Tonight, the NBA will have their first installment of a new potential rivalry in the NBA. Andrew Wiggins versus Jabari Parker will square off the for first time in their NBA careers in an NBA game. Let’s check out how these bright, young stars rivalry stacks up early on with another rivalry with two of the NBA’s best of all-time.
Everyone knows how LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony got to their respective teams now in the 2014-15 NBA season, but let’s take a step back to where they started.
Over 10 years ago, two skinny, young kids were drafted number 1 and number 3 respectively in the 2003 NBA Draft. LeBron James from St. Vincent/St. Mary’s High School out of Ohio was drafted #1 overall by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. At #3 the Denver Nuggets reluctantly had Carmelo Anthony fall to them. A scoring machine out of Syracuse University.
Eventually LeBron would leave Cleveland, go to the Miami Heat, win 2 championships and then returned back to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Carmelo on the other hand would force his way out of Denver and be traded to his hometown New York Knicks.
Over 10 years later, the Cleveland Cavaliers once again had the #1 overall pick and took freshman phenom Andrew Wiggins from the Kansas Jayhawks. With the #2 pick, the Milwaukee Bucks took Jabari Parker. Wiggins was later traded in a deal that sent Kevin Love to the Cleveland Cavaliers and Wiggins to the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Now ahead of tonight’s matchup between Parker and Wiggins, the first in an NBA regular season game, the question has been brought up. It’s time to compare, the young men who took the floor over 10 years ago to the young men who tonight will quite possibly begin the first chapter in their own rivalry.
For arguments sake, we’ll compare their first 12 games, as Andrew Wiggins has only played 12 games going into tonight’s match-up with the Milwaukee Bucks.
Andrew Wiggins Stats
Photo Credit – www.basketball-reference.com
LeBron James Stats
Photo Credit – www.basketball-reference.com
Carmelo Anthony Stats
Photo Credit – www.basketball-reference.com
Jabari Parker stats
Photo credit – www.basketball-reference.com
One thing is for sure, these young men of the 2014 draft are not off to as hot of a scoring start as the guys in the 2003 draft.
Through 12 games, LeBron James averaged 17.5 points per game, Carmelo Anthony averaged 17.3 points per game. On the flip side, Wiggins averages 12.5 PPG and Parker is at 11.8 PPG.
In the rookies of the 2014 class’s defense, they have a lot more options helping them out score then Carmelo and LeBron had.
The Bucks nowadays are lead by a potential all-star in Brandon Knight, a spark off the bench in O.J. Mayo and the “Greek Freak”, Giannis Antetokounmpo, also being able to score for the Bucks. Minnesota on the other hand early in the season had Ricky Rubio dictate how the ball moved, mostly to open shooter or a big man off the pick and roll. Thaddeus Young and Kevin Martin who are bonafied scorers when healthy and available for the team. The scoring is thin within these two teams.
The scoring load was on LeBron and Melo from the jump of their careers and they’ve put up great numbers since. LeBron’s only help was a sub-par Ricky Davis, “Big Z”, Zydrunas Ilgauskas and a young and lost Carlos Boozer. For Melo, he had an established crop of talent behind Andre Miller, Nene and Marcus Camby, but obviously Melo needed to score to help that team succeed.
The NBA may be in store for something great in Parker versus Wiggins, will it be as good as Carmelo vs LeBron? Well, only time will tell.
It’s very early, but it is interesting to look at it. The newest NBA rivalry will stay under the radar, for now. At least until one of these guys has a breakout game, maybe makes a great play, makes an all-star team or just leaves their teams because they’re unhappy with the progress that the team is going, just to end up on a worse team in the long run. But who knows, anything can happen.
