Hoop Teens: From High School to NBA riches?

This is the second in a five-part series reviewing the NBA draft since 2005.

The 2006 NBA draft was the first one that required players to be 19 years old and a year removed from high school. Just two of the 60 players drafted in 2006 left college after their freshman year. Those one-and-done players –  Tyrus Thomas and Shawne Williams — haven’t exactly lit up the NBA.

Thomas (AP photo) was selected fourth overall by the Chicago Bulls and is part of their rotation. He started 61 of the 79 games he played in last season and averaged career-highs in points, rebounds, blocks, and steals. Thomas has, however, been inconsistent throughout his career, causing his name to come up in seemingly every trade scenario involving the Bulls.

Bulls forward Tyrus Thomas was one of just two freshman selected in the 2006 NBA draft.

Williams went to the Indiana Pacers at No. 17 and spent his first two seasons there before being traded to the Dallas Mavericks last fall. The NBA has been a struggle for Williams thus far as he has averaged 5.2 points per game and just 13.4 minutes a contest. Among sophomores selected in ‘06, LaMarcus Aldridge (No. 2), Rudy Gay (No. 8), and Rajon Rondo (No. 21) are rising NBA stars.

Here are the number of selections in the ‘06 draft based on experience (first-round total in parenthesis):

- Freshmen: 2 (2)
- Sophomores: 9 (7)
- Juniors: 13 (7)
- Seniors: 20 (8)
- Foreigners: 16 (6)

Following my classification of underclassmen being sophomores and lower, about 18% of the 2006 draft was comprised of underclassmen. Again, that’s not including the foreigners, who are in many cases just as young.

The number of foreigners went up by two from 2005. My guess would be that at least two of the first-round picks made on foreigners would have been made on high school players if allowed. Three foreigners went in the lottery, including the first overall pick Andrea Bargnani to the Toronto Raptors. Besides Bargnani, the first round saw the likes of Mouhamed Sene, Thabo Sefolosha, Oleksiy Pecherov, Sergio Rodriguez and Joel Freeland. Sefolosha and Rodriguez have been OK while Sene and Pecherov have barely made a dent. Freeland is still not in the NBA.

So what can we conclude from the 2006 draft? The best guess is that by changing the age limit, the NBA limited the pool of available talent. Teams gambled on foreigners in the first round or missed badly on collegians with lottery picks (see No. 3 Adam Morrison, No. 5 Shelden Williams, No. 9 Patrick O’Bryant, and No. 11 J.J. Redick (jury’s still out on him)). If high school players had been allowed to enter the draft, perhaps a handful of them would have been lottery picks. We won’t know that for sure until we examine the 2007 draft and see its one-and-dones in the next part of this series.