With Jason Terry signing to return to Milwaukee for a 19th season in the league, at least 14 former Arizona players are headed to NBA camps this month (not counting Derrick Williams, who was a role player for Cleveland last season and remains unsigned for 2017-18).
That's the kind of number the Wildcats no doubt want their recruiting targets to know about.
Yet, according to Sports Illustrated, Arizona has only one of the NBA's Top 100 players: The Warriors' Andre Iguodala, rated at No. 46.
SI has three other Pac-12 schools producingΒ more Top 100 players than Arizona: UCLA has four on the list (Russell Westbrook, Kevin Love, Jrue Holiday, Trevor Ariza), USC has three (DeMar DeRozan, Nikola Vucevic and Taj Gibson) while Stanford has two (the Lopez twins).
What probably works against UA in this ranking is that players now in their prime years generally entered the NBA between 2007-2011 -- just as the Wildcats' recruiting dipped in the transition from Lute Olson to Sean Miller.
In other words, most of the top Olson-era players in the NBA are on the back ends of their careers, while most of Miller's NBA guys are still young. And 29-year-old Jerryd Bayless, who played for neither of those coaches (he appeared in the Kevin O'Neill interim year of 2007-08 before going No. 11 in the '08 draft), is coming off two injury plagued seasons.
While Williams' status as the No. 2 pick in 2011 suggests he should be on the Top 100 list at age 26, subsequent Miller-era Top 10 picks Aaron Gordon (2014), Stanley Johnson (2015) and Lauri Markkanen (2017) still have time to get there.
Gordon is only 22, Johnson is 21 and Markkanen is a 20-year-old Bulls rookie.
