In the summer of 2019, Dayton’s Obi Toppin was coming off a big redshirt freshman year in which he started nearly half the team’s games, averaged a team-high 14.4 points per game and became the first rookie in two decades to earn First Team All-Atlantic 10 honors. Then something spectacular happened: the highest-flying player in the sport just kept ascending.
Toppin’s stock soared to new highs later that summer, where he drew positive reviews during six workouts with NBA teams during the draft process, busted out in front of NBA decision-makers at the Nike Skills Academy and starred while sharing the court with the likes of Carmelo Anthony and CJ McCollum in pick-up hoops in NYC. An already-promising redshirt sophomore season reached hype of epic proportions, and as it turns out, it was warranted. The following season, he went on to win Player of the Year while leading Dayton to a magical 29-2 season that was cut short because of the Covid-19 pandemic. (A SportsLine simulation, for the record, dubbed Dayton the champs that year. I think that’s enough to hang a banner somewhere.)
So today we pay tribute to Toppin’s gargantuan 2019 summer leap with a new post featuring my “Obi Toppin All-Stars.” The players below follow a similar path as Toppin — they each had big summers either at various events or behind the scenes have caused whispers of an imminent breakout. They also project as potential soon-to-be stars of the sport in 2023-24.
The list could go on and on and on and on and …. Well, you get it. I hear optimism in the offseason on the No. 4 option for a middle-of-the-pack Big 12 team just as much I hear on the No. 1 option for a top-five team. It can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise. But for this exercise I’ve limited my submission to just five players. To keep the timeline as close to Toppin as possible, I tried including only returning players. But one freshman snuck…
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