However many hours from now, Cade Cunningham will become the No. 1 pick in the draft. He’s ridden the wave of hype rail to rail, dominating with his mentality as much as his skills, more an outlier in the figurative, conceptual sense than the physical one, and certainly not in the statistical realm. It’s rare a prospect like Cunningham comes along, and even rarer to see one so comfortably ordained as the next big thing. Slap whichever adjectives and buzzwords onto him you choose; NBA teams have tried them on for size.
Cunningham has been pegged as the top player in his class for long enough now that it sometimes gets taken for granted.