NBA Draft 2011: The Top 10 Prospects Whose Stock Dropped in March Madness
Sometimes the bright lights of March Madness overwhelm players and force them into previously unseen battles with ineptitude. It happens to the best of them.
With the great hopes and dreams that March brings along, it also brings immense pressure. The vast majority of those dreams do, after all, end up shattered.
Regular season stars don't end up being postseason stars and their draft stocks begin to slip down and down.
Such is the case for players like Kawhi Leonard, Scotty Hopson and more. Read on to find out which 10 draft prospects hurt their chances at a bigger payday the most.
Keith Benson
1 of 10
Oakland's star big man played fabulously throughout the regular season, but couldn't live up to expectations against the favored Texas Longhorns in his opening game of the 2011 NCAA Tournament.
Keith Benson may have put up a double-double with 15 points and 11 rebounds, but he didn't exactly have a great performance.
He only made six of his 15 shots from the field and made just three of his six free throw attempts. Additionally, the senior turned the ball over twice while failing to record even a single assist.
But his biggest detriment to the team came on defense as he simply couldn't stop Tristan Thompson, who put up a double-double of his own with 17 points and 10 rebounds in the Longhorns' four-point win.
Steven Gray
2 of 10
Steven Gray was good but not great in both of his two games during March Madness. But failing to be great on the sport's biggest stage means that your draft stock is going to slip a bit, even if you have an NBA-ready body.
Against St. John's, Gray had 16 points, six rebounds and five assists, but the points came on six-for-11 shooting from the field and his defense was less than stellar. Then, in the blowout loss to BYU, Gray recorded 18 points, three rebounds and seven assists, but many of those stats came after the game was already out of reach.
Gray simply failed to leave a positive impression thanks to a relatively lackluster tournament performance.
Scotty Hopson
3 of 10
Scotty Hopson averaged 17 points per game during the regular season but then put up an absolute stinker against Michigan in a 30-point shellacking that saw the Volunteers eliminated way too quickly.
In fact, Hopson played so poorly that he may need to forgo the draft entirely, remaining at Tennessee for his senior season in the hopes of re-elevating his stock.
The 6'7" guard shot just one-for-five from the field and totaled a whopping four points. Did his other stats make up for his lack of scoring? Absolutely not.
Hopson only grabbed two rebounds on the night and turned the ball over three times while failing to record a single steal, block or assist.
Tu Holloway
4 of 10
Tu Holloway may be in a similar position to Scotty Hopson in that his March Madness performance was putrid enough that a senior season may be necessary instead of optional.
Holloway averaged 19.7 points per game as a junior, but he couldn't get it done during crunch time. In an 11-point second-round loss to Marquette, Holloway logged 38 of a possible 40 minutes but his output would never have led me to guess he was on the court for so long.
The guard made only one of his eight shots, scoring just five points. He matched that with five assists.
That's not exactly how you want your season to end.
Terrence Jones
5 of 10
Terrence Jones and the Kentucky Wildcats made it all the way to the Final Four, but the left-handed freshman didn't blow anyone away with a standout performance. Instead, he put together a number of relatively mundane box scores.
His best performance of the tournament came in the loss to Connecticut when he recorded his second double-double of March Madness with 11 points and 15 rebounds. But even then, he never appeared to dominate.
In the previous games, Jones was fairly inefficient and struggled to stay involved in the Wildcats offense. Overall, he averaged 10 points and six rebounds per game, well below his season averages in both categories.
Kawhi Leonard
6 of 10
Kawhi Leonard put up good numbers in each of his three games, but he never took over a contest and he made costly errors during critical stretches of the games. Both of those are not promising signs for a potential lottery pick.
Leonard opened his March Madness experience with 21 points and 10 rebounds, but you have to remember that those numbers came against Northern Colorado. Against a much better team in the Temple Owls, Leonard still managed to post 16 points and nine boards.
But then against the eventual tournament champions, he was shut down during the important parts of the game and finished with just 12 points and nine rebounds.
Demetri McCamey
7 of 10
With the exception of his six turnovers, Demetri McCamey played pretty well against the UNLV Runnin' Rebels during Illinois' first game of the tournament. He did, after all, score 17 points on seven-for-13 shooting and added seven assists to his numbers.
But then he had to face the Kansas Jayhawks. The results were not so pretty.
In the last game of his collegiate career, McCamey drained only two of his nine attempted shots from the field. He finished with just six points and went out with a whimper instead of a bang.
Josh Selby
8 of 10
From potential lottery pick to middle of the second round selection, so has gone the draft stock of Kansas freshman Josh Selby.
Selby capped off a disappointing freshman season with an ineffective tournament showing.
In 15 minutes against Boston University, he scored six points, grabbed two rebounds, recorded two assists and turned the ball over once.
Then in 10 minutes of action against Illinois, Selby didn't even take a shot from the field. He did pull down one rebound and feed his teammates twice.
Next came the blowout win over Richmond where Selby was on the court for 17 minutes. He tried to make those minutes count with nine points, three rebounds and a turnover.
Finally, he shot one-for-five against VCU, scoring just two points and grabbing a single rebound in his 15 minutes of play.
That's not really what an NBA team is looking to draft in the first round.
Kyle Singler
9 of 10
Was Kyle Singler bad in the 2011 NCAA Tournament? No, not really.
After all, he did average 14 points, 6.3 rebounds and 2.0 assists per game. But Duke suffered a disappointingly early loss to the Arizona Wildcats and Singler didn't really step up to help prevent that from happening.
Singler is expected to be a stud every single time he steps out onto the court, but he really wasn't at all during the tournament and he left many scouts scratching their heads and wondering why they should tell their GMs to pull the trigger on Singler in the first round.
Jeffery Taylor
10 of 10
No one hurt his draft stock during the tournament more than Vanderbilt's Jeffery Taylor.
In the Commodores' first game, played against the Richmond Spiders, Taylor let the bright lights get the best of him and played like there was a lid on the basket. He made only one of his 10 field goal attempts that game.
Now Taylor did drill both free throw attempts he was awarded, but that only gave him four points on the night and his nine rebounds weren't enough to make up for his zero assists and two turnovers.
This would have been fine if Taylor had a chance to redeem himself with another game, but the forward never got that chance since Vanderbilt was upset by Richmond in that game.
