Because we’re endlessly fascinated with the hype surrounding recruiting, we decided to take a gander at where Brandon Roy, scorer of 52 points last night in a win over Phoenix, ranked coming out of high school. Here’s the list of small forwards that were “rated” ahead of him by the people who attempt to assess high school hoops.

1 Carmelo Anthony – NBA star
2 Lenny Cooke – Colossal bust after getting clowned by LeBron at the Adidas camp about seven or eight years ago (witness!).
3 Antoine Wright – Career NBA reserve so far.
4 Rashad McCants – Won a title at UNC, reserve for the T-Wolves scoring nine ppg.
5 Kennedy Winston – Two good seasons at Alabama, now playing in Europe.
6 Curtis Sumpter – Good but injury-plagued career at Villanova.
7 Evan Burns – Struggled with academics, never panned out.

One could argue that Roy (23.4 ppg, 47 percent from the field) has passed Anthony (21.3 ppg, 42 percent from the field) this season on all those goofy “best player in the NBA” lists. They both have won the same number of postseason series (zero). If the question isn’t “better player” but who you’d rather have on your team, we go Roy on that one, easily.

As for last night … nice poster job by Amare – he really seems to get up for games against Greg Oden and Portland. Oden, who is still adjusting to the speed of the NBA and this thing called defense, could barely stay on the court last night. As soon as he was in there, everyone on Phoenix attacked him, hoping to throw one down on the rookie. Shaq baptized Oden, who was productive offensive in his time on the floor: 17 minutes, eight points. When this guy learns to keep his arms straight up on defense, look out, world!