The Step Back Composite NBA Draft Big Board: The best 30 draft prospects of the 2010s
Tier 1 — Certain franchise-changing talents
No. 1 overall pick, Minnesota Timberwolves, 2015
A fun thing to ponder, in hindsight: What does a Karl-Anthony Towns’ season look like on the 2017 Kentucky team? Or the 2019 Kentucky team? Or Towns’ second choice, the 2015 Baylor team? Basically, if Towns isn’t on a team that’s completely stacked with talent and engineered to make him look like an elite defender, do we parse out his defensive issues in the NBA a little bit earlier?
Towns was described as about as close to the perfect prospect as you could ask for prior to the draft, and his performance at Kentucky supported that assessment. KAT looked like both an elite rim protector and offensive talent at the five, someone who could easily put up 20 points a night with his combination of post play and spot-up shooting, and then control the other end of the floor with great communication, instincts and mobility. In hindsight, it looks like some of that decision-making on defense was manufactured by Kentucky’s system on that particular team, but at the time, the expectation was that Towns was going to be an elite defender from the jump. He’s a reminder that we certainly have not mastered projection from the ever-changing college game to the ever-changing NBA.