Chris Carrawell started for a top-ranked Duke team that blew out just about every opponent behind a roster stocked with NBA talent, including a freshman reserve capable of flashing high-flying potential in limited minutes.
Back then, the norm would’ve been for Corey Maggette to return for a starring role on a title contender. Instead he became the Blue Devils’ first one-and-done NBA player in 1999.
“I was a little surprised,” Carrawell recalled.
It was quite a change two decades later as Carrawell returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach just in time for the spectacle of Zion Williamson’s lone season of Duke superstardom. By then, for Carrawell and the rest of college basketball, recruiting top-tier pro prospects included the near-certainty that they’d have a brief window to impact how highly a team is ranked and its title chances come March before jumping to the NBA.
“When I come back 20 years later, now it was like that was the norm,” Carrawell said, “and that’s how we recruited.”
It’s easy to understand why. As The Associated Press marks the 75th anniversary of its men’s basketball poll, teams with those one-and-done talents often stayed near the top of the rankings.
While the best players long stuck around college for multiple seasons, Spencer Haywood’s legal fight with the NBA set the stage for players to head to the league early and ultimately ushered in today’s one-and-done era. Now, with the NBA’s age limit of 19 and requirement of being a year of high school to enter the draft, college programs have gotten one-shot glimpses of stars like Williamson, Kentucky’s Anthony Davis or Memphis’ Derrick Rose.
Their AP Top 25 standing reflected it, too.
There have been 107 one-and-done players to go in the lottery picks of the NBA draft dating to 2006, the first after the league blocked players from jumping directly from the high school ranks. Nearly two-thirds (70) played for a team that cracked the top 10, with 34 seeing their teams climb all the way to No. 1.
Seven ultimately followed that with another No. 1 by becoming the top overall draft pick: Ohio State’s Greg Oden (2007); Rose (2008); Kentucky’s John Wall (2010); Duke’s Kyrie Irving (2011); Davis (2012); Kentucky’s Karl-Anthony Towns (2015) and Williamson (2019).
“It adds such another level of excitement to think where is the ceiling for this individual, now what does that do for the team?” said ACC Network analyst Luke Hancock, the Most Outstanding Player of the 2013 Final Four in Louisville’s later-vacated title run.
“You go year by year and see these guys and wonder what their impact is going to be on great programs and great teams. Or are they just going to kind of fade and show flashes of brilliance but not win at a high enough level?”
To that point, it hasn’t always gone smoothly. In the past decade, 2016 No. 1 overall pick Ben Simmons was briefly ranked before missing the NCAA Tournament, while 2017 No. 1 pick Markelle Fultz played for a nine-win Washington team.
And it's going to get trickier, too. The transfer-portal era has players moving freely between schools. College athletes are cleared to profit from endorsements using their name, image and likeness (NIL), offering financial incentives to stay in college longer.
It creates a sport rapidly getting older, with many teams preferring a readily available pool of experienced talent compared to a small universe of elite NBA prospects.
“I think it’s made it tougher for one-and-dones to really have the same impact,” Hancock said, "whether they’re drafted high or not.”
Still, Hall of Fame coach John Calipari isn’t planning to significantly change his one-and-done approach, even while using the portal to add graduate players in supplemental fashion.
Calipari coached Rose as Memphis spent five weeks ranked No. 1. He has since spent spent 37 weeks ranked No. 1 at Kentucky, highlighted by Davis’ 2012 team winning the NCAA title and Towns’ 2015 team carrying an unbeaten record to the Final Four as a wire-to-wire No. 1.
“If we can get good enough young players, develop those young players and win at a high level, that would be my druthers,” Calipari said. “I always come back to if it’s talent or experience, I’ll take talent. If you have talented experience, then you’re going to be really good but most of the really talented players go pro.
“I’m not changing the philosophy of recruiting the very best players in the country. Teach them. Help develop them as individuals and then bring a team together over the year that has a chance to compete for national titles.”
Back at Duke, Carrawell returned to find now-retired Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski had masterfully pivoted from relying four-year stars like Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill to lean into one-and-done additions.
Duke has produced at least one freshman lottery pick in 10 of 13 seasons, including two from Krzyzewski's fifth NCAA title winner in 2015 and No. 1 overall pick Paolo Banchero in 2022. Not coincidentally, the Blue Devils have spent 34 weeks ranked No. 1 and 77% of the time (192 of 249 polls) inside the top 10 from 2010-11 through last season.
“We actually recruited those guys and tell them, ‘You’re not going to be here long,’” Carrawell said of the change. “I was really amazed how Coach K adjusted to that, the different eras and how we used to be and perceived back then. Man, you would’ve never thought Duke would be a school with one-and-dones.”
Now Carrawell is part of successor Jon Scheyer’s staff, which keeps snagging big-name recruits — even if they provide only one season's worth of highlights in Duke's famously rowdy Cameron Indoor Stadium.
“I think with the one-and-dones and with guys that talented, they can be the best player on the team,” Carrawell said. “But it’s hard to really go all the way with a freshman-led team and the best player being a freshman.
"I’m not saying it can’t happen. … But I need a mix of some talented sophomores, a junior, a grizzly senior. You need that.”