Andrew Wiggins Shows That Talent Doesn’t Top Circumstance

There has never been a #1 NBA Draft pick like Andrew Wiggins. Right from the start, his career was a weird one: Just two months after being selected by the Cleveland Cavaliers, before his rookie season had started, he was sent to Minnesota as part of a trade essentially forced on the Cavs by LeBron James. In order to return to Cleveland, James wanted to be paired with Kevin Love, and Wiggins was the price they had to pay.

This was pretty unprecedented—#1 picks are almost never traded in the NBA, and the few instances where they have been (Chris Webber, Brad Daugherty, Joe Barry Carroll) have all been teams trading up before or during the draft to select a specific player. To my knowledge, there’s no other instance in NBA history of a team drafting a player with the intent to play him, and then trading him before he ever suits up.

Which makes sense, after all: #1 picks are, usually, very good! You don’t trade very good players for no reason. In the modern era—starting in 1966, when the NBA Draft was retooled to get rid of territorial rights and other quirks—there have been 56 players who have been drafted first overall. Sixteen of those 56 are already in the Hall of Fame, and at least two more (LeBron James and Dwight Howard) will be as soon as they are eligible.

Of the remaining 38, almost all had great careers, and typically they became impact players right away. Eighteen #1 picks won Rookie of the Year. Most were All-Stars within five years (35 of 56, and I’ll bet Cade Cunningham, Anthony Edwards, and Deandre Ayton will make it too, before their time is up).

Only eight are clear busts*: LaRue Martin (1972), Kent Benson (1977), Pervis Ellison (1989), Michael Olowokandi (1998), Kwame Brown (2001), Greg Oden (2007), Anthony Bennett (2013), and Markelle Fultz (2017).** But even these busts are typically given extended time to work things out. Olowokandi hung around on the Clippers for five seasons. Brown spent four on the Wizards. Even Portland kept Greg Oden around for five years, even though he was only healthy for 82 games in that stretch.

*The term “bust” is a little anti-labor for my taste, but that is the parlance of our times.

** That’s perhaps a little unfair to Fultz, who is still young, but like the other seven names on this list, he was off the team that drafted him within five years, having never contributed much of anything.

So it’s pretty rare for a former #1 pick to become A Project. The teams that draft them don’t usually give up on them, and when they do it’s usually because they are such damaged goods that there’s not much left to salvage. The Lakers did try to reclaim Kwame Brown, and they got a few decent years out of him in the late 2000s, but his greatest contribution was getting traded for Pau Gasol. Joe Smith spent a whole career bouncing from team to team, but more as a role player and trade piece than a real attempt to rehabilitate him. Some have compared Wiggins’ performance with the Warriors to Mark Aguirre’s second act with the Bad Boys Era Detroit Pistons—but Aguirre had been a three-time All-Star with the Dallas Mavericks, and led them to multiple playoff runs before getting sent to Detroit. There just isn’t an obvious point of comparison for Wiggins.

It’s probably unfair to say that Wiggins was “a bust” for Minnesota—he won the Rookie of the Year in 2015, and he was good enough that the team felt compelled to give him a $148 million extension in 2017. But certainly there was a sense of squandered potential. In five-and-half years with the Timberwolves, Wiggins never made an All-NBA team or led the league in any statistical category. In his second year, he was paired with fellow-#1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns, who quickly surpassed him in production, leading to questions about whether Wiggins was the right secondary option for a team built around Towns. The one year Minnesota finished above .500 with the two of them was 2018, when they traded for Jimmy Butler and managed to get the 8-seed in the Western Conference before getting quickly dispatched by Houston. The next year Butler forced his way out, after allegedly embarrassing the Timberwolves in practice and calling out both Wiggins and Towns for not playing hard enough.

By the time Wiggins was traded to the Warriors in 2020, the general feeling was that it was a great deal for Minnesota, who were lucky to find a team to take Wiggins’ contract without giving up a draft pick:

Anyway, spoiler alert: The Golden State Warriors just won the NBA Finals, and Andrew Wiggins was probably their second-best player in the series. Obviously the main story of this Finals was Steph Curry’s amazing performance, winning his fourth ring, and finally earning Finals MVP honors. But nobody should overlook what Wiggins did, scoring more than any Warrior besides Curry, out-rebounding Draymond Green, and shutting down Jayson Tatum on defense. Even more, his two best games—Games 4 and 5, when he notched two double-doubles and 29 total rebounds—helped turn the series around. It was exactly the kind of elite, all-around play that people predicted for Wiggins when he was first drafted in 2014, but had never quite put together in Minnesota.

You don’t have to romanticize the Warriors’ mystique say that Wiggins clearly benefitted from the trade. Whether it was playing for Steve Kerr, or alongside Curry/Green/Klay Thompson, or just the relief of not having to carry a franchise, he finally came into his own, even before the playoffs: Wiggins was elected to his first All-Star game earlier this season.

It’s an illustration that for every player—and every worker—the circumstances you find yourself working in are as important as any natural ability you may possess. It’s true that #1 picks are generally so talented that they can succeed on almost any team, hence their remarkable track record. But the versions of “success” end up being determined, in large measure, by setting. Former #1 picks like Elton Brand, or Yao Ming, or Glenn Robinson all had successful careers by most reasonable measures, but they are still plagued by What Ifs regarding how their teams failed to build around them. Even the most talented #1 picks—the LeBrons and Magic Johnsons and Kareems—had their fates massively altered by which teams happened to have the #1 pick the year they were drafted.

The most obvious lesson of this is that, given the outsized importance of circumstances on a player’s career, players should have more say in these decisions. Drafts should be outlawed, and trades should really only take place with a player’s consent. But even if those measures were adopted, it’s a useful reminder of the role of chance in determining outcomes.

Just consider all the things that had to happen for Wiggins to end up on the Warriors that were outside of his or his team’s control: LeBron James had to return to Cleveland just weeks after the 2014 draft, and push for a Kevin Love deal. Then Minnesota had to win the lottery the following season and get Towns. Kevin Durant had to choose the Brooklyn Nets over his other suitors, sending Towns’ friend DeAngelo Russell to the Warriors. Then, after the Warriors traded Russell for Wiggins, they had to have the patience in Wiggins to resist trading him for someone else, like Pascal Siakam.

When looked at this way, it’s just a reminder that, no matter how talented a person is, their ability to control their own destiny pales in comparison to the role of time and chance. This doesn’t mean that outcomes are random, or that accomplishments shouldn’t be celebrated. But it ought to undermine the myth of individualism that undergirds so much of capitalist democracy. People are not entirely in control of their own fates—if even Andrew Wiggins needs the right situation, then so do we all. Once you realize that, class consciousness is not far off…