For those of us who are NBA fans as well as (or perhaps even more so than) NCAA fans, this year's March Madness tournament has been an exciting way to see a number of the year's most highly touted prospects facing off at the highest level of competition. A chance for one final evaluation of their on-court strengths and weaknesses before they end up being parceled out around the most desperate pro franchises this June.
But sadly, such final looks have been all too brief for most of the top guys. Projected lottery picks like Oklahoma State's Marcus Smart, Syracuse's Tyler Ennis and Duke's Rodney Hood have all been eliminated in the tournament's first two rounds, making for a lot of exciting March Madness upsets, but robbing the tournament of a lot of its star power and certainly the majority of its NBA appeal.
But of course, the biggest discussion surrounding the tournament's disappointing start for its top prospects has centered around the underwhelming final performances of perhaps the two most visible and hyped stars of next year's draft - Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker.
Wiggins and his Kansas teammates were eliminated on Sunday in a 60-57 actual-second-round upset at the hands of Stanford, in which he ended the game with just four points on 1-6 shooting, with four boards and four turnovers in 34 minutes. That's still further than Parker made it, as the forward's Duke team was taken out in the actual first round by 14th-seeded Mercer. Jabari finished with 14 points on 4-14 shooting, seven rebounds and four turnovers in 28 minutes.
Unsurprisingly, the respective performances of the two freshmen have become lightning rods for a whole lot of empty rhetoric, both from the doubters who say that the no-shows mean that the prospects will never achieve greatness at the next level, and from the reactionaries to the reactionaries who insist that the performances were entirely meaningless and that it's ridiculous to derive any meaning from them whatsoever.
As usual, the truth is found somewhere in between the two extremes. So, let's take a look at seven of the more common sentiments being expressed post-elimination for Parker and Wiggins, and determine whether I found them to be Fact (accurate and mostly inarguable), Myth (inaccurate and mostly indefensible) or Speculation (something whose accuracy we couldn't possibly know for sure just yet).
Statement #1: Wiggins and Parker's draft stock both took a big hit this weekend.
Myth.
I think the biggest thing that you could argue here is that they left the door open for another prospect or two to move ahead of them with a strong March Madness showing in the estimation of some GMs, but as you can probably surmise, there aren't a lot of prospects with surging stocks in this tournament, much less those who are already close enough to being on Jabari and Andrew's level to challenge their supremacy.
Perhaps some teams will now look a little more closely at Kansas center Joel Embiid, the only other prospect frequently mentioned in the discussion for the top pick, or at Australian point guard Dante Exum, a kind of sleeper candidate for the position if they have a top three pick. But that's sort of a fallacy in itself, since neither Embiid (injured) nor Exum (international) even played in the tournament, and there's nothing to conclusively suggest that they wouldn't have experienced similar struggles in such a situation.
Most GMs are smart enough to not overreact to a bad game or two, and Embiid's back injuries and Exum's lack of experience against high-level competition are just as potentially damning to their respective draft stocks as an NCAA flop is to Parker or Wiggins.
Statement #2: The NCAA tournament is overrated in general in terms of how meaningful it is for evaluating the future prospects of players like Parker and Wiggins.
Fact.
The idea that you get to see something new in a player based on how they play in the challenge of a single-elimination tournament ignores the unbelievable amount of pressure heaped upon these kids from day one.
They've already experienced plenty of impossibly high-stress situations, like sold-out rivalry games, nationally televised conference and preseason tournaments, and every single game they play in front of countless scouts and internet jackasses like us who pick apart their every move and try to influence decisions that could make or cost them tens of millions of dollars based on conclusions we reach from them.
To assume that they naturally have either yet another gear to reach, or instead that they have an unavoidable gag reflex that will inexorably reveal itself when the pressure is at its highest--and that which one shows up will tell you all that you need to know about the next 15 years of their basketball career--is patently ridiculous.
What's more, basing any important conclusions about a player based solely on one or two games' worth of evidence, no matter how significant the game, is really quite dangerous. There's not a player in last year's NBA finals - one which featured at least six future Hall-of-Famers - who didn't have at least one game in that series that they would have hated to go down as their final will and testament.
In a single-elimination tournament, if you have one bad game - especially if you're a key player like Parker, whose bad game could easily mean doom to his entire team - you might not get the chance to make up for it the next game. To assume that Wiggins and Parker would have similarly bad showings in ten tournament games out of ten is some pretty bad science.
Statement #3: The lousy final games of Parker and Wiggins point to real concerns about both players that NBA decision-makers should take into account when going into next year's draft.
Fact.
This is a critical distinction to make: These games are not the final legacies or defining moments of either player, but are they completely meaningless? No, of course not - they're still evidence of what both players' games are like at the moment, and you'd much rather have seen them both go off for 35 and 15, leading their teams to victory in the process.
But there's a difference between noticing weaknesses in a player's game as manifest in a high-profile game against a high-level opponent and saying "This game proves they're not all that great." That difference is what separates player evaluation from knee-jerk reactionism.
In Jabari Parker's final game, his jump shot was erratic, his offensive attacking was undisciplined and occasionally myopic, and his defensive effort was so lacking that his coach left him on the bench for critical stretches of the second half. In Andrew Wiggins' final game, he lacked the aggressiveness or the creativity to effectively penetrate the opposing zone defense, he made a couple silly mistakes as a ball-handler, he missed some makeable jump shots and he occasionally lost focus in defensive help assignments and in transition.
These are real flaws that have shown, in some games more than others, for both players all year, and they are deficiencies that both will have to work on and may ultimately be unable to fix in the pros.
But, of course, they are 19-year-old freshmen, playing in non-ideal situations. They're allowed to have flaws without those flaws being considered death sentences. You still draft those players according to how you believe they will be able to minimize those flaws, or if their strengths are great enough to make such weaknesses acceptable. This tournament goes on the resume for Wiggins and Parker in ink, but it's just one sentence of many, and not the longest or most important one.
Statement #4: The lousy final games of Parker and Wiggins mean that they will stay at school for another year.
Speculation.
Both players expressed bitter disappointment at their respective losses, as you'd expect from two guys about to shoulder the blame for hugely disappointing losses for historically successful basketball programs. And that bitter taste will likely linger for some time, with both players experiencing some feeling of regret for the way things ended, longing to make up for it next year.
But if every player whose March Madness ended in disappointed decided to return for another year, then 67/68ths of the freshmen in the tournament would eschew declaring, and we know that's not what ends up happening.
Eventually, the hurt lessens, the allure of playing at the highest level and (especially) getting a guaranteed pro contract become too great to ignore, and when a player has a guaranteed top-five draft selection awaiting him, they tend to end up going with. As relatively low as their stock might be now, both are better off than they would be if they waited another year or two and continued to underwhelm like James Michael McAdoo, or worse, got hurt with a potentially lingering injury like Embiid.
It could happen. Neither player has any obvious incredible financial urgency, and both teams project to (of course) be very good, perhaps even better, again next year. But as with most things in this business of sport, the money is the safer bet.
Statement #5: The lousy final games of Parker and Wiggins mean that they should stay at school for another year.
Speculation, but just a hair above outright myth.
Would both players benefit from another year at school? Maybe. Would both players also benefit from an early acclimation to life on the pro level, with its longer schedule, shorter shot clock, higher degree of athleticism and completely different style of play? Also maybe.
Kevin Pelton of ESPN recently looked at the evidence and concluded that an early NBA entry develops players better than another year of school, and even if you disagree with his findings - for freshmen in general or Wiggins and Parker specifically - I don't think it's safe to say that both players would definitely be better off sticking around and not chasing the money immediately.
Ultimately, the one-and-done rules being discussed by Adam Silver and company are much more about protecting the league than protecting the players. It's probable that both players would have stronger rookie seasons after staying for a sophomore year, but whether that difference would be worth delaying their first (and in turn, more valuable second and third) contracts by another year is something that the players will have to deliberate with themselves, their families and their coaches, who (to their credit) have traditionally been very good about saying "nah, get out of here" when they feel their players are pro-ready.
These games will probably play a part in those decisions, but I'd be surprised if it was the biggest factor.
Statement #6: Julius Randle leading his Kentucky team to the actual-third-round means we've undervalued him compared to Parker and Wiggins all along.
Myth.
Randle played a strong game on Sunday, going 4-9 for 13 points, with a couple offense-igniting dunks, as well as grabbing ten rebounds and handing out six assists. But he had an advantageous matchup against an undersized Wichita State frontcourt, and the six assists - the most eye-widening part of his box score - was just the result of his teammates hitting shots for once, as Randle had done a pretty good job passing out of coverage all year, but rarely found his unselfishness rewarded by his struggling perimeter teammates.
And really, without that strong effort from his teammates - nearly everyone on the UK roster had the game of their season - Randle could very easily have still been sent home by a very high-quality Wichita State team.
This is mostly just to say that while the game was a high point for Randle, especially a game after going for 19 and 15 against Kansas State, it doesn't change a ton of what we already know to be his strengths and weaknesses, and it probably shouldn't change our estimation of him as relates to Wiggins or Parker either.
If Randle moves on in this tournament to play against a frontcourt with some length and athleticism and/or a zone defense that doubles him on every touch, while his teammates start struggling from the outside again, he might have a showing as dire as he did against Florida in the SEC championship, where he had just four points on 1-7 shooting, with seven rebounds and just one assist. And then anyone who overreacted to his good game today will feel awful silly for having done so.
Statement #7: The struggles of Parker and Wiggins - as well as so many of the other prospects projected as current lottery picks - means that this draft might have been pretty overrated all along.
Speculation.
It's hard to feel as excited about this year's draft in March as we all were in November, when it seemed like countless players with franchise-defining potential would be coming out, after a long year of one-upping each other and delighting audiences all across the nation.
Of the top six or seven projected prospects at season's beginning, you could argue that only Joel Embiid has met or exceeded expectations, and the rest have all underwhelmed to some extent in the short term and lessened our expectations in the long-term. That's not all on this tournament by any means, but the tournament certainly hasn't helped.
Still, I think we've all learned by now that you can't put a final judgment on a draft class by its first few years, much less before its players even make their debut. This draft might not be on the caliber of the famed 2003 class, which brought out multiple league-defining stars, but it might have the potential of a 2008 draft, which had a couple megastars at the top, but was otherwise defined by its depth, producing All-Star or near-All-Star-caliber players well into the 10s and 20s of its first round, and unearthing a couple gems in its second round, as well.
Let's not forget that as much talent as we've already lost in this tournament, there remains not only Randle, but Arizona's Aaron Gordon, Kentucky's James Young, Michigan State's Gary Harris, Louisville's Montrezl Harrell, Michigan's Nik Stauskas, and numerous other players still remain who could end up being a huge feather in this draft class's cap if things break right for them.
I think we all watched Parker, Wiggins, Randle and Harris fighting out in that Championships Classic double-header at season's beginning, and imagined ourselves watching a preview of an eventual Final Four that was going to be truly legendary. It's sad that that's not going to happen, but it's not the end of the world for anyone involved, and it's certainly not the closing statement on the 2014 draft class.