Two words that scare NBA teams are “ceiling” and “potential”. Any time you talk about Andrew Wiggins you hear that a lot, unlimited potential and his ceiling is so high.
It doesn’t take being an NBA GM or draft expert to see why people use those words to describe Wiggins. He has unreal athleticism and an ability to blow past anyone and that is in college and will be the same in the pros.
The question begs does his talent blind us to some of the obvious issues in his game. When you are that talented it is easy to just get by on that talent especially against lesser competition. Even in the pros, if you are talented enough you don’t have to work as hard others and still be effective.
But, if you want to be great, you have to have a certain fire and desire burning inside of you. That is the difference between the great and the very good.
Wiggins is only 19 years old, we don’t know if he has that desire, sometimes it never comes and other times it develops. Some NBA team is going to take that chance, maybe with the 1st overall pick in the draft and then they are going to have to pray. Wiggins is going to be good, he has rare talent, but does he want to be great and can he be a guy who leads a downtrodden franchise back to glory.
The media has a habit of skiptizing everything, which means taking a very extreme side. If you like Wiggins you are a STAN, if you dislike his game you are a HATER, when it fact there are just a lot of unanswered questions that only Wiggins has the answer to.
Everything is harder in the pros. The competition, media, fans and pressure. If you are weak minded you will crack no matter how talented you are. I don’t have the answers, I am very much like Sway, but in a big game that his team needed him to assert himself Wiggins disappeared. That happened far too often during the regular season. Sometimes it was just a half and others times it was the whole game. This isn’t an overreaction to one game, this is a pattern that started from day one and surfaced at the wrong time for Kansas. We know what Wiggins can do when he is on, but with an 82 game NBA season on the horizon will he be up to the grind?
Some team will be putting their future on it.
