From The Editor's Desk: Don't Believe the Hype Surrounding the Class of 2009
By JOHN AKERS
Editor, Basketball Times
We all know that it’s unfair to judge a player on one game, but it’s the only way to compare college debuts.
And even based on the little evidence on hand from those first games, it’s safe to say that the freshman Class of 2009 is no Class of 2007. Or Class of 2006.
The two great freshman classes made possible only by the NBA’s age limit gave us Kevin Durant, Greg Oden and Mike Conley for one season and Michael Beasley, Derrick Rose, Kevin Love, Eric Gordon, O.J. Mayo, Jarred Bayless and J.J. Hickson for another.
While they were widely acknowledged to be great classes, too many in basketball circles began to consider them the norm and that last season’s mediocre class of freshmen an anomaly. Too many tried to lead us to believe there would be more greatness coming forthwith from this season’s class of Kentucky’s John Wall, Texas’ Avery Bradley, Georgia Tech’s Derrick Favors, Cincinnati’s Lance Stephenson and Kansas’ Xavier Henry.
Perhaps it will happen, too. One game, after all, really isn’t enough to judge.
But let’s look at how these freshmen, so eager to show the world what they can do, performed in their debuts:
Wall – Hit the game-winning shot against Miami (Ohio) and produced 19 points, five assists and five turnovers.
Bradley – Scored 10 points after coming off the bench, against UC Irvine.
Favors – 10 points, eight rebounds against Florida A&M.
Stephenson – Seven points against Prairie View A&M.
Henry – Had the best debut of them all, with 25 points against Hofstra.
Now compare those to the Class of 2007 debuts:
Love – 22 and 13 vs. Portland State.
Gordon – 33 against Chattanooga.
Beasley – 32 and 24 against Sacramento State.
Mayo – 32 and seven in a loss to Mercer.
Bayless – 18 against Northern Arizona.
Hickson – 31 and seven against William & Mary.
Rose – 17 points, six rebounds and five assists against Tennessee Martin.
From the Class of 2006, Durant opened with 20 points against Alcorn, Conley had 10 assists against VMI and Oden, shooting free throws left-handed because of a broken right wrist, produced 14 points and 10 rebounds against Valparaiso.
The differences are too difficult to ignore.
Most of us are left to the mercy of the recruiting services to determine how good these players will be. These services might get the pecking order correct, but we’re in trouble if we leave it to them to give us an overall impression of each class. They’re selling a fantasy, not the reality that Avery Bradley, ESPN’s high-school player of the year, is so good, he could be first off the bench in the Longhorns’ opener.
Several preseason magazines predicted that Wall would be a first-team All-American, and he might still be all that. He is projected as the No. 1 pick overall in next spring’s draft for a reason. Jeff Goodman of Fox Sports, whose opinion I respect, made Wall his preseason national player of the year.
But I would also submit that Wall became much better in the public eye without even playing. He took his sweet time deciding on a college last spring, which is his right. The deliberation also put him on the forefront of the college-basketball discussion during a slow news period. John Wall. John Wall. John Wall. He must be great, right?
Basketball Times uses ratings compiled by Clark Francis, one of the few analysts who couldn’t get that excited over Wall or this incoming class. Francis wrote last July that this was the most self-entitled class he had witnessed in 26 years and that none of them deserved to be called a player of the year, though he eventually settled on Bradley. Perhaps Francis is proving to be prophetic.
Consider this: Francis also wrote that Brandon Jennings has the potential to be one of the top five point guards in NBA history. Francis took a hit for that prediction while Jennings struggled just to log minutes in Italy last season, but he’s looking pretty good now as Jennings is performing like one of the NBA’s all-time great rookies.
That’s why we doubted much of the hype regarding the incoming freshman class. We trusted Clark Francis.
Great freshman classes shouldn’t be expected each season, or they wouldn’t be that great. Francis thought the next really good one would be the Class of ’11, but the past summer has led him to back off that claim. For that, it’s easy to believe he’s selling reality, not fantasy.
The Class of 2009 still has a chance to become a good class, of course, but don’t let anyone tell you it’s a great one. Not yet, anyway.
The Class of 2007 … now that was a great class.
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