Call me anxious, but I'm already looking ahead to next season. By then, 2014-15 player of the year Frank Kaminsky will be long gone, and we think the same will be true of other big names who weren't seniors this past season. That led me to wonder what the new hierarchy of elite players will look like, from top to bottom, so I decided to get a head start on ranking the players for next season.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if a player has officially declared his intention to enter the 2015 NBA draft, you won't find him here (a la Myles Turner, Kelly Oubre, Kevon Looney or Montrezl Harrell, for example). In addition to these self-declared early departures, I have also preemptively assumed that the following players will not be in Division I next season: Jahlil Okafor, Karl-Anthony Towns, D'Angelo Russell, Justise Winslow, Willie Cauley-Stein, Stanley Johnson, Jakob Poeltl, Sam Dekker, Kris Dunn, Devin Booker, Bobby Portis, Trey Lyles, Caris LeVert, Christian Wood and Jarell Martin.
The most likely scenario is that two or more of the above named players will actually stay in school. Meanwhile two or more of the players named below may surprise us by declaring for the draft. Let's revisit these rankings when we have the final list of eligible names, but for now this is our best survey of the landscape.
Presenting my way-too-early picks for the top 25 players of 2015-16:
1. Ben Simmons, LSU Tigers
By virtue of his status (consensus No. 1 recruit in the nation) and his college choice (LSU), Simmons is something of a rarity. He's the first ESPN No. 1 player to elude the usual blue-chip suspects (defined here in recent recruiting terms as Kentucky, Duke, Kansas and North Carolina) since Avery Bradley in 2009. The 6-foot-9 power forward has been labeled as versatile player with NBA size whose basketball IQ is already pre-installed.