March is reserved for the mania that is the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament. 68 teams gather to compete for the honor to cut down the nets as the national champion, and even if that number seems odd (and it is), the 68-team expansion has not taken away from the sheer excitement of the event.
Still, there is an entirely different portion of the sporting world that also has interest in March Madness, and that is the NBA universe. Of course, there are basketball fans who follow both segments closely, but for some, college basketball simply serves as a feeder system to the best professional basketball league in the world, and those pundits are entirely focused on prospects who will be arriving via the NBA Draft.
In this space, we will tackle the top sixteen NBA Draft prospects who are also taking to the hardwood to represent their collegiate institutions. Top international prospects including Emmanuel Mudiay and Kristaps Porzyngis are, of course, excluded from the proceedings here, but this is still an accurate representation of the names you would expect to see called as first round draft picks in June, and that piques the interest of an NBA diehard.
The names will come at you in alphabetical order, so as to avoid any “debate” about their order at this point, but make no mistake, NBA Draft prospects can affect their stock considerably with their performance over the next three weeks. Let’s go.
Next: Devin Booker