Rutgers men’s basketball made expected history Wednesday night when Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey — both freshmen guards on the Scarlet Knights’ 2024-25 team — were selected in the top five of the NBA Draft. Harper was taken second overall by San Antomio, while Bailey went to the Utah Jazz three picks later.
Fans looking to celebrate the accomplishment on social media Wednesday night were greeted with hundreds of variations of the same general sentiment:
How in the hell did Rutgers have two top five draft picks and not even make the NCAA Tournament?
The Scarlet Knights made the type of dual history that can make a diehard fan wonder what they’re doing with their life.
On one hand, this was one of, if not the most, consequential nights in the history of the Rutgers basketball brand.
Entering Wednesday night, RU had produced a grand total of four first round NBA Draft picks, and had never had a player taken in the top five. The program had never had multiple players taken in the first round of the same draft, and hadn’t had multiple players taken in the same draft, period, since 1985. The last time a Scarlet Knight had heard his name called in the first round before Wednesday had been 2006, when Quincy Douby was selected 19th overall.
On the other hand, any celebration of this fact was accompanied by some sort of interjection about how Rutgers made a different kind of history on Wednesday night: The 2024-25 Scarlet Knights became the first college basketball team in history to have two players selected in the top five of the NBA Draft and not play in the NCAA Tournament.
Not only did Steve Pikiell’s team not make the Big Dance, they didn’t really come close. Rutgers won just eight games in Big Ten play and finished with an overall record (15-17) that was two games below .500. They lost non-conference games to Kennesaw State and Princetown, and were one-and-done in the Big Ten Tournament.
It’s not difficult to understand how diehard Scarlet Knight fans might be more than a little bit conflicted in this moment.
While everyone else in the country is asking “how did this happen?” the more important question for these folks is “where do we go from here?”
The track record for head coaches who had subpar seasons with high-level NBA talent isn’t exactly stellar.
Perhaps most famously, there was the 2015-16 LSU Tiger team with Ben Simmons and Antonio Blakeney that had drawn preseason proclamations of a Final Four run. A year after that team won just 19 games and turned down an NIT bid, the Tigers bottomed out and went 2-16 in SEC play and 10-21 overall in a season that included a 15-game losing streak. Head coach Johnny Jones was fired.
One season after that, Washington head coach Lorenzo Romar went all in on superstar freshman Markelle Fultz, who would be the No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. The 2016-17 Huskies opened their season with an upset loss to Yale, and never really got back on track. They went just 9-22 overall, and ended the season on a 13-game losing streak. Romar was fired after 15 years as the head coach at Washington.
In 2012-13, UCLA head coach Ben Howland looked to regain his mojo by bringing in a star-studded freshman class headlined by Shabazz Muhammad, Kyle Anderson and Jordan Adams. The team began the season ranked No. 13 in the country. It ended it with a first round NCAA Tournament loss to Minnesota in a 6 vs. 11 matchup. Howland, who had been to three consecutive Final Fours from 2006-08, was fired at the end of the season.
Avoiding becoming the next name on this list is the task at hand for Pikiell, who has taken the Scarlet Knights to the NCAA Tournament twice over his nine seasons in Piscataway. In 2021, Pikiell led RU to its first March Madness victory since 1983. A year later, it took two overtimes for Notre Dame to bounce the Scarlet Knights out of the tournament’s First Four round.
Now, after back-to-back losing seasons, that momentum is gone, and the way forward is, to put it mildly, uncertain.
Four of Rutgers’ five starters from last season are gone, and Pikiell didn’t exactly load up on talent from the transfer portal or high school level that are going to flirt with the level of play that fans saw from Harper and Bailey. Dylan Grant (5.9 ppg/3.4 rpg) showed promise as a freshman, and Tariq Francis averaged 19.1 ppg for a six-win NJIT squad, but it’s hard to foresee a situation where the pieces on this roster fit to a point where the Scarlet Knights are back to being a top half of the Big Ten caliber team.
When late summer arrives and the 2025-26 preseason projections start rolling in, it seems unlikely that anyone will have Rutgers pegged to finish any higher than, say, 14th or 15th in the Big Ten. It seems even less likely that anyone will name the Scarlet Knights as a likely NCAA Tournament team.
If the projections are accurate, then Pikiell could be the latest coach riding high on draft night and then months later finding himself asking the same question while looking for his next job: “Was it really worth it?”
