Anthony Davis will always be remembered as the centerpiece for one of the most talented college basketball teams ever.
Davis' 2011-12 Kentucky Wildcats went 38-2, won the national championship and produced four first-round draft picks.
And while that team has a lore of its own, in a recent interview Davis said he and some Chicago buddies were initially considering a plan that would have shaken up college basketball in its own right.
The idea, as Davis told ESPN's Bill Simmons during an interview at the All-Star Game festivities in New Orleans, was for several of the top Chicago recruits to commit to DePaul. That included Davis (ranked by Rivals as the No. 2 recruit in his class), Wayne Blackshear (No. 36, committed to Louisville), Tracy Abrams (No. 58, committed to Illinois) and Mike Shaw (No. 59, committed to Illinois).
But, Davis says, one guy in the group was on the fence and committed elsewhere. After that the players disbanded.
If they had stayed together, this would have been an enormous coup for DePaul and one of the most interesting recruiting stories since the Fab Five joined forces at Michigan. As Simmons points out in the interview, Chicago produces some of the country's finest basketball talent but doesn't have a truly dominant college. Davis and his buddies seemed intent on changing that.
Furthermore, if Davis hadn't gone to Kentucky that team surely wouldn't have been as dominant as it was. But by combining forces with Blackshear, who won a national championship at Louisville last year, as well as Abrams and Shaw, Davis would have had a pretty strong group at DePaul. Add in Cleveland Melvin, the DePaul forward who won Big East Freshman of the Year in 2011 and would've been a sophomore when Davis was a freshman, and that's a formidable team.
It also would've significantly boosted DePaul's national reputation. While the Blue Demons have a strong basketball history, they haven't been to the NCAA tournament since 2004 and haven't had an NBA draft pick since Wilson Chandler in 2007.
Davis discusses the plan at around the 16:30 mark of this interview:
