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2015 NBA Draft: Will Stanley Johnson Play up to his Full Potential in the NBA?

By James Fitzgerald

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If you did not watch any of the players in the 2015 NBA Draft play, and put them in a police lineup in order to choose who is going to be a Hall of Famer just purely on the eye test, University of Arizona small forward Stanley Johnson would win that contest.

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Arizona Wildcats

After you are done with the lineup and pop in the video of him playing the game, you would be convinced that your choice is 100% correct.

With all due respect to all of the players in this NBA Draft, no one truly looks the part more than Stanley Johnson.

When you watch him play and take notice of how smooth he moves around the court with or without the ball, and how effortlessly he makes the game look, you can’t help but say to yourself, “this young man is going to be great!”.

Stanley Johnson is listed at 6-foot-7 245 pounds according to a cbssports.com Mock Draft that projects him going either at No. 8 to the Detroit Pistons, or No. 12 to the Utah Jazz.

If you have taken the time to look at multiple Mock Drafts, you will see that there is no real consensus on where he is going to go.

Johnson has been projected to go anywhere from No.5 to No.14.

Regardless of where he goes the question that needs to be asked is, ” Will he truly play up to his full potential in the NBA?”.

Johnson is strong, his movement is fluid, his handle is solid, he has the physique to be able to finish after contact, his leaping ability is amazing, he can shoot the jumper either spotting up or off the dribble, he has every physical attribute that you would want in a pro prospect.

His numbers were even solid in his one-and-done year leading the Wildcats in scoring averaging 13.8 points on 44.6% shooting from the floor and 37.1% from three-point land.

He also was second on the team in rebounding at 6.5 per contest.

Even when you factor in that Johnson hit double-digit scoring in 30 of the 38 contests he participated in, he still left you with the feeling that there was something missing.

He left you with the feeling that he could have done so much more.

Johnson did not become a “cheat code” type player, with the capability to raise his game to a level that no one could contend with in order to put Arizona over the top.

When you needed Stanley Johnson to come through big on the NCAA Tournament stage and outclass the players that were considered his peers, the players that were held in the same regard as him, he was nowhere to be found.

When you filled out your bracket after watching Arizona shred the PAC-12 and had Arizona going to the Final Four, it was because you thought that Johnson was going to raise his level of play and become the talk of the tournament, similar to how Carmelo Anthony stood out in the tournament, or even Shabazz Napier.

That did not happen!

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Instead what you got was a 1 of 12, four point performance on the tournament stage against fellow lottery prospect D’Angelo Russell and the Ohio State Buckeyes after he dropped 22 on Texas Southern.

Then when you needed him in the Regional Finals against Wisconsin he only takes four shots and finishes with six points.

Now he may have a disclaimer on the Wisconsin game since he might have tweaked his wrist or arm early in the game, but even with that, you expect more than four attempts.

We know, we know, why go in hard on a 19-year old kid about the games he did not show up in when he balled out in so many others?

Because you expect greatness from this player and he has the tools to be dominant.

But when you see that he did not raise his game and intensity on the big stage, one has to wonder if that was an aberration, or a flaw in the player.

Bottom line, he is the top Rookie of the Year candidate in this draft and most likely to be a Hall of Famer as far as this writer is concerned.

However, Stanley Johnson needs to be thinking about domination 24/7, and he needs to bring the killer instinct that should accompany the skillset that he is bringing to the NBA.

If he shows his inner killer on a night-to-night basis, he will be unstoppable.

If he does not bring it, he will be considered a bust, and all the people who felt that he needed to stay in school will be right.

His inner killer was not seen in the tournament, but he has a chance to unleash it in the pros.

Even if he has not developed it, he will have the time to find it, nurture it, and harness it on the next level.

That is the Stanley Johnson a lot of people expect to see. People expect to see a dominant force.

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