Oklahoma State freshman Cade Cunningham is currently projected as the No. 1 pick in the 2021 NBA draft. If that does indeed happen, Cunningham will join Georgia's Anthony Edwards as the second consecutive top pick to have played somewhere other than where one-and-done stars are supposed to play, i.e., Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and their ilk.
In recent years several standout freshmen have set Duke- and Kentucky-free examples for Cunningham and Edwards to follow. Texas and Washington, for instance, have both seen multiple one-and-done performers pass through their doors on their way to the NBA. Roster sizes are limited, and even the top recruiting powers can't corner the market on one-and-done talent.
For the purposes of this discussion, we'll refer to such outside-the-top-recruiting programs as "normal" teams. What performance impacts do we see when one-and-done lottery picks play for "normal" programs? What might the future hold for Oklahoma State, this season and beyond, now that Mike Boynton has Cunningham in uniform?
Most "normal" teams with a one-and-done lottery pick do improve
Perhaps it should go without saying that landing one of the best players in the nation tends to improve your team, but, in real time, the opposite can sometimes appear to be the case. Indeed, the exceptions to this rule are destined to be infamous.
LSU, for example, struggled through a 19-14 season five years ago and missed the NCAA tournament despite the presence of the 2016 NBA draft's No. 1 overall pick, Ben Simmons. Then, the very next season, Washington fared even worse, posting a 9-22 record with that year's No. 1 pick, Markelle Fultz, in the lineup. What good are one-and-done stars if you don't even make the tournament?
Well, Simmons and Fultz notwithstanding, two out of every three "normal" programs with a one-and-done lottery pick over the past five years have improved their KenPom ranking compared to what they posted the previous season. Granted, these improvements can be hard to spot. Georgia really was better with Edwards last season than the Bulldogs were in 2018-19, but Tom Crean's team still went just 5-13 in SEC play.
For every Simmons or Fultz, there has also been a Trae Young at Oklahoma or a D'Angelo Russell at Ohio State. Coaches are right to covet this population of players, even if these stars stick around for only one season.
As a group, these freshmen excel individually for their "normal" teams
On average, the 18 one-and-done lottery picks who have played for "normal" programs over the past five seasons have clocked in at 26% in terms of possession usage while posting an offensive rating of 113. That's quite good for a college player and outstanding for a freshman.
If you've been reading along here for a while, you know one-and-done freshmen don't quite collectively measure up to the statistical standard set in college by all-conference performers. Nevertheless, that's a high bar to ask freshmen to clear, and coaches at any program, "normal" or otherwise, aren't going to be benching an all-conference player in favor of their highly rated freshman.
Slotting in a first-year player who can carry a featured scorer's workload and do so efficiently is a luxury most coaches can't take for granted. These NBA-track freshmen, on the whole, give their "normal" teams a valuable performance base.
The downstream recruiting and performance effects, however, are open to question
Often when a coach lands an outstanding prospect, the hope is voiced that the "normal" team's recruiting will show improvement from that point forward. Once the talent is upgraded, wins will surely follow. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult dynamic to confirm, however.
Consider UNLV from a few ago, an example of a "normal" program that really did seem to build on a key recruiting win. Future No. 1 overall pick Anthony Bennett was a top-10 recruit when he arrived in Las Vegas in 2012, and head coach Dave Rice followed that up with an even better and deeper recruiting class two years later: Rashad Vaughn, Dwayne Morgan and Goodluck Okonoboh. One more top-10 recruit, Stephen Zimmerman, arrived the following year.
This Bennett-to-Zimmerman run constituted an outstanding stretch of recruiting for Rice. To the extent that the sequence was set in motion by signing Bennett, this might be one of the best case studies in which a "normal" program built on its own recruiting success. Yet the Runnin' Rebels, rather notoriously, played in only one NCAA tournament during that span, losing to No. 12 seed California in the 2013 round of 64 when Bennett was a freshman.
More recently, several coaches who landed one-and-done lottery picks have even been let go by their universities soon afterward (e.g., Lorenzo Romar at Washington, Johnny Jones at LSU, Mark Gottfried at NC State and Crean at Indiana). Signing the best talent in the country is preferable to missing on such players, surely, but doing so is not a performance silver bullet, either.
For his part, Cunningham has already distinguished himself at Oklahoma State as a skilled scorer and distributor at 6-foot-8. In a small sample size of three games this season, he has scored 21, 20 and 15 points. It is likely the Cowboys (3-0) will improve on their performance from a season ago, and it's possible the program could earn its first NCAA tournament bid since 2017. Both developments would be tangible outcomes brought about substantially, though not solely, by Cunningham.
As for the future in Stillwater, who knows. The last time OSU had a one-and-done-level performer, it was Marcus Smart, and he actually stuck around for his sophomore year. Cunningham might not pull a Smart, but he can follow in the footsteps of his one-and-done predecessors by continuing to make his team better in the here and now.