In a parallel universe, the state of Kentucky has been dominating the NBA for years. Back in 1976, when the six remaining teams in the fledgling American Basketball Association (ABA) were negotiating for survival, the Kentucky Colonels were left out of the mix. Kentucky had enjoyed a stable history -- by ABA standards -- and its Hubie Brown-coached 1975 league champions might have been the best team produced by the upstart league, one that could have rivaled the best the NBA had to offer at the time. Somewhere in the multiverse, those Colonels held on to Brown, along with star players Dan Issel and Artis Gilmore, entered the NBA and became a respected franchise in the mold of today's San Antonio Spurs.
In the universe in which we actually reside, the Colonels are mostly forgotten in NBA circles. Yet Kentucky's long tradition as an epicenter of basketball is as intact as ever. In fact, the number of impact professional players the University of Kentucky has churned out under coach John Calipari has grown so immense that the influence of the Bluegrass State on the NBA is perhaps greater now than it would have ever been had the Colonels made the cut 40 years ago.
This is all evident on the surface. The NBA is coming off a draft in which Kentucky had four first-rounders, including No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns, and two second-rounders. During the summer, undrafted Wildcats player Aaron Harrison latched onto the Charlotte Hornets and now seems like a good bet to give the league seven rookies from Kentucky during the 2015-16 season. Three of the past six No. 1 picks have come out of Kentucky, and if you go back to Derrick Rose in 2008 (out of Memphis), four of the past eight top selections have been Calipari players. Towns enters the season as a prime challenger for rookie of the year honors, while New Orleans Pelicans superstar Anthony Davis is poised to join Rose as Calipari's second NBA MVP.
Despite all this, I still wonder if we realize the extent to which Kentucky's presence has become so pervasive at the NBA level. Let me jump back for a moment, to when this story began for me on draft night last month. Strangely enough, the spark came from the improbable predilection Phoenix Suns general manager Ryan McDonough shows for Calipari guards. The Suns went into draft night with a projected starting backcourt of former Wildcats Eric Bledsoe and Brandon Knight. Meanwhile, Archie Goodwin will be entering his third season as a key reserve guard.
That trio of Wildcats wasn't enough for the Suns. When Phoenix picked at No. 13, McDonough made Devin Booker the fourth Kentucky pick of the first round. Later came my eureka moment, when in the second round the Suns took Aaron's twin brother, Andrew Harrison, at No. 44. Five Kentucky guards in one team's backcourt rotation! Then it occurred to me that maybe we were at a tipping point, where Calipari was churning out so many NBA players that it was impossible for them not to cluster on the rosters of at least a few teams.
Andrew Harrison was traded that same night to Memphis, but it hardly took the wind out of my sails. This all goes back to when I was first getting into the NBA as a kid and played a card-based simulation game called Statis Pro Basketball. If that seems like questionable training for a future NBA analyst, you should know that at least one up-and-coming league executive used to play the same game, and I'm pretty sure he's not alone. Anyway, I liked to sort the cards into teams based on college affiliation, and would play games between schools with at least five players. Soon, that became dull because of UCLA's domination. The Bruins had so many productive NBA players at the time that I could have divided them up into two really strong teams.
That's what Kentucky is becoming today, a force similar to what UCLA was to the league back in the 1970s and '80s. While Calipari might not be able to rival coach John Wooden in terms of NCAA championships (nor would Wooden rival himself in the modern college hoops landscape), his influence on the pro game has become every bit as impressive.
Realizing this was an abstract notion, I set out to put some numbers behind the thought. My favorite bottom-line metric, WARP, is only calculated through the NBA's 3-point era, so I raided the indexes of Basketball-Reference.com for win shares data, which is available for the entirety of the league's history. That was easy enough, but merging the data with a logistical database that lists where all those players have come from -- that took some time, and a lot of tedious cleanup of mismatched text strings. I ended up with a massive table that told me how many win shares have come from each school (and high school, as the case may be, or country of origin for international players) for each season in NBA history.
The UCLA dominance I perceived as a kid was very, very real. Beginning in the 1969-70 season -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's rookie year -- Wooden's players rose to the top of the NBA win shares list. Thanks to Wilt Chamberlain, Kansas had topped the list for much of the 1960s, though it was actually Indiana that held the No. 1 spot the year before UCLA took over. The Bruins proceeded to dominate the rankings for the next decade and a half, finishing No. 1 in every season through 1983-84. UCLA was then brushed aside by a long period of Michael Jordan/North Carolina dominance. Since then, the top slot has changed hands a number of times, with familiar blue-blood programs like UNC, UCLA and Duke usually winning out, but other programs like UConn, Georgetown and even Georgia Tech have taken a turn or two.
But not Kentucky. The Wildcats had a two-year run at No. 1 to close out the 1950s, led by Frank Ramsey and Cliff Hagan. However, Kentucky did not return to the top spot until the 2013-14 season, when it edged Duke, 58.7 win shares to 56.1. Last season, the Wildcats repeated with 64.3 win shares, far outdistancing North Carolina's 55.4. Davis' ascension goes a long way toward explaining the rise, but he's only part of the story.
Let's return to UCLA for a second. The Bruins' high-water mark was 71.3 win shares for the 1976-77 NBA season. UNC was No. 2 -- at 28.6. Former Bruin Bill Walton led the Portland Trail Blazers to the NBA crown that season, and Abdul-Jabbar was the league's best player. Jamaal Wilkes, Swen Nater and Sidney Wicks were other ex-Bruins producing at the time. Those 71.3 win shares stand as the record for one school in one season.
For now, anyway. Kentucky is coming on fast. Already, its totals for the past two seasons rank among the top 11 in league history.
That is indeed impressive, yet not as impressive as what might happen this season. To jump all this historical chatter back into the present, let me remind you of the obvious: Calipari most likely will have another seven rookies in the league this season. That could give Kentucky as many as 25 players in the NBA for 2015-16, though not all of them played for Calipari. That number is soft, as we don't know if Nazr Mohammed will find a spot this season, and there are a couple of fringe players on the list who might not make a roster. If they all play, there could be times this season when 5.6 percent of the possible available roster spots in the NBA will be filled by former Kentucky players.
The sheer number of players is impressive, but not as much as the quality. We mentioned Towns and Davis as possible award winners. Yet John Wall, Bledsoe and DeMarcus Cousins could all join Davis in the top 15-20 on the win shares board. And WARP, too, for that matter. In fact, I did some rough translations of my WARP projections into win shares. That's where the story gets really interesting.
The 25 former Kentucky players I've flagged as "active" collectively project to put up 90.3 win shares this season. Let me re-state that for emphasis, like I'm writing a big check: 90.3! Again, that is rough, as there is no systematic way to convert WARP into win shares, but it's close enough to make a clear conclusion: Calipari has the Wildcats poised to have more of an NBA presence this season than any other school has ever had in any season.
Given that the influx of Kentucky players isn't likely to stop anytime soon, and so many of the ones already in the NBA are on the upswing, it's safe to say that the Wildcats have embarked on a domination of the league that might not rival the UCLA dynasty in duration, but it certainly will in quality. This is historical stuff.