The NCAA Tournament is loaded with top NBA prospects. Consider this the March of the freshmen

Audio By Carbonatix

It was early in the final week before March Madness when BYU’s AJ Dybantsa opened his Big 12 Tournament run by scoring 40 points, breaking a freshman single-game record held by NBA great Kevin Durant.

“I’m just trying to win games,” Dybantsa said afterward.

By Selection Sunday, Darius Acuff Jr. had completed a three-game tear through the Southeastern Conference Tournament that secured Arkansas’ first title in 26 years.

“Downhill was working all weekend and today,” he said.

And that's how this freshman class stocked with high-end NBA talent rolled all year, making the extraordinary look routine — so much so that the NBA is concerned about teams tanking to improve their chances at landing one of these talents in June.

From Dybantsa and Acuff to Duke’s Cameron Boozer and Kansas’ Darryn Peterson as headliners, the potential class of draft prospects is considered among the deepest in years if all go the one-and-done route as expected.

And they’ve arrived at the NCAA Tournament to play in the sport's marquee event. It's now the March of the freshmen, possibly all the way to the Final Four in Indianapolis.

“I know most of those guys. They’re all having great years,” Acuff said during his SEC run. “They’re playing special. It’s great to see all the young guys playing great.”

Start with the East Region, where top overall tournament seed Duke has the 6-foot-10, 250-pound Boozer (22.5 points, 10.2 rebounds) as the leading force in an often-withering inside-out attack.

The East also has a potential top overall pick in Peterson, a 6-6 guard averaging 19.8 points even while being in and out of the lineup all year for the fourth-seeded Jayhawks; and a potential top-10 talent in 6-5 guard Mikel Brown Jr. from sixth-seeded Louisville.

In the West, the 6-foot-9 Dybantsa did nothing to harm his status as the long-running favorite to go No. 1 overall in the NBA draft while averaging a national-best 25.3 points for the sixth-seeded Cougars. Acuff is there, too, the 6-3 point guard who just set an SEC Tournament record by averaging 30.3 points — and getting anywhere he wanted — while playing 117 of 120 possible minutes for the fourth-seeded Razorbacks.

Arizona tops the West, led by its own promising NBA freshmen prospects in 6-4 guard Brayden Burries (15.9) and 6-8 forward Koa Peat (13.6).

South No. 2 seed Houston is led by 6-4 guard Kingston Flemings (16.4 points), while third-seeded Illinois found a star in four-star prospect Keaton Wagler — a 6-6 guard averaging a team-best 17.9 points.

In the Midwest, sixth-seeded Tennessee has slender 6-10 forward Nate Ament, who has averaged 20.3 points since mid-January while coach Rick Barnes has pointed to his gains in playing through contact.

And the tournament list could've been even longer if not for South 6-seed North Carolina losing 6-foot-10 freshman Caleb Wilson (19.8 points, 9.4 rebounds) to a season-ending thumb injury in early March.

Tuesday's release of The Associated Press All-America teams reinforced the freshman surge. Boozer was a unanimous first-team pick, joined by Dybantsa and Acuff on that top quintet. Wagler and Wilson were second-team picks, Flemings a third-teamer.

“You knew they were extremely talented, but you just never know how they’re going to adjust moving to this level,” Tar Heels coach Hubert Davis said of the freshman class. “I know a lot of people think going from high school to playing at this level, the transition is easy. It is not.”

Freshmen made it look that way all year, even beyond the spotlight-seizing pro prospects.

This year, 24 freshmen are averaging at least 16.0 points on the NCAA's leaderboard as of Tuesday. That's nearly triple the annual average from the 2011-12 season through last year (8.8), with no more than 15 reaching that mark in any season during that span.

The numbers had been particularly low in recent years, when the sport got older with players who competed during the COVID-19 pandemic sticking around college with an extra year of eligibility to play five seasons. During that time, only 17 freshmen hit that 16-point threshold in the past three seasons combined.

Yet this year, freshmen accounted for 10 40-point games, up from seven in the previous seven seasons combined.

Acuff led that list with 49 in a double-overtime loss at Alabama, while Wagler scored 46 against eventual Big Ten champion Purdue. Louisville's Brown dropped 45 on N.C. State to break the Atlantic Coast Conference freshman single-game record — set by last year's No. 1 overall NBA draft pick in Duke's Cooper Flagg — and Flemings had 42 against NCAA-bound Texas Tech.

Dybantsa did it twice, first with 43 against Utah in January before last week's 40 points against Kansas State. He later broke Durant's overall scoring record for a single Big 12 Tournament in a loss against Houston.

“I coached six years in the NBA,” Cougars coach Kelvin Sampson said. "So I sat on the front of that bench and watched everybody from Allen Iverson to Rip Hamilton, to LeBron, Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, Dubinski, Jason Kidd, all of those guys.

“You know, some of them just have the bucket gene. I don’t think you can teach that. For us, we have to recruit it. For the NBA, they have to draft it. ... But Dybantsa has got the gene.”

ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla figures this freshman-led draft class could be the best since the 2003 group that had LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade among the top five picks.

“If you don’t get a top-3 pick, there’s going to be a lot of consolation prizes for the tankers right down to probably 8 or 9 or 10,” he said. “That's a good thing.”

Fraschilla has Dybantsa, Boozer and Peterson as his top prospects, while Acuff — with potential he compares to NBA star Damian Lillard — and Wilson and Flemings are next in a top tier set to offer “instant production" at the next level.

He also said Burries and Brown could develop into all-star talents, and he's high on Ament's long-term prospects as he gets stronger to handle physical play.

Fraschilla figures most NBA teams are “75% of the way home” in their evaluations of potential draft prospects, though he notes: “There are still guys that can help themselves.”

“A piece of it is the NCAA Tournament, a piece of it will be interviews and background, a piece of it might be talking to these kids at the combine,” Fraschilla said. “Here's the way I'd put it: the NCAA Tournament is like getting an extra-credit question on your final exam. ... You can go from a B to an A.”

Maybe so, but it sure looks like this freshman class has long since been on the Dean's List.

___

AP Basketball Writer Dave Skretta in Kansas City, Missouri, and AP Sports Writer Teresa M. Walker in Nashville, Tennessee, contributed to this report.

___

AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness