Problem 2 with Oklahoma State Basketball ban: Cade Cunningham
This could be the second season in a row that the potential No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft is forced out of college basketball by the NCAA. And that’s a problem. It already happened this past year with Memphis’ James Wiseman being ruled ineligible partway through the season. Now, it’s possible Cade Cunningham might not play college basketball either.
To be fair, the NCAA penalties don’t necessarily affect Cunningham in the same way they might affect other OSU roster players. Cade Cunningham will undoubtedly be fine no matter what he decides to do next. And he has a few options, as detailed here by Busting Brackets’ Tristan Freeman. So the issue here is not a massive alteration to Cunningham’s career trajectory. He’s greatly inconvenienced in that he has to figure out what to do next, but that’s about it. Like Wiseman, who is still widely projected as a top-5 pick in the upcoming NBA Draft, he’ll be just fine whether he stays at Oklahoma State or goes straight to the new G League program.
The real problem here is that the NCAA might be willingly cheapening their own product by forcing a top prospect out of school for the second time in a calendar year. This is also another form of unjustly punishing the Oklahoma State basketball program in that they might lose the best recruit in school history as penance for violations that 1) happened when that recruit was in eighth grade and 2) the university wasn’t even responsible for according to the NCAA. Yeah, that makes sense.