Where Does Bronny James Rank among the NBA Draft's Worst One-and-Done Players?
Few freshmen have entered the draft after a college debut this rough.
It isn’t hard to feel sympathy for Bronny James. Trying to make a career as a professional basketball player as the son (and namesake) of LeBron James may have its advantages, but it also comes with the weight of tremendous pressure. Those expectations might even make you work to return to the court just five months after suffering cardiac arrest at a USC offseason practice, and play 24 more games after that.
Still, the news that the younger James would not only be hitting the transfer portal, but entering the NBA draft as a one-and-done player was more than a little absurd. Despite being a McDonald’s All-American and Top-20 recruit, James Jr. started only 6 games for a Trojans team that went 15-18, its worst season in nearly a decade. He averaged just 4.8 points, 2.8 rebounds and 2.1 assists while shooting 36.6% from the floor. One can’t help but feel like the elder James is trying to force his dream of playing with Bronny to happen, whether it makes sense or not.
Again, we can cut James Jr. plenty of slack for the health challenges he overcame to even play major-college basketball at all this past season. But even so, taking his numbers at face value, James Jr. would be one of the worst players of the one-and-done era to test his luck in the draft if he stays in the pool of early entrants.
To judge this, I grabbed RealGM’s list of all early-entry collegiate players, filtering it down to freshmen who stayed in the draft since the NBA’s age-limit rule ushered in the one-and-done era in 2006. Then, for those who qualified, I grabbed their pace-adjusted freshman-year stats, calculating Game Score (a simple, all-in-one metric for boxscore productivity) to measure how well they did in their college season before jumping into the draft.
Here are all 215 players in the sample, arranged by year and freshman-year performance:
As we can see, no one-and-done entry has gotten drafted in Round 1 after a season like James Jr. had as a freshman. (Kentucky’s Skal Labissiere was close, though he was the No. 2 recruit in his high school class — and averaged 38% more PPG than James Jr. in college — before going 28th in the 2016 draft.)
In fact, only one player in the entire dataset declared for the draft following a rougher freshman year: Dayton’s Kostas Antetokounmpo, who averaged a meager 5.2 PPG (albeit on 57.4% shooting), 2.9 RPG and 0.4 APG in 29 games before entering the 2018 draft… and going absolutely last with the 60th overall pick. (But at least he was drafted.)
Maybe it’s fitting that an Antetokounmpo is right next to James Jr. on the list, as Giannis’ brothers are the frequent targets of nepotism jokes across the league. If a team drafts James Jr. with a high pick as an attempt to lure James Sr. to join in free agency (or to stay, if it’s the Lakers),1 surely such memes will fly fast and furious around Bronny as well.
Of course, just like the athletic talent of the Antetokounmpos provided at least some plausible deniability against accusations of pure nepotism, James Jr. has a track record of being a good prospect beyond just his pedigree as a legend’s son. His numbers were no doubt reduced — perhaps significantly — by the ordeal of his heart condition and subsequent recovery. There are legitimate reasons to think he is better than his weak USC stats indicate.
But how much better? That’s the determination teams will have to make as part of the calculus around potentially drafting James Jr., in addition to the looming shadow of his father’s possible free agency. It’s also worth noting that, if he doesn’t draw as much interest as he wants, James Jr. can always pull back from the draft and stay in college. (His options are wide-open in that way.) But if he stays in, it would be after one of the worst seasons by any would-be freshman draftee in the one-and-done era — regardless of the famous name on the back of his jersey.
Filed under: College basketball, NBA
James has a player option after the 2023-24 season.