'd be deserving of award consideration.
Alec Peters, Valparaiso
8 of 10
Arguably the best mid-major player in the country last season, Alec Peters got Valparaiso to the NIT championship game while putting together a tremendous individual stat line. If his senior year involves leading the Crusaders back to the NCAA tournament and includes a win or two, his decision to return to school for one more season will have proved to be an incredibly lucrative one.
The 6'9" forward averaged 18.4 points and 8.4 rebounds, shot 50.5 percent overall and 44 percent from three-point range in his junior season. He entered the NBA draft and went through the combine, getting feedback that said a return to school—and not as a graduate transfer at a bigger program, as he was eligible to do—was his best course.
"Be a guy at a mid-major school next year that's dominating at my level," Peters said he was told, per NBC Sports' Rob Dauster. "Show that I can put up 20 and 10 and dominate a game against a bigger opponents when we play them. Lead my team farther into the NCAA tournament this year."
Peters, who helped Valpo get into the NCAA tourney in 2015, would be doing it almost all himself, as the Crusaders graduated several starters and saw head coach Bryce Drew head to Vanderbilt.
Rodney Purvis, Connecticut
9 of 10
Connecticut has won four national titles since 1999—two since 2011—and has had more than a dozen players become NBA draft lottery picks, though it's never had a player chosen as Naismith or Wooden national player of the year. Often the Huskies' biggest years have been when they've made incredible late runs, such as their last two championships, and thus their top players weren't dominant enough over the course of an entire season to warrant strong consideration.
If UConn makes another title push in 2016-17 and manages to do so as a strong team all season long, look for Rodney Purvis to get a look for the big awards.
Purvis, who began his career at North Carolina State before transferring and then sitting out the 2013-14 season, has averaged double figures in scoring in his two years with the Huskies. His 12.8 points per game were tops on a balanced offensive team last season, but he's the only returning player who averaged more than 7.3 points per game.
Nigel Williams-Goss, Gonzaga
10 of 10
Just like with freshmen, the Wooden Award's soon-to-be-released preseason watch list won't include any players who transferred from other programs and are set to debut with their new schools in 2016-17. Had Nigel Williams-Goss stayed at Washington instead of crossing to the other side of the state, he may have been on the 2015-16 preseason list. If he can return to his old form, he's likely to be part of a midseason roster.
The 6'3" guard averaged 14.5 points per game in two seasons with the Huskies, which is better than the career averages of any other player on Gonzaga's roster (which also includes veteran transfers from California and Missouri). His ability to rebound at his position and facilitate for others as well as score on his own will be invaluable for the Bulldogs, who lost their top three scorers from an Elite Eight team.
Gonzaga is still considered a mid-major but has been winning consistently for so long it's treated differently, and that includes when it comes to awards. Adam Morrison was a co-Wooden winner in 2005-06 when he averaged more than 28 points per game, and while Williams-Goss hit 28 or more points just four times at Washington, it doesn't mean he couldn't erupt for a big year with Gonzaga.
All statistics courtesy of Sports-Reference.com unless otherwise noted. All recruiting information courtesy of Scout.com unless otherwise noted.
Follow Brian J. Pedersen on Twitter at @realBJP.
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