4. Sustained production all season long
Donte DiVincenzo is viewed by many as a one-hit wonder, a kid who played the best game of his career on national television and is being drafted solely on that game performance. They will point to a player like Mitch McGary as a recent example of drafting a player based purely on his Final Four performance.
The problem with that line of thought is that DiVincenzo is more Kemba Walker than Mitch McGary. That’s not saying DiVincenzo will be an All-Star one day — not impossible, but unlikely — but rather that DiVincenzo did not simply explode during the tournament. He was a high-level contributor to Villanova throughout the entire season.
In just the second game of the season, DiVincenzo played 29 minutes and scored 20 points on 6-of-8 shooting from the field. He dropped 25 on St. John’s, 21 on Xavier and a then-career-high 30 on Butler. He dropped double-digits in 28 of the 40 games he played this season.
Expecting DiVincenzo to score 30 points every game and hit 10-of-15 shots is of course an impossible expectation. Yet what the sophomore did in the tournament was parlay his strong production all season long into a timely and ferocious hot streak that, in large part, helped seal the title for the Villanova Wildcats. Milwaukee can be confident in its selection based on his college career, not solely his tournament run.