The recent events in the world of basketball have made me revisit the question we all started asking ourselves on April 10.
Should Arron Afflalo have gone pro?
I started thinking about it again when Georgetown center Roy Hibbert decided to opt out of the NBA Draft. No doubt the Hoya nation has been rejoicing, because if Hibbert had departed with leading scorer Jeff Green, not much fuel would have been left in the tank to propel the Hoyas deep into the NCAA Tournament.
Now I don’t usually buy my opinions from ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption,” but I was watching the usual debacle of a sports show yesterday and it said something that really struck a chord with me. Something to the effect of, Hibbert has drastically gotten better with every year he’s been at Georgetown and coming back for his final year was a very smart decision.
Tony Kornheiser finally got it right. That’s exactly what it is: the right decision.
See it’s too late for Afflalo to come back now, but I can’t help but think that if he had decided to return for his final season, it would have been a smart decision and, more importantly, the right decision. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying only a few players had a perfect excuse to declare for the draft.
Those players are the four starting Gators who led Florida to its second consecutive NCAA title this season. Those guys have pretty much reached their peak in the NCAA game and coming back for another season wouldn’t really improve their abilities as players any more. It would be on the verge of ridiculous: They’re ready for the next level.
Almost every other player has at least one good reason to stay. That’s not to say that Kevin Durant and Greg Oden made the wrong decision to go pro, but they could have stayed back and gotten a little bit more out of the college game. Say, an NCAA title?
Then there is everybody else, on that line between “Should I go pro and get paid?” or “Should I stay behind another year, get better and go for that NCAA title?” Certain players, as now Hibbert has been dubbed, made the right decision to come back to college because they could get much more out of college basketball if they stayed. If they went to the draft, they suffered the risk of falling into the depths of mediocrity, sitting on a Boston Celtic bench and maybe playing a few minutes a game.
Afflalo, sadly enough, possibly falls under this category.
Afflalo will most likely go early second round. Maybe he’ll improve his game and become an NBA starter with a nice lucrative contract. (It’ll take a few years though.) Or maybe he’ll sit on a bench for the rest of his life, wondering what could have been. Nothing is certain and, in general, his NBA career is very unpredictable.
While if he returned he would have absolutely cemented himself as a UCLA great. I need not remind you of who will be on the court for UCLA basketball next year, and adding Afflalo to that almost unanimously ranks UCLA as preseason No. 1. A national championship would be realistic and Afflalo could leave UCLA as the player who led the Bruins to that pinnacle. And he could possibly make a run for Player of the Year.
I respect Afflalo and wholeheartedly thank him for everything he’s brought to Westwood. But in the end, I don’t agree with his decision. He should have stayed and shown us Bruins everywhere the Midas touch. He could have established himself next to the rest of the UCLA basketball immortals.
Instead, we’re left here wondering what if.
E-mail Wenzel at awenzel@media.ucla.edu.