As a sport we follow on a daily basis, there are many different facets of basketball which garner our interest. At the very core, we love the game because watching athletes compete against each other at the highest level of competition is such a pure form of enjoyment. We revel in the individual brilliance of these players, we immerse ourselves in the rivalries that grow over time, and if for nothing else, there are the GIFs and memes and minute-to-minute construction of jokes that forms the new-age experience of watching the game while simultaneously being engaged on Twitter.

All of the above are great, but there’s also a whole other landscape that demands our attention. Whether it’s free agency, trades, or the discussion of player salaries, we love to engage in conversation about what the future of our team can look like. Eventually, we turn our attention towards the prospects who are making their way through the system, from high school, AAU ball and/or ABCD Camp to college and, eventually, the NBA draft.

This aspect of basketball has become a full-blown obsession in many circles, and it’s hard to sit here and say it’s only been happening in recent years. Even a decade ago or even further, it was common to hear about the next phenom even if he were only just starting high school.

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The first time I heard about Andrew Wiggins was four years ago, when he attended Vaughan Secondary School in Toronto, a high school that is a 15-minute drive from where I grew up. The local media was already very much on top of the story. At the time, Wiggins was just a 15-year-old in Grade 10. But even then, he was touted as the next can’t-miss prospect. 

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When he was profiled in 2010, he was described as someone who combined the fluid, explosive grace of a track athlete with a broad base of skills and basketball savvy. Among the traits that made him so highly regarded was his willingness to listen and learn. But for Wiggins, it always came back to his athleticism. He was drawing comparisons to Kevin Durant, Tracy McGrady, and Vince Carter.

Wiggins would transfer to Huntington Prep, a basketball-focused college-preparatory school in West Virginia, for his last two years of high school basketball. Due to the current age-limit rules in the NBA, he could not make the leap from prep to pro after donning a mortarboard, and instead “chose” to spend a year at the University of Kansas where he gave the scouts a chance to pick his game apart.

When I watched him play last year with the Jayhawks, the one thing that immediately stood out was the lackadaisical vibe he gave off on the court. Sometimes it’s easy to forget you’re watching a teenager still learning to play the game when you’ve been conditioned to compare them to the greats. 

I fell into that trap.

When Wiggins scored 41 points along with eight rebounds, two assists, four blocks, and five steals in a loss to West Virginia before the NCAA Tournament, the evaluation took a turn; perhaps he was ready to realize his potential after all. But later that month, he made just one field goal in 34 minutes in a third round loss to tenth-seeded Stanford. The result left people with questions about Wiggins and the usual buzzwords with a prospect. 

Was it was an internal drive issue? Did he have the desire to be the best player on the floor, and so on.

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Wiggins shows off his explosive athleticism in a pre-draft workout last month. Photo via Instagram

The questions about Wiggins and his lack of assertiveness remain, and even though he will go in the top three at next week’s draft, the question marks about his competitiveness will surely influence the decision of the teams selecting in the lottery. There are also questions about whether he has the tools to be a complete player on the offensive end, a strong enough player that a team can build around. His strength and weaknesses, like the prospects before him and those who will follow, have been dissected with exquisite detail. There are sites—such as Draft Express—who devote their time to evaluating these prospects and helping us digest the hours of scouting by distilling them into easy to consume video reports. There are also extensive models that are aimed at predicting how prospects will do at the pro level.

All of this is great, because the genuine curiosity of figuring out how we can better evaluate prospects will only help teams in the long term. But there are also limitations to evaluating these players based on the available data. The entire idea of draft preparation is based around information gathering, but selecting the right player is such an unpredictable science, and I wonder if we should even be forming expectations based on incomplete information.

Prognostication is a huge part of what we do. For some, it is the end game. Increasingly, it feels like there’s a divide between explaining what we just watched versus predicting what will happen next. The former allows us to better understand what exactly happened in a game, or a particular sequence. It explains the how, why, who, where, and all the relevant questions that make us understand the game in more detail. The latter, while educational and informative in its own right, can often feel like guess work.

The need for benchmarks and predictive ability, or just the basic desire to be right and to think we know the future is what keeps a lot of us focused on evaluating these prospects and reaching a point where we feel like we understand everything about them, all before they’ve played a single game in the pros. 

Perhaps we need to reevaluate whether it’s fair to use the draft as an arbitrary point of evaluation, or if we need to have a particular set of expectations for these prospects at all.

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This week, I read several features about Wiggins and the lead up to the draft. In one, NBA scouts marveled at how he runs the floor, “He gallops. He glides. He flies.” Another compared Wiggins to LeBron James and Russell Westbrook from an athletic standpoint. And that’s what it always comes back to with Wiggins: The tantalizing athleticism. Whether it was when he was 15 and still in high school, or a week before the draft, it’s the same conversation.

In this particular case, maybe that’s the only thing we know about Wiggins. Everything else feels like speculation. In all these years leading up to the draft, we’ve scrutinized Wiggins many times. In the end, there are no first or last impressions, or anything in between that feels like it should be a lasting impression.

We’ve been trying to put a puzzle together when we only have a few pieces from the box. Maybe it’s the next impression, the next puzzle piece that we get of Wiggins that will matter. The next one starts when he steps on the court next season—wherever he lands among the first three selections next week—and finally starts playing at the highest level. 

Maybe then we can start our evaluation, and do so with a blank canvas rather than carry the expectations we’ve formed about him since before he was old enough to drive a car.

We’re doing the best we can to predict what’s next. Maybe we don’t need to.