Photo: Ben Wilson (left) was tragically shot in Chicago near Simeon High School on November, 20, 1984 and was pulled off life support the next morning. He was considered the best player in the 1985 class. Derrick Rose, a member of the famed 2007 class, honored Wilson by wearing No. 25 at Simeon and he joins Wilson on the list of the HOOP SCOOP’s Ranking of the Top 100 High School Players Since 1984.
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It’s ironic Ben Wilson was gunned down 40 years ago today on November 20, 1984 in Chicago, because we wanted to honor him and also publish our list of the 100 best players we’ve seen in a high school or grassroots setting over the course of the past 40 years. The 1983-84 class of high school players is the first one we got to look at extensively on a national basis throughout the year and the first one we put out national player rankings for. You can check out our final rankings for the 1984 class and each subsequent season by clicking on the “Player Rankings” tab at the top of our website’s navigation bar or by CLICKING HERE.
We’ve been publishing player rankings for each class since and because it’s been 40 years and counting that we’ve closely followed the national high school and grassroots scene, we thought today would be a great time to publish our exclusive list of the Top 100 players we’ve seen since the 1983-84 season. We annually publish All-American teams that you can find HERE and this is basically a summary of pouring over the best players from each class. No two classes are exactly the same; some classes are terrific and some not very good at all. Accurately explaining the differences between each class is one area of the business where the major national recruiting networks fail at miserably.
This exercise Ranking the Top 100 High School Players in the HOOP SCOOP ERA (Since 1984) is an extension of the list HOOP SCOOP Editor Emeritus Clark Francis first published in March of 2005, the HOOP SCOOP’s Ranking of the Top 60 High School Players Since 1984, a list of the players he personally saw play up until that time. In the 20 seasons since then, we’ve evaluated plenty more players, but it also offered us more perspective of the players myself and Clark saw prior to 2005. The greatest remain just that, but time also arms us with more knowledge and perspective of what we’ve seen.
Francis will also offer a break down of how he and I formed the list of 100 great players in another article that we’ll publish in the coming days for our subscribers.
This Ranking the Top 100 High School Players in the HOOP SCOOP ERA (Since 1984) not only gave us an opportunity to add 40 great players, but also gave us an opportunity to honor Wilson, who was shot early in his senior year just outside Simeon High School and passed away the next day on November 21, 1984 after his mother asked doctors to remove her son off life support. Wilson is a symbol of the tragedy of gun fire in America’s inner-cities that has persisted over the past 40 years, snuffing out countless lives, and also a symbol of the importance of the grassroots basketball scene.
Francis attended the Athletes For Better Education (AFBE) Camp in Princeton, New Jersey in the summer of 1983. This is important, because Wilson is not only a symbol of tragedy but also a symbol of the terrific grassroots event that emerged when the AFBE Camp became the Nike ABCD (Academic Betterment and Career Development) All-American Camp the next summer when Wilson attended and Francis saw him for the first time. Scouts and college coaches were able to evaluate the nation’s best players in a single location for four or five days and after Wilson’s death, the importance of these camps were ten-fold because Camp Director Sonny Vaccaro was able to provide evidence in a civil disposition that being the best player at camp, as Wilson was, or being ranked No. 1 in the country as a high school basketball player, had tremendous monetary value. This notion of value, of course, is quite important in the current Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) era of NCAA and high school basketball where players are able to profit off that value.
The nation’s top players always had that value, going back to prospects prior to 1984, such as Ralph Sampson in 1979, Daryl Dawkins in 1975 and Moses Malone in 1974. Wilson’s tragedy, however, proved it on a grander scale to the country and ushered in a new era of grassroots basketball that many casual fans around the country began to follow. The NCAA also instituted the early signing period in 1982-83 so high school seniors could sign in November and take the recruiting pressure off during their senior year. That made the summer grassroots scene make it or break it time for college recruiting and made what happened prior to the senior season much more important.
Francis saw national level players prior to 1984 in settings such as the Kentucky Derby Festival Classic, but this list of 100 players is exclusive to players during the era when he was the editor and publisher of the HOOP SCOOP as a national publication before handing over the reigns to yours truly during COVID-19 in 2020.
The 6-foot-8 Wilson wasn’t on the initial list in March 2005 and neither was another player who didn’t finish high school who was supposed to graduate in 1987. That player is 6-foot-8 guard Lloyd Daniels, who Francis saw as a rising junior during two different sessions of the Five-Star Basketball Camp in 1985. “Swea Pea” dropped out of school after his 1985-86 junior season at Andrew Jackson (Queens, N.Y.)
Wilson deserves to be listed on the Ranking the Top 100 High School Players in the HOOP SCOOP ERA (Since 1984) and based on how good he was in high school, it would be a joke if Daniels wasn’t also included. Make sure to check out the exclusive list of the All-Time HOOP SCOOP All-American Team of the past 40 years, which includes the first 25 players numbered.
Another player who we included that wasn’t on the Top 60 list in 2005 because he didn’t plays his senior season was 6-foot-5 wing Schea Cotton of St. John Bosco (Bellflower, Calif.). He was the national freshman of the year in 1993-94 for a nationally-ranked Mater Dei (Santa Ana, Calif.) team and the only sophomore ever to be named Cal-Hi Sports D1 State Player of the Year, but injuries marred his final two high school seasons at Bosco. If you never saw him play as an underclassman, trust us when we tell you he was dominant in matchups against some guys who made our list and is still one of the best young players we’ve ever seen. Cotton’s selection drives home two of the main points in compiling this list. One, it’s based on how good the players were when they came out of high school and not how they ended up, and two, there is no guarantee of pro success for anyone.
That’s why when you check out the Ranking the Top 100 High School Players in the HOOP SCOOP ERA (Since 1984) you’ll see names such as 6-foot-5 Felipe Lopez of now defunct Rice (New York) from the Class of 1994 and 6-foot-4 Randy Livingston of Newman (New Orleans, La.) from the Class of 1993 pretty high on the list of 100.
We evaluated those two and many others at either the Nike All-American Camp or the ABCD Camp between 1984 and 2006, among other events. After a split with Nike, Vaccaro took his ABCD Camp brand with him and it was sponsored by Converse for a year (1992), Adidas for 10 years (1994-2003) and by Reebok its final three years (2004-2006). Nike continued to run its All-American Camp and the two events ran concurrently through the summer of 2006. There was fierce competition to secure the top 120 players for each camp and the play at these events was usually quite competitive.
The summer of 2006 also is of key importance to our list. One, the 2007 class goes down as one of the best in the HOOP SCOOP era, along with the 1988 class, and 2006 is what we consider “the last great summer” in terms of the top players showing the competitive fire to want to play and compete against each other that we regularly saw in the 1980s and 1990s. The 2007 class included names such as 6-foot-10 Kevin Love of Lake Oswego (Ore.) and 6-foot-3 Derrick Rose, who honored Wilson by wearing No. 25 during his time at Simeon and formed one of the best backcourts we’ve ever seen on one travel team when he teamed up with 6-foot-3 Eric Gordon of North Central (Indianapolis, Ind.) on Meanstreets Express.
Since then, events have been more fragmented and travel teams are more exclusive to the shoe circuits that sponsor them such as the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League (EYBL). Similar to the players of 40 years ago, the current high school players emulate pros and they seem to play hard when they want. There are great players, no doubt, and some more skilled than ever, but seeing two top-ranked players go at it seems rarer. Many players are also enamored with what the game can do for them, rather than being in love with the game, and since the social media era that began around 2008 that notion is heightened. There are social media stars whose immense popularity has nothing to do with their skill as basketball players or pro potential.
We didn’t include anyone from the 2024 class or current high school players, but if we did, 6-foot-8 Cooper Flagg of Montverde Academy (Montverde, Fla.), who is now a freshman at Duke University, would definitely make the list of 100. Some of the players who made the initial list of 60 didn’t make the 100 cut and Flagg would have caused another talent player to drop out. Francis may explain it more in his forthcoming breakdown, but Flagg might be even as high as the 15-25 range for him. That is pretty high praise, as I may have pushed to have him slightly lower. The 2024 Mr. Basketball USA (national player of the year) had the accolades in high school and is that talented, regardless.
That brings us to the current crop of players, which include Duke-bound 6-foot-9 Cameron Boozer of Columbus (Miami, Fla.), who was the 2023 Mr. Basketball USA, the first tenth-grader ever to earn national player of the year honors in high school basketball. Not even all-time greats such as Malone (the best player to ever attend a Five-Star Basketball Camp), Lew Alcindor of Power Memorial (New York) in the 1960s or LeBron James of St. Vincent-St. Mary (Akron, Ohio) over 20 years ago was honored as the best high school basketball player in the country as a tenth-grader. Just as Francis feels about Cooper Flagg, John Stovall, a talent scout for Nike, feels Flagg and Boozer would be mentioned in the same breath as many of the players on this list coming out of high school.
On Tuesday night Nov. 19, Columbus, the preseason No. 1 team in the FAB 50 National Team Rankings, lost its season opener against No. 8 Prolific Prep (Napa, Calif.), in Baca Raton, Fla. Six-foot-5 Kansas-bound wing Darryn Peterson went off with 33 points, eight rebounds, four assists, two steals and three blocks, as Prolific Prep overcame an early 19-7 deficit to record a 66-54 victory.
The whispers are getting louder that Peterson, a well-built specimen with skill and patience, is every bit as good as Boozer or A.J. Dybansta of Utah Prep (Hurricane, Utah), a native of Brockton, Mass. who most feel is now the consensus No. 1 prospect in the 2025 class ahead of Boozer. There is still plenty of games left in the 2024-25 high school season to find out what the final pecking order of the class will ultimately look like.
Who knows, maybe all three of the talented players at the top of the 2025 class will join Flagg on our next All-Time HOOP SCOOP All-American Team that we do when the HOOP SCOOP turns 50 in 2034. By then, the list will probably grow to 150, but we’ll also be armed with 10 more years of data and perspective.
Maybe future classes will bring a re-birth of the competitive fire we saw in previous decades or perhaps the NBA and NIL money will get so big that players like Cooper will be an anomaly and we’ll have to add players from older classes to fill out the list.
We won’t know until it happens.
It’s been 40 years since Wilson tragically passed and we’ve seen a lot of great players come and go. We hope to be around a long time to give you the scoop on just how good players on the horizon are and how they compare to what we’ve seen the past 40 years.
Ronnie Flores is the Publisher of hoopscooponline.com. He can be reached at ronlocc1977@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter: @RonMFlores
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