College basketball has been at its best this season, mainly due to the individual talent inside the sport. Seemingly every night, a crazy performance is being put together. Usually by a true freshman as well. And entering the NCAA Tournament, the stage is only going to get bigger.<\/p>\n
ESPN\u2019s Jay Bilas was asked who his top NBA Draft prospect participating in March Madness is. He actually provided two players. One of them, Bilas saw live and in person on Sunday afternoon in the SEC Tournament championship.<\/p>\n
\u201cAJ Dybantsa<\/a> of BYU<\/a>,\u201d Bilas said<\/a> via The Dan Patrick Show. \u201cAnd then Darius Acuff Jr.<\/a> at Arkansas<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Dybantsa has been at the top of many lists for quite some time. There was a ton of hype for the BYU star and, for the most part, he has delivered. Averaging 25.3 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 3.8 assists per game, somehow, was not enough to earn Dybantsa the Big 12 Player of the Year. However, BYU earned a six-seed in the NCAA Tournament and is hoping for back-to-back runs into the second weekend.<\/p>\n As for Acuff, the Rivals Industry Rankings<\/a> had him as a five-star prospect coming out of IMG Academy<\/a>. Everyone knew what kind of special player was heading to Fayetteville to play under head coach John Calipari<\/a>. Acuff\u2019s game has taken off in recent weeks, though, turning into an elite scoring guard for Arkansas. In the SEC Tournament alone, Acuff averaged 30.3 points and helped the Razorbacks cut down the nets.<\/p>\n There are plenty of other names Bilas could have thrown out there. His tune about the upcoming 2026 NBA Draft is similar to many out there, believing this is the deepest pool of prospects in a while. The entire lottery \u2014 and then some \u2014 should be filled with players who spent this past season playing college basketball. Almost all of them should be on display over the next few weeks in a star-studded March Madness.<\/p>\n \u201cThis tournament is loaded with great players,\u201d Bilas said. \u201cThis draft is as good as I can remember, especially of freshman. I\u2019ve never seen a freshman class this deep of really, really good players. There have, obviously, been great drafts before where the top five were just as good or something like that. But we\u2019ve never had a draft like this where you go 20 deep of freshman that are 18, 19 years old and they\u2019re just as good.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"College basketball has been at its best this season, mainly due to the individual talent inside the sport.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662023,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[5387,7,73892,6,12],"class_list":{"0":"post-662022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba-draft","8":"tag-aj-dybantsa-25-utah-prep","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-darius-acuff-25-img-academy","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-nba-draft"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116241802636904902","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}