Final Four participants Willie Cauley-Stein, Frank Kaminsky and Jahlil Okafor were among the five finalists announced for the men’s Wooden Award, presented to college basketball’s top player.
Cauley-Stein, a 7-foot junior forward from undefeated Kentucky, is averaging 9.1 points and 6.5 rebounds per game. Kaminsky, Wisconsin’s 7-foot senior forward on a team that does not list a center on its roster, is averaging a team-high 18.7 points and 8.0 rebounds.
Kentucky and Wisconsin will play in a Final Four game Saturday, facing the winner of the Duke-Michigan State game.
Okafor, a 6-foot-11-inch freshman center, leads Duke with 17.5 points and 8.7 rebounds per game.
The other two finalists are Notre Dame senior Jerian Grant and Ohio State freshman D’Angelo Russell, both 6-foot-5-inch guards.
Grant averaged a team-high 16.5 points and 6.7 assists, helping the Fighting Irish reach the Midwest Regional final, where they lost to Kentucky, 68-66.
Russell averaged a team-high 19.3 points per game for the Buckeyes, who lost in a West Region round of 32 game to Arizona.
Voting by nearly 1,000 national college basketball media members and previous Wooden Award winners ended March 23, a day after the completion of the round of 32 games.
As insisted upon by the late legendary UCLA coach John Wooden at the award’s creation in 1976, all players under consideration for the award must have proven to their universities that they are making progress toward graduation and are maintaining at least a cumulative 2.0 grade point average.
The Wooden Award will be presented April 10 at Club Nokia in a ceremony to be televised by ESPN.
—City News Service