The fates of over a dozen teams in the NBA will change on Sunday, when the NBA Draft Lottery takes place in the afternoon.
It is one of the more highly anticipated drafts of the past decade, as three golden prospects in the form of AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, and Cameron Boozer have made fans of wallowing franchises (and the Oklahoma City Thunder) dream of a future with one of that trio wearing their jersey.
At the start of the year it was the ultra-talented Peterson who led the pack, but after a season as a Kansas Jayhawk, in which he missed multiple games for various reasons, a new name took his spot.
For the back half of the college year, it was Dybansta who carried the BYU Cougars into March Madness and showed his elite scoring ability, which began to generate buzz as the best prospect of the trio.
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While Dybansta is still considered the consensus favorite to go No. 1 overall in the NBA draft, depending on who gets the selection, longtime NBA analyst John Hollinger has a differing opinion heading into what could be a generational draft.
He believes that Cameron Boozer is the best prospect of this upcoming class.
“The reason you take [Boozer] No. 1 anyway is that [he] was basically ‘college basketball Nikola Jokić’ last season,” wrote Hollinger for The Athletic. “He's a huge, wide big man who nonetheless can handle on the perimeter and shoot 3s (39.1 percent from distance, 78.9 percent from the line). Duke ran inverted pick-and-rolls for him last season, where he was picking out 3-point shooters on the weak side and flicking one-handed crosscourt passes. As a rule, teenage centers do not do this, and when they do, they turn out to be pretty special.”
Being compared to arguably the best offensive big man in the game’s history is lofty, but Hollinger sees the potential in Boozer.
Although a team looking for an elite guard of the future is still more likely to take Dybansta or Peterson first overall, Boozer might be the most ready to contribute heavily to a team next season.
In a world where the Oklahoma City Thunder somehow got Boozer, for example, the NBA might be destroyed as we know it for the next decade.
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