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College Basketball: What if the One-and-Done Rule was the Four-and-Done Rule?

By Matt Ostrowski

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1. 2012-2013 Kentucky Wildcats

PG – John Wall/Eric Bledsoe
SG – Brandon Knight/Doron Lamb
SF – Michael Kidd-Gilchrist/Terrence Jones
PF – Anthony Davis/Nerlens Noel
C – Demarcus Cousins/Willie Cauley-Stein

Oh. Wow.

Since there’s really no debate on whether or not this team is number one, a more interesting debate might be: would this team have made the NBA playoffs in 12-13?

The threshold for that was 38 wins, achieved by Bucks. I’m going to say no, but only because the bench only contains one guy who was an NBA rotation player at the time, and that was Eric Bledsoe. Jones and Lamb were rookies, but not overly effective ones.

Anyway, a more reasonable debate here is this: is this actually the best Kentucky team you could put together? I went back and forth for at least four days on whether to choose this squad, or the 14-15 one:

PG – Marquis Teague/Andrew Harrison
SG – Devin Booker/Alex Poythress
SF – Michael Kidd-Gilchrist/Trey Lyles
PF – Nerlens Noel/Karl-Anthony Towns
C – Anthony Davis/Willie Cauley-Stein

How fun would it be to watch those two teams battle it out?

Ultimately, if they were to play each other, it would come down to the backcourts, and that ended up being the reason why I chose the 12-13 team. John Wall was a near all-star for the Wizards that year, posting 18 points, 4 rebounds, and 8 assists per game, and Brandon Knight was starting to blossom into the solid guard that he is now, posting 13 points and 4 assists per game for the Pistons.

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    • Those two would absolutely destroy Marquis Teague and Devin Booker. Teague was out of the NBA by the 14-15 season, and Booker was just a college freshman. As good as he was for Kentucky last year, he wouldn’t stand a chance against the 12-13 version of Brandon Knight.

    And quite frankly, I’m not even sure that the frontcourt is much better for the 14-15 team. Sure, Anthony Davis vaulted himself into a top 3 player in the NBA last season (24 ppg, 10 rpg, 3 blocks per game), but he was still solid in his rookie year, averaging 13 points, 8 rebounds, and almost 2 blocks a game. Pair that with a 22 year old Demarcus Cousins, who averaged 17 points and 10 rebounds a game for the Kings that season, and I’m not sure MVP-level Anthony Davis is enough to make-up for playing with an NBA rookie in Nerlens Noel, and two college guys in Towns and Cauley-Stein.

    The actual moral of the story? John Calipari is a one-stop, NBA all-star shop. I didn’t even realize how good he was until I started making this post. If I didn’t make it a rule that each school could only have one team, they honestly would have had at least three teams on this list, probably four.

    And if the NCAA actually made players stay for four years, Calipari might be going for a historic number of championships.

    Next: A Leaner, Meaner Kennedy Meeks Means Trouble for the ACC

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