Basketball Recruiting
Dennis Smith Jr.: Top Commit in Decades
So, just how big of a deal is Dennis Smith Jr.’s commitment to NC State?
He is a 5-star recruit, and NC State has had 10 other 5-star players commit to play for them over the past 15 recruiting classes (that’s as far back as the Scout and Rivals databases go).
Smith is a Top-10 recruit, and only one of the Wolfpack’s 5-star recruits of the past 15 years was a Top-10 recruit, and his name was J.J. Hickson. Hickson was the #10 ranked player in the 2007.
DSJ is a Top-5 recruit, and you have to go back to the pre-Rivals and pre-Scout days to find the last NC State Top-5 commit. In 2001, Julius Hodge committed to run with the Wolfpack, and he was the #5 ranked player according to ESPN. In 1999, Bob Gibbons ranked Damien Wilkins as the #1 overall player in the class, but because Bob was so off with his prediction, I’d prefer to go with the #7 ranking he received from another recruiting service. Rodney Monroe and Chris Corchiani were both McDonald’s All-Americans in 1987, but I don’t think they were Top-5 recruits.
You have to go all the way back to NC State’s 1984 recruiting class to find a recruit that was a higher ranked commit than Dennis Smith Jr. Chris Washburn was one of the Top 3 players in the 1984 recruiting class, alongside Danny Manning and John Williams.
So how big of a deal is Dennis Smith Jr.’s commitment to NC State? He’s the biggest Wolfpack commitment in over 30 years.
5-star NC State Commitments of the past 15 years
- Dennis Smith Jr. – 4 (E) / 7 (247)
- J.J. Hickson – 10 (R)/ 11 (247)/ 14 (E)
- C.J. Leslie – 11 (14)
- Rodney Purvis – 18 (12)
- Cedric Simmons – 24 (17)
- T.J. Warren – 27 (17)
- Ryan Harrow – 25 (19)
- Brandon Costner – 20 (30)
- Cat Barber – 21 (27)
- Courtney Fells – 30 (24)
- Lorenzo Brown – 28 (37)