Five-star basketball prospect Joshua Christopher spent last weekend in Tempe, attending Arizona State’s rousing victory over Utah, spending time with Sun Devils coach Bobby Hurley and posing for courtside videos as fans chanted “We Want Josh! We Want Josh!”
Lest anyone get carried away and pencil the Sun Devils into the 2021 Final Four, remember this: Former Rivals.com five-star recruits Emmanuel Akot, Josiah Turner, J.P. Prince, Grant Jerrett and Jawann McClellan signed with Arizona amid a chorus of hosannas.
Sometimes the stars don’t shine.
Recruiting in college basketball is a slippery business, and predicting success based on high school headlines has rarely been harder.
If you are under 40 and relatively new to planet Earth, you probably do not know that Arizona State was once a superpower in college basketball recruiting, ruler of the Territorial Cup, shooting for the stars.
The most formidable, bound-for-the-NBA starting lineup to walk onto the court in an Arizona-ASU game wasn’t coached by Lute Olson, didn’t include Deandre Ayton, Mike Bibby, Gilbert Arenas or any of those names on display in the McKale Center rafters.
And yet those uber- stacked ASU teams of 1980 and 1981 never got close enough to sniff the Final Four.
Forty years ago this week — Jan. 26, 1980 — Arizona State coach Ned Wulk started a lineup of five NBA draft picks that would go on to score 47,058 points in the NBA. The Sun Devils beat Arizona 97-72 that night at McKale, and every coach in the Pac-10 feared that ASU was at the beginning of a run that could define West Coast basketball for a decade or more.
But the Sun Devils have never won a Pac-12 basketball championship. It is one of the most baffling narratives in league history.
In the spring of 1978, ASU recruited the two most talented guards in the West: Pueblo High School’s future NBA All-Star Lafayette “Fat” Lever and Los Angeles mega-prospect Greg Goorjian, who averaged 43 points per game in high school. He chose the Sun Devils over UCLA and Notre Dame.
There was no such thing as Rivals.com in 1978, no stars next to a recruit’s name, but both Lever and Goorjian would have been five-star players. And that was just the beginning of ASU’s rise to heavyweight rank in basketball recruiting.
A year later, ASU signed Los Angeles guard Byron Scott — yes, THAT Byron Scott — when new UCLA coach Larry Brown miscalculated and chose to recruit Parade All-America guards Rod Foster of Connecticut and Michael Holton of SoCal, leaving Scott to the Sun Devils.
Foster and Holton were good, but they weren’t Byron Scott or Fat Lever good.
Arizona State recruited so well as it entered the Pac-10 that Wulk was able to package Scott and Lever — Goorjian later transferred to UNLV and then Loyola Marymount seeking more playing time — with future NBA big men Alton Lister, Sam Williams and Kurt Nimphius. When all five were together in the 1979-80 season, the Sun Devils went 15-3 in the Pac-10, finishing second to Oregon State’s 16-2 mark.
The payoff was thought to be the 1980-81 season when, in my opinion, Lever and Scott became the greatest backcourt tandem in modern league history, and, if not No. 1, pushing Arizona’s 1994 Final Four, thunder-and-lightning package of Damon Stoudamire and Khalid Reeves.
Scott. Lever. Lister. Nimphius. Williams. Size, power and national championship talent. If that’s not the most skilled starting five since the league added Arizona and ASU, it’s no worse than 1-A. They combined to play in 3,899 NBA games.
The timing of ASU’s rise was such that Arizona coach Fred Snowden entered a career-ending recruiting dive. Snowden’s fear of flying kept him from recruiting the way he did in the early 1970s while building Arizona into an Elite Eight program. As ASU was recruiting Lever — incredibly, Snowden didn’t seriously pursue Lever from his own hometown — the four recruits signed by Arizona all quit the team and transferred.
That exodus included future NBA point guard Leon Wood, who today would be classified as a five-star prospect in the Lever-Scott class.
Snowden even failed to work the UA’s connection to Byron Scott, whose father, Allen Holmes, had been the national JC player of the year at Weber State College in 1959 while playing for Bruce Larson, a former Wildcat standout who subsequently became Arizona’s head coach from 1961-72.
The league was ASU’s to own.
By the winter of 1980-81, ASU was so good that it ended the Pac-10 regular season by embarrassing undefeated No. 1 Oregon State, 87-67, on the final day of the regular season at OSU’s Gill Coliseum.
ASU was 24-3 and 16-2 in the conference, its best-ever record in the league. But then, out of nowhere, the No. 2 seeded Sun Devils were stunned by then-mediocre Kansas in a first-round NCAA Tournament game.
That once-in-a-lifetime group of five-star recruits never won an NCAA Tournament game. The fallout has been severe; the Sun Devils have been unable to regain any measure of national recruiting clout.
Lister, Williams and Nimphius went to the NBA, and Wulk was fired after the 1981-82 season . Arizona hired Lute Olson and all the numbers changed.
Arizona has won 53 NCAA Tournament games since ASU’s 1981 flameout. The Sun Devils? Five.
Arizona has won 12 Pac-12 championships. ASU: zero.
Today, 40 years later, the Sun Devils are in pursuit of five-star prospect Joshua Christopher, chasing the stars, a game that has no end.
