Philadelphia 76ers: Cole Anthony is the ultimate boom-or-bust prospect

Is Cole Anthony’s ceiling high enough to entice the Philadelphia 76ers?

There are a lot of prospects in the 2020 NBA Draft that talent evaluators would describe as having a high-floor.

From Tyrese Haliburton to James Wiseman, Obi Toppin, and even Villanova’s own Saddiq Bey, while this particular draft isn’t all that deep in the way of star power, it may feature plenty of players who could hang around in starting lineups for the next decade-plus.

Cole Antony is not one of those high-floor players.

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Measuring in at 6-foot-3, 190 pounds, Anthony is a shoot-first, athleticism-based point guard coming off an underwhelming half-season with the UNC Tarheels and a midseason surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his right knee that feels just as likely to boom as he is to bust. He’s also a microwave scorer who at times looks like a legitimate All-Star with an ability to take over an offense and run rickshaw through an Eastern Conference playoff campaign.

It’s entirely possible Antony could come back healthy one year(ish) removed from his knee surgery, take a step forward as a defender, and perfectly assimilate into a new-look Philadelphia 76ers offense a la Bryan Colangelo’s intentions when selected Markelle Fultz first overall to form a homegrown Big 3 alongside Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons.

That’s the problem with drafting Anthony in the first round of the 2020 NBA Draft – outside of whispers of him being a bad teammate. If a player like Bey doesn’t further develop into a legitimate star, he does enough things well to justify a long career Wesley Matthews-style. If Anthony doesn’t develop into a legit starter, or even a Lou Williams-esque sixth man coming off the bench, he’ll rapidly flame out of the league because no one wants a 12th man with a high usage rate that isn’t all that keen on getting his teammates involved.

While Anthony’s 18.5 points per game as a rookie is admittedly impressive, he’s the type of player who will score 30 points one week and nine points the next. The same goes for his shooting, as over his 22 game tenure at Chapel Hill, Antony took 141 3 points versus 49 makes, with as many 11 shot games as he had zero make games (three). For every massive game he had against a team like Virginia Tech, Oregon, or Notre Dame, he’d come up short against a team like Michigan, Duke (twice), and Notre Dame, again.

Anthony averaged 20.5 points per game in wins versus only 16.8 points in losses, with the freshman averaging 7.5 points in UNC’s two-game stint in the Conference Tournament – take with that what you will.

2019-20’s UNC team was bad. Though Anthony did return to court for 15 games in 2020 after his surgery, it’s clear he never got perfectly on the same page as his teammates and suffered through as many struggles as he experienced triumph, as his 3.5 turnovers would suggest. With a full, normal season under his belt, maybe Anthony would be the certified lottery pick many projected when he was a McDonald’s All-American, but as things presently stand, he brings more questions than answers in a year filled with players who do anything but.

If you want the anti-Cole Anthony, look no further than TCU’s Desmond Bane, a guard The Ringers’ Kevin O’Connor called a player ‘tailor-made for Daryl Morey‘. Sure, he doesn’t have Anthony’s explosive athleticism, but he shoots 3s at a great clip, plays good defense, and could perfectly fill a Malcolm Brogdon-esque role paired up with a point forward like Simmons.

Anthony, by contrast, looks a whole lot more like college Markelle Fultz than a guard willing to perch on the wings and wait for a wide-open 3.

Is that what the Philadelphia 76ers want? That, my friends, is the two-year, $5.3 million question.

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Typically speaking, there aren’t a whole lot of ‘star players’ who hear their names called in the 20s of the NBA Draft. If you fall out of the lottery, it’s usually because you either lack 1. experience, 2. athleticism, or 3. a combination of both. While some will argue ad nauseam over how high Cole Anthony’s ceiling is or why his single season at UNC went so poorly, at his best, he clearly has the top-tier potential that puts many a player in his draft range to shame. Who knows, maybe Doc Rivers, a teammate of his father, Greg Anthony, is the perfect guy to get the most out of Anthony without the pressure of a single season under the microscope. If that’s the case, maybe the Philadelphia 76ers are right to have invested so much time on the 20-year-old heading into the draft.