Klay Thompson didn’t just show up in the Bay and start putting up outrageous numbers for the Golden State Warriors. There’s a royal NBA lineage there, as well as a sea of buckets in high school and college.

Check out this mixtape of Thompson’s high school highlights back at Santa Margarita High School (Calif.):

Watch this clip from last week of Class of 2014 6-8 Kevon Looney (Milwaukee Hamilton High School) putting his defender on a poster on the break. Beastly:

Looney has offers from Duke, Cincinnati, Florida, Georgetown, Kansas, Louisville, and more.

For those of us who follow the recruiting process, rankings aren’t always an accurate data point when measuring the likelihood of immediate success at the collegiate level. Sometimes, the biggest factor is player retention. Which freshman will be given an opportunity? Sometimes the biggest factor is “fit”. How does this new crop of talented freshman adapt to playing for a new coach in a new system? Sometimes it’s maturity. How do these first year players handle being away from home for the first time? How do they handle balancing their training and school work?

There are many factors which contribute to the immediate success of a particular freshmen class. It’s the reason rankings are more feel than they are science. Most of the 2013 class is now committed and the early entry date to declare for the NBA Draft is behind us. Armed with more information we look at 15 players ready to make an instant impact on College Basketball in the fall.

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15. JOEL EMBIID, Kansas (7-0, C)
There is no doubt Joel Embiid has the tools to one day be a lottery pick. The question is how quickly will he transform from prospect to player? Lately, there’s been enough evidence to suggest it’s going to happen faster than many expected. It feels like the calm before the storm. Embiid has the talent and opportunity to emerge as a one-and-done star for Kansas. Jeff Withey is gone and a vacancy in the middle is ripe for the picking. Embiid can protect the rim, rebound his area, and make shots out to 10 feet. As his feel for the game improves, the sky is the limit for the international big man. His freshman year might be similar to what we saw with Andre Drummond at Uconn. Early in the season he might even look like he’s running wind sprints while there is a high level basketball game going on around him. But eventually the light is going to come on. When it does, he’s going to shoot up this board.

With a name like Seventh Woods, you can bet this kid will be subjected to a lot of “…and on the seventh day, God created…” jokes down the line. That’s what happens when you’re 14 years old and coming down smashing on kids like you’re Russell Westbrook. The amazing thing is that most dominant 14-year-olds are great because they’ve physically matured quicker (bigger and stronger) than everyone else. Woods is only 6-1, already plays like someone who’s comfortable on the perimeter, and even has a skillset outside of his supernatural athleticism. It’ll be interesting to see where he is come 2016, but for now, do what we did. Watch this Hoopmixtape video and bash the basketball Gods for not giving you those hops at 14.

Who’s the best 14-year-old basketball player you’ve ever seen?

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At one point early in the first half of Saturday night’s Jordan Brand Classic, the crowd at Barclays Center suddenly and incongruously erupted into a thunderous ovation during a dead ball. Only one person’s arrival could have elicited such a reaction.

Nope, not him. It was Drake.

Depending on what you think of Drake and his music — for me, it’s a guilty pleasure — some might consider the fact that he received arguably the biggest ovation of an event that also had Michael Jordan in attendance to be a sign of an oncoming apocalypse. Quite to the contrary: What it demonstrates is that the Jordan Brand, plain and simple, gets it. Playing in front of M.J. is a big part of the experience, for sure, but there’s no avoiding that Drake also holds quite a bit of cache for the new generation of ballplayers.

In that sense, on the one side, the Jordan Classic falls right in line with the McDonald’s Game and others of its kind in providing the best aspect of high-level prep basketball: the opportunity to watch emerging players on the verge of potentially becoming household names, thus being able to say you had an advance look at the brilliant future of the sport.

But the Jordan Game has gone the extra mile to present a unique experience — for spectators, sure, but especially for the prep players involved. The game was the culmination of a whirlwind weekend in New York that included a tour of legendary Gleason’s Boxing Gym, a visit to the Sports Illustrated offices and a private movie screening with Spike Lee. Jumpman-obsessed players get a grip of fresh gear and sneakers to take home. And they get to experience all of it as a group of peers preparing to make a communal and individual jump to the next level.

“I also played in the McDonald’s All-American Game, but I really like this one,” Indiana-bound forward Noah Vonleh said. “We get a lot more gear; Jordan takes care of us. And we’re playing against a lot of the other top players in the country, so it’s good to get in like a family type environment with them. I’m going to see a lot of these guys for years to come, so it’s great to build relationships with them.”

“Probably,” mused future Kentucky point guard Andrew Harrison, “the Drake concert was the best part.”

Drake aside, the fanfare surrounding the game is an illustration of how far prep basketball has come from the proverbial dusty high school gym. New York sports icons Carmelo Anthony, Amar’e Stoudemire and CC Sabathia sat courtside, as did Spike Lee and rappers Joe Budden and Fabolous. (Sabathia, for his part, was particularly excited to see future Blue Devil Jabari Parker, whom he described as “unbelievable.”)

Upstaging them all was Jordan himself, who took in the action from a skybox while players and fans alike peered up at him as if at Vatican City. Of all the things that make the Jordan Classic unique, foremost is the literal presence of the greatest player ever, going right along with his virtual ubiquity, his logo connoting excellence literally everywhere you looked in the Barclays Center.

In general, the freewheeling style of play allows players the latitude to showcase what they’re individually best at. With the beat from “No Church in the Wild” rumbling in the background, future Kentucky front line Julius Randle and Dakari Johnson muscled to the hoop, while Dime favorite Chris Walker pogo-ed over everyone to dunk home the East team’s first four points. Cerebral players Parker and Nigel Williams-Goss took proper advantage of their savvy to excel within the flow of the game. And while Canadian star and Drake favorite Andrew Wiggins didn’t quite take over, per se, he showed multiple flashes of having a higher gear than anyone else.

Check out the top plays from Day 1 practice at the Jordan Brand Classic at Basketball City in New York, featuring Andrew Wiggins, the Harrison Twins, Aaron Gordon, Wayne Selden, Jabari Parker, Marcus Lee: