Chris Johnson is an RTC Columnist. He can be reached @ChrisDJohnsonn.
The few generational prep superstars that surface every so often, the rarefied air not only of their own one-year classifications but of a decade of college and NBA basketball, are special tent posts in the historical arc of individual hoops stars. You know them when you see them (Kevin Durant, Carmelo Anthony, and so on), from the incipient middle school grumblings, to the mind-numbing AAU mix tapes, to the frenetic recruiting buildup, to the actual, final, conclusive, decision date. Wiggins reached that final stage like few players of his ilk ever have before him. Everyone you talked to – all manners of basketball insiders and friends and his own future coach and, reportedly, even his parents – was completely in the dark about his decision. Wiggins had four schools left on the board, all of them variously qualified to welcome the greatest prep basketball prospect since LeBron James to their campus for a brief six-month season, and beyond that – beyond maybe a slight communal leaning that Wiggins would wind up at Florida State – nobody really knew. At 12:15 PM ET yesterday, the college basketball world stood on the brink of an utterly season-revolutionizing event, and Wiggins’ opaque signals and shrouded inclinations leading up made it one of the most exciting sports-related things ever to follow live on Twitter. It was suspenseful. Titillating. Unnerving. It was every stomach tingly-feeling, hands-sweating, acute-attentioned sensation imaginable, and all of it was couched in a thick cloud of uncertainty.
One simple tweet announced the news. Next came the firestorm. I’m not talking about the angry folks on Twitter, the myopic blockheads who can’t possibly fathom why the best high school basketball player in the country would ever decide against attending the school they support. I’m talking about predictive articles like this and this. The exalted leaders of this diffuse college hoops writing profession took it upon themselves to write “Post-Wiggins Top 25’s,” as if one player, sitting on a faux-erected dais in the middle of a high school gym, and a few simple words, could disrupt the entire established elite tier of the 2013-14 college basketball season. Kansas is clearly better now than it was at 12:14 PM Tuesday afternoon, but the rest of college basketball’s projected top teams – a group that, even discounting Wiggins, features at least three (Duke, Michigan State, Kentucky, Louisville, Arizona, etc.) guaranteed national title aspirants, with bundles of future NBA lottery talent to go around – had to be shifted into new relative locations. Wiggins’ decision was that big, that impactful, that not only would Kansas immediately enter the preseason Final Four discussion, everybody else would need to make room for the Wiggins-equipped locomotive and Big 12 frontrunner. Wiggins didn’t just change Kansas; he shifted the tectonic plates of college basketball’s one supra-conference organizing principle: competitive equity.
He made a filthy talent-rich Kentucky team go from best recruiting class of all-time and a cadre of solid returners to “who’s going to guard Wiggins in the Final Four?” He set up an epic season-opening match-up on November 12 with Jabari Parker, pride and soul of Chicago high school hoops, in Chi-City’s most identifiable arena (the United Center). He made Russ Smith’s decision to return to defending national champion Louisville feel like a microscopic footnote in a compressed six-week window of the college basketball offseason. Andrew Wiggins, one player, on one team, on one campus, put an entire sport in the palm of his proverbial hand and, for one afternoon, made anyone even remotely interested in college basketball – fans and media and players and coaches alike – stand up, realize and paint mental portraits of the rarest breeds of utter one-season domination.
Before he actually steps on a basketball court or even arrives in Lawrence, Kansas, gauging Wiggins’ one and only season is sort of like trying to formulate a premature understanding of Google inserting its technical acumen into the luxury automobile industry or Ian Darke announcing the NCAA Tournament. You can’t pin down exactly how Wiggins will translate at the next level, where all that freakish otherworldly athleticism will fit in a talented but raw Kansas lineup, how other teams will even attempt to construct a defensive game plan without ceding vast acres of floor space to the Jayhawks’ supporting cast or how giddy Bill Self must have felt scanning Twitter and learning, just like the rest of us, that he would have the most highly-lauded high school player of the one-and-done era running sets and dunking and exploding at the rim and making everyone around him look plainly mediocre. All you know is, it’s going to be amazing.
That last bit, I admit, was my visceral reaction to the whole thing. I don’t know about you, but I do know what I see, and when I watch Andrew Wiggins play basketball, and hear some of the things the most respected talent evaluators in on the planet are saying about him, I cannot restrain my excitement, or even pretend to play it off with a half-spirited column. Andrew Wiggins is going to be an absolute force. How else can you explain the revised preseason rankings, the Twitter warfare, the LeBron James/Kevin Durant hybrid comparative hyperbole? It’s May 15 and really early and all, and all of this is inherently speculative. I know. I’m with you. Freshman unpredictability and overwhelming pressure and Harrison Barnes and all that stuff. Punch holes in the hype, if that’s your most brutally honest feeling on what Wiggins set in motion Tueday afternoon. Be rational. Cool. I’m already hooked. Wiggins is going to dominate, and he’s going to dominate for one of the most illustrious and historically successful programs of all-time.
I do have one small point of contention. Andrew Wiggins can do a bunch of really neat tricks with a basketball. Running, blocking, jumping, all at insanely high speeds and elevations, with countless defenders standing in his way. You know – Wigginsian things. Everyone with two eyes and a reliable Wi-Fi connection knows this. His next recommended act: figuring out how to compact six months of interminably-painful college hoops offseason into a two-week (or day?) window. I can’t wait.
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