Duke Basketball: 4 reasons why RJ Barrett will win 2019 National Player of the Year

4) Lack of top-tier competition

All of the recent Naismith winners have been experienced players on some of the best teams in the country – and players that fans had gotten familiar with throughout their playing careers. In fact, nine of the last 10 winners played on a team ranked in the top 10 in the country.

As such, they often entered their final collegiate campaigns as legitimate frontrunners for the award. This season, though, those early clear-cut frontrunners aren’t there.

Of Busting Brackets’ top 20 preseason player of the year candidates, only six upperclassmen on top-10 ranked teams (Luke Maye, Grant Williams, Dedric Lawson, Reid Travis, Caleb Martin, Udoka Azubuike) made the cut.

Neither Maye or Travis figure to be the focal point of their respective teams due to a plethora of talent and top-tier freshmen on each roster, while Lawson and Azubuike will both take some Player of the Year publicity away from each other as teammates for Kansas.

That leaves Williams, whose role isn’t expected to increase (and he averaged just 15.2 points and 6.0 rebounds per game last year), and Martin, who plays for a mid-major (Nevada) on the West Coast. A player like Martin has won recently (Jimmer Fredette, 2011) but, while possible, it’s highly unlikely that Martin is able to replicate Jimmer-mania.

All of that has left the door wide open for Barrett, who is the best player on one of the five best teams in the country. Oh yeah, he is also projected to be the No. 1 overall pick in the 2019 draft.

If he delivers on the hype – and, given his skill set and intangibles discussed earlier, it’s hard to imagine him not – Barrett will enter Durant and Davis’ elite club.