Will John Wall win Wooden Award?

[coloradobuff]

Was thinking of betting on him to win at +250.

Evan Turner does scare me a bit. What you think?

[johnsteed]

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I think it's strange that you keep asking sports questions every other day, yet you never seem to follow up on any thread that you start. It's as though you're a 'sportswriter' who has an article to do, but you don't actually want to do the work, so you go to various message boards asking questions like this one, and if the answer is good enough, you'll submit it as your own work. I could be way off on this one, but that's what it seems like.



If you're taking the time to ask these questions, I'm curious if you really have an opinion yourself (because you never really dig into any of the questions you're asking). Personally, if you're truly serious about discussing sports, I'm all for it and would love to engage in some discussions, but if you're just throwing out random headlines and turning them into questions, which seems to be in play here, what's the point?



To answer your question though, I'd take that bet for Wall. Considering that he's generally regarded as the best player in college hoops, at least talent-wise, he plays a very important role for the 2nd best team (Kentucky) in college (behind Kansas), and he's the consensus 1st pick in this year's NBA draft, I doubt that it's anything but his for the taking. A lot of people will say that the Wooden Award winner generally doesn't reflect how that player will project in the NBA draft with example of guys taken later such as Tyler Hansbrough, J.J. Redick, Jameer Nelson, T.J. Ford, Ed O'Bannon, and Christian Laettner (to name a few), but 10 winners were eventually picked #1 overall (so the correlation isn't so off).



Guys who won the Wooden Award and went #1 in the NBA draft were:


2009 — Blake Griffin, Oklahoma
2005 — Andrew Bogut, Utah
2000 — Kenyon Martin, Cincinnati
1999 — Elton Brand, Duke
1997 — Tim Duncan, Wake Forest
1994 — Glenn Robinson, Purdue
1991 — Larry Johnson, UNLV
1988 — Danny Manning, Kansas
1987 — David Robinson, Navy
1983 — Ralph Sampson, Virginia
1982 — Ralph Sampson, Virginia


1979 — Larry Bird, Indiana State (gets mentioned here because... well... he's Larry 'Legend', but he wasn't #1 overall his year; he went 6th in the '78 Draft)





Steed


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