Sports

College teams with multiple lottery picks over the years

June 20, 2011

With Brandon Knight and Enes Kanter expected to both go in the lottery in this year’s NBA Draft, I decided to take a look at what college teams have produced multiple top-14 picks in the same year. So I went back 20 years and looked them up. I suppose it might be a way to see how the years progressed in terms of which teams were churning out the most talent (although not necessarily which teams were “the best,” if you define “the best” as winning championships, though the two ideas did coincide at times), but I was mostly just curious to see how it would turn out.

Some things that stood out for me – I totally forgot Louisville did it two drafts ago, the traditional powers are on this list frequently while less notable schools will have their one or two years (which makes sense, of course, as traditional powers inherently have sustainability), the years of preps-to-pros weakened the list for those years, and UK only made it on the list once in those mid-90s years when the roster was stocked with future NBA talent. Anyway, here’s the list in reverse chronological order:

2010

Kentucky – John Wall (1), DeMarcus Cousins (5), Patrick Patterson (14)

Kansas – Cole Aldrich (11), Xavier Henry (12)

2009

Louisville – Terrence Williams (11), Earl Clark (14)

2008

UCLA – Russell Westbrook (4), Kevin Love (5)

2007

Ohio State – Greg Oden (1), Mike Conley (4)

Florida – Al Horford (3), Corey Brewer (7), Joakim Noah (9)

2006

Duke – Shelden Williams (5), J.J. Redick (11)