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There was no dance on the court after the March Madness victory. Don’t jump on stage in a fancy suit to meet the commissioner in June.
The coronavirus pandemic ended the traditional end of a college career and the usual beginning of a professional one. Players like Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball and James Wiseman should be about a month into their rookie seasons by now, but their plans were put on hold.
After multiple delays, the NBA draft finally arrives on Wednesday (Thursday Manila time). Like everyone else in 2020, this year’s class of players have tried to make the most of their difficult circumstances.
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“I feel like it was better for me,” Edwards said. “I haven’t complained, I haven’t stumbled at all. I just felt like it was better for me because I had more time to improve and prepare for the NBA.”
Georgia’s freshman guard is one of the leading candidates to be chosen first by the Minnesota Timberwolves. Ball, a guard who skipped college to play professionally abroad, and Memphis freshman center Wiseman, 7-foot-1, are the other headliners in the class.
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The draft usually takes place in June in New York, where Adam Silver announces the first-round picks. The best players sit at tables in front of the arena and when called, don a hat with the logo of the team that chose them and walk to the stage for a handshake and a photo with the commissioner.
This time, Silver will announce the picks from the ESPN campus in Bristol, Connecticut. Players have been sent hat boxes wherever they are looking to choose the one they need when their name is called.
It’s not the draft night they wanted, but the excitement of becoming a pro player will not diminish. Not when they’ve been waiting since March, when sports stopped just days before the NCAA Tournament field selection, to start playing ball again.
“I mean, playing in games, I missed him so much. But at the same time, this overtime, it’s just helping me,” said forward Obi Toppin, Dayton’s national college player of the year.
“I feel like I’m more prepared and mentally prepared for when the time comes, and I feel like when I’m on the court and that jump goes up, I feel like I’ve been waiting so long for it to pass.” be an amazing feeling. “
The Golden State Warriors have the second pick, a chance to add a top-tier young player to a team that reached five straight NBA Finals before falling to the bottom of the league when Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson were injured. Charlotte chooses third, followed by Chicago and Cleveland.
Teams lacked some resources to evaluate players, lacking the normal Chicago combo draft or the ability to invite players to their facilities for meetings and training sessions. Perhaps that is part of the reason why there is no consensus on the No. 1 pick this year as Zion Williamson in 2019.
“I would say the analysis is fair. There is no guy who has separated himself from the group, from public or outside view,” said Timberwolves president Gersson Rosas.
Edwards believes that the lack of an NCAA tournament hurt players. They couldn’t make a final collegiate statement like Ja Morant did when he delivered a triple-double in an upset victory for Murray State in the first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament. That helped secure him as the No. 2 pick behind Williamson and he was a big winner of the Rookie of the Year award after nearly leading Memphis to the playoffs.
Wiseman wouldn’t have had that opportunity anyway. He averaged 19.7 points and 10.7 rebounds in three games after arriving as the nation’s number one pick, then was suspended by the NCAA for eligibility reasons and announced that he was leaving the program to prepare for the draft.
“Of course I wanted to win a national championship, of course I wanted to establish that situation with my teammates,” he said. “I love my teammates, I actually text them every day. But you know how life happens. It’s like, things hit you out of nowhere, but I feel like being there gave me a lot of mental strength, me He gave a lot of maturity as a person. “
He worked only for the Warriors and Hornets, which suggests the Wolves may be picking between Edwards and Ball with 2015’s No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns entrenched as their man in the middle.
If he’s Ball, he ends a streak of 10 consecutive attempts to become the first pick. Blake Griffin in 2009 is the last non-college freshman to be the top pick.
Ball did not study at university, he played professionally in Lithuania and Australia. It certainly wasn’t the easiest path to the NBA, which perhaps makes him the perfect player to handle a year in which everything else about the draft process has been changed.
“I feel like I’m the right man for that,” Ball said. “Like I said, I feel like I was born for all of this.”
With Dave Campbell
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