Do you have to play basketball to get into the NBA?

Here’s an old chestnut that’s becoming less and less true over the years: the idea that, until they land in an NBA locker room, every player in the league has been the most dominant player on every team they’ve ever played for. This is becoming less true not because of amateur career arcs like Markelle Fultz. Fultz sat on his powerhouse high school’s junior varsity team for two years before uncorking three straight dominant seasons, including the one at Washington, before going No. 1 overall. That’s one kind of thing. What I’m talking about is players are getting drafted from the edges of their college teams’ rotations more than ever before.

Let’s remember that, until a basketball generation or two ago, it was a de facto requirement for NCAA players to reliably drop buckets in order to be a top 10 pick. From 1985 to 1999, nobody was taken with a top 10 draft pick who averaged less than 13 points a game collegiately. There have been 24 of these picks since then, including two this year.

Quite a few of those 22 previously drafted low scorers have developed into All-Stars or All-Star-like talents: Russell Westbrook, Mike Conley, Andre Drummond, Joel Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns. A lot of the other players out of this group are no slouches, either: Andre Iguodala, Joakim Noah, Derrick Favors, Nerlens Noel, Aaron Gordon, Justise Winslow. Somehow, it’s become true that you do not need to score in college basketball — when 90 percent or whatever of your competition could never hang in the NBA — in order to thrive in the professional game.

What’s also become true is that you do not need to have experience carrying your collegiate team in order to be an NBA star. To be sure, most NBA Draft picks are so valuable to their collegiate teams that they are rarely taken off the floor. Witness Fultz’s 35.7 minutes per game average at UW, or Lonzo Ball’s 35.1 at UCLA, or Ben Simmons’ 34.9 a year ago at LSU. But also, a star NBA player who averaged just 20-25 minutes per game in college is straight-up commonplace. Embiid was at 23.1, Towns was at 21.1, Myles Turner did 22.2 — DeMarcus Cousins, so many years ago, was at 23.5.

This rule doesn’t just apply to players from mega-schools whose lineups are filled with other NBA talent. Steven Adams did 23.4 at Pittsburgh, second-rounder DeAndre Jordan did just 20.1 at Texas A&M, Festus Ezeli did 23.2 as a senior at Vanderbilt. Resting for nearly half the game also can no longer be considered as a negative for any collegiate prospect.

Here’s the newest trend, a trend that was pushed to its newest limit this year: drafting players who rested for more than half of their college games. We’ll call them the ultra-resters, who averaged less than 20 minutes per game during their last year in college. From 2000-2015, I counted eight ultra-resters, total. From 2016-2017: seven ultra-resters. What in tarnation is happening.

The second-rounders

The likelihood of any second-round pick being a smash hit is, of course, low. So, there are no success stories among the college ultra-resters who were taken in the second round from 2000-2015 — but what does that mean, really? They are: Dakari Johnson, Grant Jerrett, Dexter Pittman, Sasha Kaun, Chris Richard. (Probably the only interesting note here is that Sam Presti tried this twice, with Jerrett in 2013 and Johnson in 2015.)

The jury is understandably still out on the two ultra-resters who were taken in 2016: Deyonta Davis (18.6 collegiate minutes per game) and Cheick Diallo (7.5). These two players had the most opposite rookie years you could imagine: Vince Carter built a bedroom for Davis in his house, while the Pelicans coldly shuffled Diallo from the big-league roster to three different D/G-League teams.

This year, the Pacers took Ike Anigbogu (13.0) at 47th overall, a pick they may have been led to, subconsciously, thanks to the success of Turner.

The first-rounders of years past

2016 / Skal Labissiere / Kings / 28th overall

I wonder if international high-school-aged prospects have kept an eye on Labissiere and Diallo. Despite their huge talents, their premiere NCAA coaches couldn’t find a way to integrate them into their teams. Meantime, Dante Exum and Thon Maker essentially hid for a year and got taken in the lottery. (College basketball helps who again?) Labissiere got 15.8 MPG at Kentucky but 18.5 his rookie year in Sacramento, including a monster 29.4 minutes in April. It’s kind of looking like we should get used to saying this: the Kings made a great call here.

2010 / Daniel Orton / Magic / 29th overall

It was tempting to say that Orton’s 13.2 MPG at Kentucky was just because he was virtually on an NBA team already — the squad had Cousins, John Wall, Eric Bledsoe, Patrick Patterson and DeAndre Liggins. But looking at the footage of Orton almost going full Malice at the Palace in China in 2014, uh, it’s clear that there were other reasons why this didn’t work out.

2007 / Daequan Cook / Heat / 21st overall

Cook is 30-years-old, played last year in Iran and hasn’t been in the league since he was 25. Still, I feel like this worked out. Cook was a rotation player in multiple playoffs and was top-five in 3-pointers per minute one year. The most recent 21st overall picks are DeAndre Bembry, Justin Anderson, Mitch McGary, Gorgui Dieng and Jared Sullinger. Drafting an ultra-rester seems pretty good!

2000 / Zach Randolph / Trail Blazers / 19th overall

Not totally sure why Randolph was given just 19.8 minutes per game in college. Footage of him in the McDonald’s Game shows an even bigger Randolph than we’re used to, but the dude is legitimately running fast breaks. The shape of Randolph’s career is good reason not to give up on slow-starting rookies like Davis or Diallo. As a rookie, Randolph played just 238 total minutes on the end of the bench, and he wasn’t a starter until his third year.

It’s a small sample size but, alright: it looks like barely playing college ball is totally fine.

The first-rounders of 2017

Zach Collins / Trail Blazers / 10th overall

Collins is an unprecedented pick in all sorts of ways. One, he’s the first ultra-rester to go in the lottery — and Portland traded up to get him. Plus, as Jay Bilas noted during the 2017 NBA Draft broadcast, Collins wasn’t just a back-up last year at Gonzaga, at 17.3 minutes per game, he was also a back-up for three seasons on his own high school team.

This pick is just so audacious to me it feels like a tipping point, one way or the other, for how this ultra-rester trend goes. Either production truly doesn’t matter for prospects or Collins has inadvertently received the blessing of not having weaknesses exposed over a longer period of game time.

Draft punditry didn’t disagree with this pick, although Blazer faithful certainly did:

Harry Giles / Kings / 20th overall

The Kings traded back with the Blazers and took an ultra-rester of their own. Yes, Giles was injured in his one year at Duke, but also so was Kyrie Irving, who was played for 27.5 minutes a night over his super-short 11-game NCAA career. Giles’ 11.5 minutes average is easily the lowest among all first-rounders. Hard to hate on this pick on the heels of the Labissiere selection since both players were supremely lauded high school projects whose stock only dipped after a couple hundred minutes of collegiate play.

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Tony Bradley / Jazz / 28th overall

Utah also moved up — albeit only two spots — to draft Bradley. This one’s interesting because the Jazz have the only front office on this list who have pulled off a successful rebuild almost entirely through the NBA Draft. The Jazz ignore hype and stay away from any sort of character concerns to Spurs-ian levels, so I just kind of automatically attribute some sort of cerebral-y insight to this pick.