There is an argument, based on both stats and results, that the 10 best programs in Division I men’s basketball the last half decade are Arizona, Duke, Gonzaga, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan State, North Carolina, Villanova, Virginia—and Wichita State.
How appropriate that this “other” Kansas basketball school ends a list like this one alphabetically, since it probably would any other way. National championships won? Zero, like Gonzaga and Virginia. But UVA competes in one of those “power conferences,” with all their football money and multisport prominence. Gonzaga doesn’t—like Wichita State, it doesn’t even field a team on the gridiron. The Zags, however, have been top-tier in college hoops for longer than just five years: They’ve been to the NCAA tournament every season for the last two decades, and were last year’s national runner-up—a result most basketball observers would say was overdue. Gonzaga is a powerhouse: consistent, successful, and feared.
Wichita State is a newcomer. It did make a Cinderella run to the Final Four in 2013 and entered the 2014 tournament as a No. 1 seed. In the four tourneys since, including this one, the Shockers have been seeded only 7, 11, 10, and 4. But they also were rated no worse than the nation’s 20th-best team by advanced analytics websites like KenPom and Haslametrics, which use significantly different methodologies but arrived at similar conclusions about the quality of head coach Gregg Marshall’s squad.
To sustain his program’s success, Marshall has stayed away from chasing “one-and-done” recruits—so named because NBA rules forbid 18-year-olds from signing with a franchise, thereby compelling most of the very best high-school stars to spend a year on campus before turning pro. The first 10 players chosen in the 2017 NBA Draft were one-and-done freshmen; the last time even a sophomore was selected in the top three was 2013. Two Wichita State standouts have ascended to the NBA in recent years, Ron Baker and Fred VanVleet. But they were four-year lettermen—and neither one was drafted.
Instead, Marshall has forged great teams from good players—really good in the case of his star point guard this season, Landry Shamet, who could be a first-round NBA pick someday. There are a handful of elite high-school seniors each year who boast some sort of rare athleticism or skill or basketball acumen, and a few of the handful possess all three. But there is an abundance of incoming college freshmen who need only a tilled environment to contribute, and a fortunate harvest to flourish. They have such a place in the hoops-fertile Sunflower State—where rock and chalk rhyme with shock, too.
The mistake fans make in worrying that the one-and-done practice damages the sport—either by disrupting team basketball, which makes games less enjoyable, or providing the bluebloods an unfair advantage—is that these players, the Bakers and VanVleets and Shamets, are the ones who fuel college hoops. The attention that one-and-dones get is out of proportion with their footprint on the sport. Of the 10 teams cited earlier, only three—Duke, Kansas, and Kentucky—have depended annually on “impact” freshmen to actually win games, not just contribute to wins. Arizona and North Carolina have had their share of say-hello, wave-goodbye stars: DeAndre Ayton (likely 2018) and Aaron Gordon (2014) of Arizona, for example, and Brandan Wright (2007) and Marvin Williams (2005) of North Carolina, the latter before the new age limits even went into effect in 2006.
But those teams’ fortunes in recent years and the present have depended on experience. North Carolina’s title-winning starting five in 2017 featured two juniors at guard, and a junior and two seniors at forward. The Tar Heels’ top freshman last season, Tony Bradley, played 15 minutes a game, and was a late-first-round NBA draft choice in June—several picks behind Justin Jackson, one of the aforementioned juniors. This season for Arizona, Ayton, the Wildcats’ centerpiece (with an emphasis on “center”), is complemented by star guard Allonzo Trier, a junior, and two seniors and a sophomore. Ayton is the only freshman on the team who plays more than 15 minutes a contest.
Arizona is just a No. 4 seed this tournament. The top two overall seeds are two of the 10 best schools from the last five seasons listed here, Villanova and Virginia. Nova’s championship team in 2016 started two seniors, two juniors, and one freshman: point guard Jalen Brunson, who is now a junior and a finalist for college ball’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy, the Wooden Award. One of Brunson’s fellow freshmen that year was forward Mikal Bridges—a Wooden Award finalist, too. Brunson and Bridges were stud recruits, no doubt: Brunson was a can’t-miss prospect, and Bridges was right among the top 100 high-school seniors that any program with an available scholarship would’ve signed. Some successful programs ink great pro prospects. National champions get great college players, who certainly can be coveted signees, but also are quality teammates and use their amateur experience to develop, not just fulfill a requirement.
Malcolm Brogdon of the Milwaukee Bucks was only a second-round draft pick, but he was the NBA’s Rookie of the Year in 2016-17. He played four seasons at Virginia and was an integral part of a team that averaged 28 wins per season. After his departure, the Cavaliers were supposed to rebuild—they were expected to be competitive, but they began the regular season unranked. They ended it as the nation’s number-one team, led by two sophomores and two seniors, and filled out by freshman DeAndre Hunter, who is projected to be drafted. Just not in 2018.
Villanova’s offense is a Rube Goldberg scheme of screens and drives and passes and shot fakes and drives and passes that produces more points than any attack in the country. The Wildcats are fundamental basketball incarnate on that end of the floor—just as Virginia is on the defensive end, where the Cavaliers are stouter than any team since Kentucky’s national semifinalist in 2015.
For anyone complaining about the one-and-done siege of college basketball, the 2018 version of these young Wildcats are the poster children. They start five freshmen, three of whom may be selected in this year’s first round, which would add to the 15 that have been picked since 2012—the last year Kentucky won the championship. But UK enters the tournament as just a No. 5 seed, lower than the likes of veteran clubs like Nova, Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan State, Gonzaga—and, yes, the Shockers.
They’re lower than No. 2-seed Duke, too—which is now every bit the one-and-done factory Kentucky is. With a top-10 offense and defense, the Dukies are also a bigger threat to win the title. Three of their starting freshmen—they start four in all—could be top-15 draft selections in June. Two are consensus top-10 picks. On a talent basis alone, few teams in Division I, if any, can match Duke’s roster. But the Blue Devils lost to Virginia in their only meeting, and North Carolina prevailed in two of their three matchups.
To experienced teams like those, Duke isn’t indomitable when they’re just the Green Devils.
