UGA basketball forward Rayshaun Hammonds recently announced his intent to stay in the 2020 NBA Draft, leaving Georgia with one year remaining.
UGA basketball fans can’t have anything nice.
The 2020-21 season looked promising. Big man Rayshaun Hammonds as the team leader with a talented, growing and maturing crop of players around him. This was going to be the team that turned the program around and turned UGA basketball into a perennial NCAA Tournament team.
Now, the upcoming season looks like another rebuilding year as Hammonds has decided to enter the 2020 NBA Draft after three seasons in Athens. Hammonds scored 974 points and pulled 571 rebounds as a Bulldog. He started 85 of the 93 games he appeared in and averaged 25.5 minutes per game. Losing Hammonds is a big deal.
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But this is a situation UGA basketball fans are all too familiar with. Great players leaving the program early instead of spending their last season as the leader of a star-studded UGA basketball team.
The previous instance is still a fresh wound on the program; Nicolas Claxton leaving after his fantastic sophomore season. Claxton, at 6-11 and 220 lbs., and scoring in double figures almost every night was sorely missed this past season. A big three of Claxton, Hammonds and Anthony Edwards would have lit the SEC on fire. Instead, the Bulldogs finished below .500 again.
Previous head coach Mark Fox dealt with players leaving behind solid teams twice in his tenure. First, when both Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie left after leading Georgia to the NCAA Tournament in 2011. Their departure and Jeremy Price’s graduation depleted the 2011-12 team’s roster. Had Thompkins and Leslie stayed, they would have been joined by Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Without the leadership Thompkins and Leslie could have provided, Georgia fell to 15-17.
Pope later left behind another talented UGA basketball when he chose the NBA after his sophomore season. Georgia only won 30 games (and lost 34) with Pope. The Bulldogs improved to 20-14 the season after Pope left, so there’s no telling how good the 2013-14 Bulldogs could have been.
At least the NBA Draft decision paid off for Pope. He is a seven-year NBA veteran with 391 career starts and 9,196 points to his credit. Thompkins didn’t even spend two hours on an NBA court and Leslie played even less. You can’t be too upset about Pope leaving, but Thompkins and Leslie robbed themselves of valuable experience and robbed the UGA basketball program of a potential dream season.
Perhaps players leaving early is a fate destined to doom every potentially great UGA basketball team. After all, the program’s brightest moment came a year after its brightest star decided to forego his senior year to play in the NBA. Had Dominique Wilkins stayed one more year, Georgia likely wins the 1983 National Championship, or at the very least plays in the championship game.