Where Does Cade Cunningham Fit Among OSU’s, Big 12’s Best All-Time Recruits

It’s the summer of 2019, but the recruitment of a 2020 basketball player has been the talk around the proverbial Oklahoma State water cooler.

It’s been thought for a little while now that OSU is in a good spot to land five-star prospect Cade Cunningham. But, those thoughts have turned into obsessions with the announcement that Mike Boynton hired Cannen Cunningham, Cade’s older brother, as an assistant coach Tuesday.

Cade Cunningham is the third-ranked recruit in the 2020 class, per 247Sports’ composite rankings. ESPN recently updated its rankings and had Cunningham as the second overall prospect in the class.

Cunningham has a 247 Composite Score of .9988. The highest score possible is a 1.000. His .9988 has a chance to change, as it’s still the summer before his senior year of high school, but here is a look at all of 247Sports’ composite ranking’s .9988s:

That’s some solid company. All of those players have played in the NBA. Four of the five were first-round picks. Derrick Rose won an NBA MVP and is a three-time All-Star. Shannon Brown is a two-time NBA champion.

At this point in their careers, Cliff Alexander is the only one of that group that could be considered a bust, but he is still only 23 years old.

As far as OSU goes, if Cunningham committed, he’d be the second highest-rated recruit to ever commit to OSU, behind Gerald Green. Green went on to declare for the NBA Draft before getting to OSU, so if Cunningham committed and actually came to OSU, he’d be the highest-ranked recruit to ever do so.

Here is a look at the top recruits who actually played for the home team in Gallagher-Iba Arena:

Lastly, we’ll look at the current top recruits in Big 12 history.

*-Went straight to NBA

So, Cunningham would be tied with Cliff Alexander as the Big 12’s 10th best recruit, ninth-best excluding Gerald Green. There are some ridiculous names left off that list, such as Blake Griffin, Trae Young, Joel Embiid and Mario Chalmers, all of whom scored lower than a .9988.

This obviously doesn’t mean that Cunningham could just show up to Stillwater and become the next Derrick Rose, but this is the caliber player that Boynton and OSU seem on the verge of getting.