The 2017 Final Four has star power even without ‘one-and-dones’

Last the fall, the 2016-17 college basketball season was predicted and dubbed by many to be “the year of the freshman.” The title was understandable given the strength of the 2016 recruiting class, and in a lot of ways it held up over the succeeding five months.

The 2017 NBA draft has fans of the professional game across the country buzzing already about it being potentially the most loaded draft in a decade. The reason is the youngsters.

In his latest mock draft, SB Nation’s Ricky O’Donnell has 10 freshmen being selected before a college veteran (North Carolina’s Justin Jackson) finally hears his name called. That’s not a knock on college basketball’s current upperclassmen. It’s simply a testament to just how impressive the crop of freshmen were in their only season at the college level.

Lonzo Ball completely transformed UCLA from a team with a losing record to a national title contender, and as a result he’s a finalist for every national Player of the Year award. Josh Jackson’s ridiculous skill set was on full display all year, as he helped Kansas to a No. 1 seed and a Midwest Regional final appearance.

Kentucky’s big three freshmen — De’Aaron Fox, Malik Monk, and Bam Adebayo — were the powerhouse’s top three players. And even though they began the year injured, Duke’s No. 1 recruiting class eventually got healthy and helped the Blue Devils to an ACC tournament title and a No. 2 seed in the Big Dance.

Here’s the other thing about college basketball’s most prominent one-and-dones this season: You’re not going to see any of them at the Final Four.

Kentucky got nipped by North Carolina in the Elite Eight one round after taking out Ball and UCLA, Duke was stunned by South Carolina in the second round, and Kansas went down in surprising fashion as well, falling to Oregon in the Elite Eight despite the luxury of playing the game in Kansas City.

The result of these losses plus a few others is that each of the last four teams still alive in the NCAA tournament haven’t been overly reliant on freshmen this season. Only one freshman on any of the four rosters, Gonzaga’s Zach Collins, is thought to have a shot at making the jump to the NBA after this season. While Collins is supremely talented, he only averages 17.2 minutes per game for a Bulldog team loaded with proven vets.

In all, only two starters on the four national semifinalists will be freshmen.

Fans of the NBA who only pay attention to the tournament to catch a glimpse of the future of their league will likely be disappointed in the “lack of star power” at the Final Four. The fact of the matter is that if we’re talking about actual production at not next-level projections, almost all of the tournament’s biggest stars are going to be in Phoenix.

No one has been better over the last two weeks than South Carolina senior guard Sindarius Thornwell. The tournament’s leading scorer, Thornwell has dropped between 24 and 29 points in all four of the Gamecocks’ wins, giving Frank Martin’s scrappy team the offensive production it had lacked at the end of the regular season.

The tournament’s second and third best players both suit up for Oregon. Tyler Dorsey has been unstoppable in his last seven appearances, scoring 20 points or more in each game. That wasn’t enough to make him the Midwest Region’s Most Valuable Player, though.

That distinction belonged to Jordan Bell, who has been an unstoppable force ever since frontcourt mate Chris Boucher was lost for the season with an ACL tear during the Pac-12 tournament. Bell capped his remarkable run in the Midwest Region by coming two blocks short of a triple-double in the Ducks’ Elite Eight upset of Kansas. All this has left Second Team All-American Dillon Brooks as the third-best player on his own team during March Madness.

As for the two top seeds still standing, there’s no shortage of star power there either. North Carolina’s Justin Jackson was named a First Team All-American by the Associated Press earlier this week, while Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss made an appearance on the Second Team. Both players were named the Player of the Year in their respective conferences.

At some point in time, a large faction of the sports world became convinced that lottery pick freshman talent is now a necessity for teams looking to be true national championship contenders. Perhaps it’s because we saw Greg Oden and Derrick Rose nearly lead their teams to titles in the first two years of the so-called “one-and-done rule.” Or maybe it’s because we saw Anthony Davis carry Kentucky to a title in 2012 and Jahlil Okafor and Tyus Jones do the same thing at Duke three years later.

The reality is that in the one-and-done era — which is now more than a decade old — only that 2011-12 Kentucky team and that 2014-15 Duke team have won a national championship with at least one freshman who went on to make the leap to the NBA draft after the season.

The national championship game has been a treat in each of the last two seasons. A year ago, Villanova and North Carolina squared off in a game for the ages. There were no one-and-done players on either side.

The season before that, Coach K’s young and talented Blue Devils took down a Wisconsin team loaded with veterans in a game that came down to the final minute. Both games were wildly entertaining and memorable, and both featured different degrees of “star power.”

You might not see a player in Phoenix this weekend who will hear his name called during the first 30 minutes of the draft this summer. That doesn’t mean that you won’t be seeing college basketball’s best players at this point in time, and it doesn’t mean that you won’t be wildly entertained on both Saturday and Monday evening.