Both of these conference finals matchups are going to be billed as a triumph for the small college basketball program.
And for good reason. A quick list of where the best remaining superstars went to school:
Damian Lillard -- Weber State
CJ McCollum -- Lehigh
Steph Curry -- Davidson
Kawhi Leonard -- San Diego State
Klay Thompson -- Washington State
Kevin Durant -- Texas
Giannis -- Some YMCA in Greece?
Of those schools, only two -- Texas and Washington State -- are power six programs (members of the PAC-12, ACC, Big East, Big 10, Big 12 or SEC) and neither are traditional basketball powers.
Those first four schools have very little or zero historical NCAA relevance.
(If you don’t know much about Lehigh, it plays in the same conference as Boston University and Holy Cross.)
Here’s a graph of how many NBA players each of those schools has produced, plus Duke for scale.
Duke’s got 81 -- including Steph’s brother Seth; Texas has 33; WSU has 17; SDSU has 10; Weber State has 10; Davidson has six, and Lehigh has McCollum, and that’s it.
Feeling extra punchy? Relive McCollum’s Lehigh upsetting Duke in the NCAA Tournament in 2012 for its first-ever tourney win.
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