Top 50 Recruits of the Decade: Cunningham Fits With Simmons, Kyrie, Zion

Sometimes recruiting — not dissimilar to Chuba Hubbard’s rushing prowess — is difficult to properly contextualize. We talk about how guys were ranked a certain number in a certain class or their rating was .992828343 or whatever, and it all gets a little bit confusing as to what any of this actually means.

I think the best way to properly contextualize a player’s ranking coming out of high school is to put him in with other players who were rated similarly. So when we talk about Cade Cunningham, instead of saying he’s the No. 2 guy on the 247 composite rankings with a rating of .9996, let’s look at who’s around him. The type of talent we’re talking about here.

I pulled the top five of every recruiting class dating back to 2010 (the Dana Holgorsen era, for my football readers). Here they are ranked by rating first and then class second. Notes and thoughts at the bottom.

• This list is LOL-worthy. Steven Adams, Bradley Beal, KAT, Zion and Jayson Tatum are all at the bottom of it. So when we talk about Cade, we’re talking about a guy who has — at least to this point in his career — surrounded himself with other guys who have gone on to become not just professional basketball players, but successful professional basketball players.

• How about Baylor getting Isaiah Austin and Quincy Miller in consecutive years? Here’s your count by school.

Duke: 11
Kentucky: 9
Kansas: 5
UCLA: 3
UNC: 3
Arizona: 3
Washington: 2
Baylor: 2
Pro: 2
Alabama, Cal, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Memphis, Mizzou, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Oregon, Pitt, Texas, USC: 1

• The hit rate on this list is astonishing. It would take me hours to go through and count up all the NBA seasons or all-star appearances, but the percentages here are hilarious. Carson and I went through it a little last night on our pod. I would say a name and he would just say, “lottery pick, lottery pick, lottery pick, pro, lottery pick.” Actually, just going through this list off the top of my head, I think the only guys who didn’t play in the league are the 2018-2020 guys. I might be missing a guy or two, but man.

• Name guy. I’m a name guy. I realize it’s ridiculous, and it’s embarrassing to type on here, but names matter, and this list is full of great, elite names. Cade is near the top of that list. World-class name.

• This can obviously go poorly (Simmons, Ben), but the thing I keep going back to is how Boynton coached the pants off of multiple hall-of-famers with the facsimile of a good team he had in his first season. Last year was always going to be an outlier, but the chatter about, “Well Travis Ford recruited like this, but he couldn’t coach ’em … I’ll wait and see.” First, Travis Ford didn’t recruit like this. Second, Boynton has already coached ’em.

• Yes, the kool-aid tastes good, and yes I have had too much of it.