Next week, NBA commissioner David Stern will get another opportunity to stand on a stage in some half-full arena to shake hands with the newest crop of draft picks.
Not exactly the most exciting television – not for most people, at least.
Don’t be surprised, though, if a few NUMBers or Northwestern season-ticket holders are glued to their television screens, cheering wildly with each selection.
Each year, the men Stern greets on stage are inching closer and closer to the cradle, usually in the form of some 6-foot-9, 170-pound kid who’s a wizard on the playground but about three years from being anywhere near professional quality.
In 2001, more than 70 players – a combination of college underclassmen, high school seniors and under-21 foreigners – decided that they were ready for the top level and declared themselves eligible. So what if there are only 57 picks in the entire draft?
Figure that at least two or three dozen very young men will go undrafted on Wednesday (in case you forgot, there are actually a few seniors who will get picked, too). Truth be told, it’s a tragic byproduct of kids being told well before they’re capable of making educated decisions that they’re a lot better than they actually are.
But enough about the problems with the basketball world. It’s time to get greedy and go back to those lonely NU fans-turned-draftniks.
For them, these shattered dreams bred by immaturity couldn’t be any better. Thirty kids not drafted? Hey, why not make it 40? The more the merrier, they say.
See, NU doesn’t have a big track record of losing kids early to the pros. If anything, they tend to stay around as long as humanly possible before entering the draft. Evan Eschmeyer stayed for six years, in case you’ve forgotten.
The kids who are either going to get drafted or disappointed are ones who have not or would not be playing basketball for the Wildcats. They could, however, be playing for other schools – 10 conference foes come to mind.
When your program is trying to build from the ground floor up, it helps a lot when the best players from other schools take off before they’re ready to really dominate your team. Take a guy like Zach Randolph of Michigan State. Randolph was a 270-pound man-child of a freshman who could have been one of the best players in college hoops a year or two down the road. But East Lansing, Mich., was only a pit stop for Zach, who took his one year of class from head coach Tom Izzo before jetting for his mug shot with Stern next week.
Recent history has shown that the most successful college teams are the ones with veteran experience, something that more and more teams don’t have, thanks to the draft.
But you can bet that the Cats won’t be losing anyone in the near future to the NBA. So long as head coach Bill Carmody can stop the rash of transfers – Ben Johnson was the 10th early departure from the team in 17 months – he’s primed to have a team loaded with juniors and seniors, just when other coaches are scrambling to make up for a lack of veteran leadership.
And with Carmody’s on-court scheme so heavily reliant on confusing the opposition, the experience gap could become the team’s single greatest asset.
It’s not unlikely that Carmody’s chances of building the first-ever NU NCAA tournament team will rest on having more on-court smarts than anyone else. The Cats’ elder statesmen in the years down the road – Tavaras Hardy, Collier Drayton and Winston Blake, to name a few – will have lost more games than they’ve won at the end of their careers, but they’ll still probably have enough wisdom tucked away to make the difference in a few games.
So leave it to the NU junkies to get up from their sofas and scream when yet another potential impact player gets tacked onto an NBA roster. They know that their guys will be ready and waiting for the 18-year-olds coming out of high school and into the Big Ten.
Kind of funny for a group that hasn’t even had a senior in three seasons.
Glenn Kasses is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].
