Three Freshmen Are Stealing the Wooden Award Spotlight, and the College Basketball World Is Watching
This college basketball season belongs to the freshman class, and the Wooden Award finalists just proved it. Three first-year players made the cut for both the Wooden Award finalists and All-America selections: Arkansas' Darius Acuff Jr., Duke's Cameron Boozer, and BYU's AJ Dybantsa. These are not your typical role-playing freshmen. These are the guys carrying their teams on their backs.
Boozer Has Been the Frontrunner All Season Long
Cameron Boozer took home ACC Player of the Year honors, and honestly, it is easy to see why. The Duke star averaged a double-double for the Blue Devils while posting the ninth-best scoring mark nationally at 22.5 points per game and the 12th-best rebounding average in the country at 10.2 rebounds per game. He recorded double-doubles in 22 of his 38 games, distributed 4.1 assists per game, and shot 39.1% from three. That three-point percentage powered Duke's top-10 adjusted offensive efficiency ranking. Boozer has been considered the front-runner for the Wooden Award for much of the season.
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Dybantsa led the entire country in scoring with 25.5 points per game and recorded 20 or more points in 28 games. That is the second most for a Division I freshman over the past 20 seasons and just two short of Kevin Durant's 30 games in 2006-07. Meanwhile, Acuff finished with 26 games of 20-plus points, placing him fourth on that same list. The SEC Player of the Year became the first athlete to lead the conference in both points (23.5 per game) and assists (6.4 per game) since Pete Maravich in 1969-70.
Two veterans also made both lists: Michigan's Yaxel Lendeborg has led the Final Four-bound Wolverines in scoring at 15.2 points per game, while Purdue's Braden Smith finished his senior season second in assists nationally at 8.8 per game. Smith also broke Bobby Hurley's NCAA assists record, ending his career with 1,932 total assists.
The full Wooden All-American Team includes freshmen Kingston Flemings of Houston and Keaton Wagler of Illinois, plus Michigan State sophomore Jeremy Fears Jr., who led the nation in assists at 9.4 per game. Iowa State's Joshua Jefferson and Texas Tech's JT Toppin also made the team despite season-ending injuries.
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