Andrew Wiggins is the New Next Big Star in Basketball
By Jason McIntyre
Andrew Wiggins is a 6-foot-7 Canadian high school basketball phenom who put on a show over the weekend at the Peach Jam. The player he’s dismantling – repeatedly – above is Julian Randle, who is widely considered to be the 2nd best prospect in the Class of 2013 (behind SI cover boy Jabari Parker). As you can see, it wasn’t close.
To be fair to Randle, he’s more of a power forward – Gary Parrish of CBS Sports said his NBA comp is Chris Webber – while Wiggins looks like a wing. The performance vaulted Wiggins to the top of the 2014 Class, and besides leaving everyone drooling, the following questions bubbled up:
* Will Wiggins reclassify as a member of the 2013 class – he’s actually older than Jabari Parker – and enter college in the Fall of 2013?
* The college he’ll pick will be Kentucky, right? (Note: Wiggins’s parents attended FSU. His dad, Mitchell, averaged 23 ppg with the Seminoles in the 80s, was a 1st round NBA draft pick and played for three different NBA teams.)
* Is it too early to get excited about Wiggins as the next great NBA player, the type of guy we can talk about as the No. 1 pick in the 2014 NBA draft? (It’s never too early for this kind of chatter. We already have a 2013 NBA mock draft!) I’d guess Orlando “wins” (nods at David Stern) Wiggins in 2014 after losing Dwight Howard next summer.