Trae Young’s NBA Draft number may surprise some

Back in early January, Oklahoma’s Trae Young was leading the nation in both scoring and assists, and some NBA experts were projecting him as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft.

Related Story: Trae Young named consensus First-Team All American

In fact, there are some in the Sooner Nation who are in betting pools over which Sooner star will go higher in their respective professional drafts: Baker Mayfield or Trae Young? We will learn how Mayfield fares much sooner, however, than we will learn Young’s fate. The 2018 NFL Draft will be held later this month. but the NBA Draft is not until late June.

Flash forward to April 2018, nearly a month after the Oklahoma basketball season ended in an NCAA Tournament loss to Rhode Island, and with it the short-lived college career of the consensus First-Team All-American Young.

The Sooner freshman sensation did finish the season as the top scorer (27.4 points per game) in NCAA Division I college basketball as well as the nation’s assist leader (8.6 apg). Talk of him becoming the National Player of the Year and a potential No. 1 draft pick, however, quickly dissipated in February and March in the wake of Oklahoma’s dramatic second-half collapsedecline, as the Sooners  over the second half of this past season.

Just to be clear, despite how incredibly bad the Sooners peformed as a team the second half of the season, Young’s performance was easily the best by a freshman in OU basketball history (he broke several of Wayman Tisdales’ freshman records) and one of best by any player in the country in 2017-18. And you don’t get to be a consensus All-America First-Team selection if you are not recognized as one of the best players in the country.

Early in the season, some of Young’s game performances were absolute  jaw-droppers. By the time the conference season rolled around in January, however, opponents began figuring out how to defend him to limit his touches and force him to take difficult shots. His production tailed off somewhat in the final month of the season, but only to the extent that he went from being a nearly unstoppable force — whether delivering points seemingly at will or dishing dimes to other open shooters — something more on the mortal side as the season wound down.

Most NBA mock drafts have the Oklahoma superstar as a lottery pick, or among the first 10 players chosen in this year’s draft.

The consensus seems to be that Young will come off the board somewhere between the No. 5 and No. 10 overall picks. If that were the case, he would enter the NBA as property of the Dallas Mavericks, Sacramento Kings (where former OU star and college Player of the Year Buddy Hield is currently), Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers, respectively. I have seen his name associated with all five of these teams in recent mock drafts.

I have also seen reports speculating that Young could fall outside of the top 10 draft selections because of concerns about his size and strength and how we will be able to perform going up against defenders who are much better, stronger and quicker than the ones he faced in college. You could also turn than skepticism around, though, and argue that he will be playing with much better players, as well.

Wherever Young lands in the upcoming NBA Draft — and I personally believe it will be somewhere between the No. 4 and No. 7 overall pick — he should do very well. Perhaps not from the very start, but I don’t think it will be too long we see him turning heads at the next level, just as he did at Oklahoma and before that at Norman North High School.