ESPN Men's Basketball

On Monday, the announcement came: All five starters for the 2012 national champion Kentucky Wildcats would announce their NBA draft intentions, or lack thereof, at a Tuesday afternoon news conference. With all the decisions up in the air, I thought it would be instructive to take a look at each player's individual likelihood of entering his name in the NBA draft, based on the very scientific system you'll see below:

Center Anthony Davis: Um, obviously.

Small forward Michael Kidd-Gilchrist: Double obviously.

Forward Terrence Jones: Almost as obvious as Davis and MKG (almost).

Guard Doron Lamb: He got 22 in the national title game. He's going.

Guard Marquis Teague: Are UK fans still holding out hope? They're not, right?

At the risk of beating a dumb joke into the ground, well, you get the idea. A couple of weeks ago, there may have been some vague question as to whether Teague or Lamb would return and attempt to take on a starring role in 2012-13. But even that question came after Kentucky coach John Calipari said he hoped he'd have six players drafted in the first round of the 2012 NBA draft (with senior Darius Miller being the sixth) just minutes after winning the national title. By this point, the Associated Press is leading its UK announcement story with quotes like this one ...

But with the possibility that all of his starters could leave college early, coach John Calipari said: "My guess is we'll need a new batch."

... and it's rather clear Tuesday's announcements are going to be anticlimactic. All five players are going pro.* This isn't the least bit surprising, of course, not with Davis and MKG as the possible No. 1 and No. 2 overall, with Jones as a likely lottery pick, and with Lamb and Teague as potential first-rounders, and certainly not with the "players-first" ethos Calipari so vocally espouses. But if there was any doubt at all out there, I'd say "my guess is we'll need a new batch" should go ahead and quell that. As if it needed quelling in the first place.

*Now watch me write this and watch Teague stay. If there is anything powerful enough to change this outcome, it's the world's ability to make even my surest predictions look worthless.

In which case ... you're welcome, Big Blue Nation.

The excellence of four-year Hofstra star Charles Jenkins -- complete with mythical Chuck Norris-style awesomeness -- is nothing new to college hoops fans. Sure, Jenkins wasn't always a household name. He didn't have the chance to shine under the bright lights of an NCAA tournament, and though the CAA was as solid as any mid-major conference in the country last season, it doesn't get the full-frontal national media treatment frequently. But if you follow college hoops, you at least heard of Jenkins.

The NBA general managers currently examining the 2011 crop of prospective draft picks lack even that level of familiarity. Few teams will have the kind of detailed scouting data on Jenkins as they will for most potential first-round picks. Perhaps it's a surprise, then, that GMs seem to consider Jenkins a first-round pick in the first place. But maybe he should be taken much higher than that.

That's the conclusion SI's Luke Winn reached in this piece, in which Luke uses Synergy Scouting Data to identify the biggest sleeper in the 2011 NBA draft. That sleeper, you might have guessed, is Jenkins. Why?

On numbers alone, he's more impressive than any other scoring guard who's in contention for the first round, because he offers the rare combination of high efficiency in both ISO and spot-up situations. [...]

As the focal point of the Pride's offense, he was rarely left unattended -- 63.4 percent of his catch-and-shoot opportunities came with a man in his face -- yet showed an ability to make tough jumpers. His efficiency on guarded shots off the catch was 1.3898 PPP, which ranked 15th nationally among players with at least 50 such possessions. And while Jenkins shoots right-handed, he can go left off the dribble better than anyone in the draft: He had a national-best efficiency of 1.3261 PPP on left-hand drives, which he did 59 percent of the time.

Jenkins is also a rare master of the mid-range game, which has largely disappeared from college hoops as teams run offenses focused on threes and layups. At 1.2069 PPP, Jenkins was the most efficient mid-range player scorer in the nation last season; the runner up was Ohio State's William Buford -- who could be a 2012 first-rounder -- at 1.0333 PPP.

Essentially, Jenkins does it all on the offensive end, and in each of the categories you'd like to see from a ball-dominant, score-first guard -- not that that's all Jenkins is, of course -- he does it all very, very well, much better than many of the guard prospects picked to precede him in the first round of this year's draft.

Of course, the NBA doesn't draft on production. That's essentially what these numbers measure: production. Relating that performance to the NBA game is remarkably difficult. Defenders are taller and faster and more athletic. Decisions must be made that much quicker. Close-outs are much harder to shoot over. And so on.

Nor is Jenkins necessarily still a budding prospect. Already 22, he's already older than 2011 league MVP Derrick Rose. These are major strikes in a league that all too frequently discards current talent and drafts on potential, youth and the possibility of greatness.

Still, the numbers don't lie. Charles Jenkins was really, really good. You probably knew this already. Hofstra fans certainly did. But NBA general managers would do well to familiarize themselves with the notion shortly. If they don't, Jenkins, like spiritual ancestor DeJuan Blair, will slip to an intelligently run franchise like the San Antonio Spurs. The rest of the league will look mighty dumb in the process.

The college-to-NBA talent transition always fascinates me. I love college basketball, and I also love the NBA (and I'm not really sure why so many people who like college basketball actively dislike the NBA, but to each his own, I guess), but I'm always a little bit blown away by the players who do and don't get love from NBA scouts when the draft rolls around in June. If NBA general managers ignored potential and only drafted on sheer collegiate production -- which would be a horrible draft strategy, unless you're the Chicago Bulls -- the NBA draft would look much, much different.

Which brings us to this year. How are NBA scouts seeing the current college hoops season? Who is drawing their attention? And how has players' production in the season to date factored in to those perceptions?

The answer is, well, a little bit. According to ESPN.com NBA Insider Chad Ford, many scouts still like North Carolina freshman Harrison Barnes as the No. 1 overall pick, provided Barnes rebounds from his early struggles at North Carolina and increases his production in the ACC season. (Unfortunately, this doesn't settle a heated ongoing argument I have with my buddy Tom. Tom, a fellow Iowa native who watched Barnes' prep career more closely than most, is convinced Barnes deserves to slide in a big way. I think scouts, scared of watching a potential impact player fall too far, will draft him in the top five overall even if he doesn't get any better this season. I'm pretty sure I'm right. According to Ford, the jury is still out.)

Scouts were also high on Kyrie Irving, who played as well as any player in the country before a toe injury sidelined him indefinitely. Then there's Baylor forward Perry Jones, a 6-foot-10 athletic freak whose production has been decent but not great, but who is still drawing NBA looks based on sheer potential alone. Other mentions for the top pick included Enes Kanter, though scouts will apparently hesitate if they can't see film of him playing college ball this season.

There are some signs that big seasons are helping players. Kemba Walker has shot up draft boards based on his big start, while San Diego State forward Kawhi Leonard and Arizona forward Derrick Williams have both become coveted prospects thanks to hugely productive winters. But more often than not -- surprise, surprise -- scouts like potential. They rate John Henson as the best non-freshman draft prospect in the country (over Walker, Williams and Leonard) and there's nary a mention of Ohio State freshman Jared Sullinger, who has been effortlessly dominating college basketball for about two months now.

In any case, go read Chad's entire breakdown. (I'm not going to copy and paste any of it, because it's Insider, and that kind of defeats the purpose of Insider, right?) But it will be interesting to watch how these perceptions change as conference play heats up. If you're an NBA scout, who's your No. 1 pick?

Yesterday, after rather wordily pondering whether Luke Harangody would become an NBA player -- Harangody is the Platonic idea of a great college player who never got much love from NBA types, for understandable reasons -- a good thing happened: Luke Harangody was drafted No. 22 in the second round by the Boston Celtics. Huzzah for college production! Huzzahs all around.

Plenty of Harangody's peers weren't so lucky.

Compiled quickly from Chad Ford's updated top 100 list, here's a sampling of that group: Manny Harris, Sylven Landesberg, A.J. Ogilvy, Brian Zoubek, Jon Scheyer, Sherron Collins, Jerome Randle, Matt Bouldin, Scottie Reynolds, Samardo Samuels, Tyler Smith, Courtney Fortson, Armon Bassett, Ryan Wittman, and Omar Samhan. I could have missed somebody, but this group is a pretty good mix of players who either led their teams to successful seasons in 2009-10 or played huge four-year roles at their colleges of choice. In some cases, they did both. And every NBA team passed on all of them.

Of course, there are a few bad decisions mixed in here -- Harris, Landesberg, Samuels, and Bassett were all questioned immediately when they decided to leave college for the draft. And it's not exactly hard to fathom why many of these players weren't picked. Some come with attitude concerns. Some aren't NBA athletes. Some have the skills for one position and the body for another. And so on.

Still, there are some good, good collegiate players on this list. Jon Scheyer just won a national title. Matt Bouldin and Scottie Reynolds are two of the best point guards in the country. Tyler Smith was a first-round lock in 2009. Samhan and Wittman just led their teams to brilliant Sweet 16 runs, the former doing so while putting up 20-10 scoring and rebound tallies for pretty much the entire season.

So while it's not exactly surprising none of them were picked in the second round of Thursday's NBA draft, it is disappointing. (Though in terms of surprises, Zoubek and Collins qualify. Why not take a flyer on a seven-foot rebounding machine or a pedigree point guard like Collins?) For some, it's disappointing they chose to leave school, forfeit eligibility and have no pro promise to show for it. For others, it's just disappointing. It's not the end of the world, or of anyone's basketball career, but it is, as the Dude might say, a bummer, man. This is a bummer.

• Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician decided to dust off an old sports blog chestnut -- the classic "let's compare X athlete to Y pop culture artifact" -- and comes out with a classic of the genre: The 2009-10 Syracuse Orangemen as quotes from "Jersey Shore." My favorite: "'I dance because it's something inside of me. I feel the beat, right? It might just so happen that my fist might pump in the air.' -- Vinny Aptly describes Arinze Onuaku's free throw shooting. He feels the beat of the free throw shooting experience. It's inside of him. It just so happens that the ball might not touch anything but air."
• That John Wall-Grant Wahl Sports Illustrated feature is out, and it's a doozy. Read up.
• This is apropos of nothing, but here's a quick look at some NBA draft projections as we bear down on the end of college hoops, and thus the beginning of that weird transitional cocoon-to-butterfly experience known as the "NBA draft." Guess who's projected to go No. 1? (Hint: His name rhymes with "Wahl.")
• Some Pac-10 NCAA tournament speculation: Andy Glockner says the conference is a one-bid league. Seth Davis disagrees, writing that the Pac-10 should get two or three teams in the tournament at minimum (I'm not sure if this is a hard and fast rule, or if Davis thinks three Pac-10 teams are worthy in 2009-10, but I'm not sure about either conclusion). For what it's worth, Joe Lunardi's latest Bracketology also disagrees; Lunardi doesn't have a single Pac-10 at-large team in the tournament.
• Kevin Pelton diagrams just how inconsistent the Oregon State Beavers have been in 2009-10. The Beavers, for whatever reason, don't seem to give a lick about who the play. They don't play better against better teams, or worse against worse teams. They just sort of play.
• The Sporting Blog's Chris Littman reminds you never to turn off a Big East game in the second half, even if it looks like a blowout.
• Jerry Tarkanian did his grammatically suspect anti-NCAA dance this weekend, saying the NCAA was the "crookedest" organization. Crooked organization? Or the crookedest? Stephen Colbert continues to have widespread influence over the zeitgeist.