Timberwolves Draft: Unheralded Recruits at the Top

The Timberwolves have the fifth pick in next week’s draft, but what unheralded college players could be surprise selections come draft day?

Rivals.com. Scout.com. ESPN.com/recruiting. Maxpreps.com. And on and on and on.

There’s so many basketball recruiting sites out there now only the loneliest of the unemployed lonely could keep up with them all. I’m looking at you, Kentucky fans.

Luckily, RSCIhoops.com joins all the major recruiting sites into one composite rankings list at the end of each season. Of the last 10 number-one picks in the NBA draft, nine of them were in the top-seven on their respective RSCI class rankings. The only player outside the top-seven was Blake Griffin, who was 17th in the 2006 class. Three of the players went wire-to-wire as the top recruit followed by the top pick in the draft just one year later (Greg Oden, Anthony Davis, and Andrew Wiggins).

Quite often, however, an unheralded recruit plays his way from obscurity into the top-10 of the draft. How does this relate to the Timberwolves and their fifth pick, you ask?

Well, a player rising up the draft boards who plays a position of need for the Wolves, stretch-four Marquese Chriss, was only the 56th-ranked recruit just a year ago. This kind of leap isn’t all that uncommon, either. In fact, in the one-and-done era that began in 2006, a whopping 22 players (!) that were ranked outside the top-50 out of high school were drafted in the top-10.

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What makes Marquese Chriss unique, however, is all of these players stayed at least two years in college while Chriss is a one-and-done.

Below is the list of players in order of Win Shares (per basketball-reference.com). But first, how do you think each recruiting prognosticator reacted when another player low on their rankings list went in the top-10 of the draft, yet again? Well, let’s just say that any time you can use a (NSFW, language) quote from ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin’, you do it.

Yep, I may or may not have constructed my entire post around that quote. But here’s the list:

Wow, we’ve got the full spectrum here, don’t we? If you assemble the top-seven players on an actual team, how many titles would they have already won and continue to win over the next few years? Let’s let LeBron answer that question.

I think myself and my fellow DWW staffers could fill out that roster and still win a few titles.

By the way, how depressing is that list for the Timberwolves? They could’ve drafted Curry (twice), Westbrook, Noah, George, Hayward, and two guys who just missed out on this list at picks 11 and 15 in 2011, Klay Thompson (RSCI 61) and Kawhi Leonard (RSCI 54).

Who’d they get instead? Corey Brewer, Kevin Love, Ricky Rubio, Jonny Flynn, Wes Johnson, and Derrick Williams. Good god, are you serious?! As a Timberwolves fan, this paragraph elicits the following two reactions:

You forgot about the David Kahn meme didn’t you? That’s what I’m here for.

But let’s now take a look at the bottom of that list. The bottom-six players could comprise a team that would be somewhere between a dominant D-League team and an awful NBA team.

Joe Alexander played three years in college yet still managed to play his last NBA game at age 23. By the age of 25 he became a nationally-ranked competitive mountaineer in his adopted home state of West Virginia. And only one of those previous sentences was completely made up.

In defense of Joe and the others at the bottom, picks 8-10 carry much less expectations than ones at the top of the draft. Also, many of them just started their careers and could go on to successful, if not extended stays in the NBA (especially Elfrid Payton & Frank Kaminksy).

I think it’s important to state again that all of the players on the list played multiple years of college. In fact, nearly all of them played through their junior or senior seasons. This makes sense; they all needed extra years to develop past higher ranked players and surpass them on draft boards.

Marquese Chriss, as previously mentioned, declared after his freshman year. So in the span of 12 months he went from the 56th-ranked recruit to a potential top-three pick in the draft. How did this happen?!

The only reasonable explanation I’ve seen is that he’s been, you know, only playing basketball for a few years so he wasn’t on the AAU/summer camp circuit until later in high school.

The better question is, what does this mean for his NBA career and where does he deserve to get drafted? Is he riding a solid season and great measurements/athleticism to fool everyone, a la Joe Alexander? Or is he a late bloomer still on the rise with freakish athleticism (per Chad Ford of ESPN.com) who will become a star if given the opportunity to grow, a la Russell Westbrook?

Next: Should Timberwolves Trade For Jimmy Butler?

It’s most likely that he’ll end up somewhere in the middle, of course, but if recent draft history suggests anything at all, does anybody really ever know?