One of the nation’s top five basketball recruits picks Milwaukee over Duke
The pick is in for Patrick Baldwin Jr. — long ranked as one of the best basketball recruits in the country — and it’s an unconventional choice.
Baldwin will play his college ball for Milwaukee, picking the Horizon League program over an early scholarship offer from Duke and opportunities to play for other blue-blood programs.
The commitment to the Panthers was not unexpected. Baldwin’s father, Pat Baldwin, is the head coach of the Milwaukee program, and that team had emerged in recent months as the perceived favorite in his recruitment.
But this is an unprecedented choice in modern recruiting times.
Baldwin is currently listed as the No. 4 overall prospect in the 2021 class — according to the 247Sports composite rankings — and he appears to be a shoo-in to remain in the top five once those rankings are finalized this spring.
The Recruiting Services Consensus Index — a longer-tenured recruiting rankings system — dates back to 1998, and there’s no record of any top-five player ending up at a mid-major program in that span.
There are some recent examples of similar commitments.
Makur Maker — the No. 15 player in last year’s recruiting class — signed with Howard University, but that followed a recruitment in which many of the nation’s top programs backed away from the process with the expectation that Maker would go pro out of high school.
Charles Bassey — the No. 9 player in the 2018 class — signed with Western Kentucky, but the Hilltoppers have a long and storied college basketball tradition despite their “mid-major” classification. WKU has advanced to 23 NCAA Tournaments and has a Final Four on its resume.
Milwaukee, on the other hand, only moved to Division I full time in 1990 and has been to just one NCAA Tournament in the past 15 years. The program has just three NCAA Tourney victories in its history, with two of those coming when Bruce Pearl was coach in 2005 and the other coming the following season.
The recent results haven’t been great.
Pat Baldwin is 47-70 in four years in charge of the Milwaukee program, and he’s yet to have a winning record in any of those four seasons. Baldwin has also yet to have a winning record in the Horizon League, which has been a one-bid NCAA Tournament conference since Butler’s departure nearly a decade ago.
Of course, the Panthers have never had a player like Patrick Baldwin Jr.
The highly skilled, perimeter-based 6-foot-9 forward was previously ranked as the No. 1 player in the 2021 class and has retained his top-five status despite missing nearly all of his senior season with an ankle injury.
Baldwin averaged 24.2 points, 11.0 rebounds and 4.2 assists per game the season before that, earning first-team junior All-America honors from MaxPreps.com.
Kentucky and North Carolina both extended scholarship offers before Baldwin’s junior season, but it was Duke that made the first big splash in his recruitment. Coach Mike Krzyzewski issued Baldwin a scholarship offer just a couple of months after he wrapped up his freshman year of high school. At the time, it was reported to be the earliest Krzyzewski had ever offered a high school recruit.
For most of Baldwin’s high school career, Duke was the perceived favorite. In the end, he committed to his father, who was a standout player at Northwestern and played professionally overseas before returning to the United States as a college assistant.
“He’s been around every single level of basketball,” Baldwin Jr. told the Herald-Leader earlier in his recruitment. “He’s recruited high school, been around NBA coaches, been in the college system. So he knows what it takes to be successful at every level. So just picking his brain constantly is something that I can really put no words to how much that means to me and how much that’s helped me through my process. Just having him literally down the hall — being able to talk to him and run things off of him — is something that’s really special to me.”
Duke basketball will obviously be OK. The Blue Devils already have commitments from three McDonald’s All-Americans — Paolo Banchero, AJ Griffin and Trevor Keels — in addition to four-star point guard signee Jaylen Blakes. That class is ranked No. 3 nationally — behind only Michigan and Tennessee, which both have more total commitments skewing the ranking — and the latest CBS Sports Top 25 for next season places Duke at No. 7 nationally.
Still, adding a player with the unique skill set of Baldwin would have been yet another major offensive weapon for Krzyzewski and the Blue Devils.
Instead, Baldwin’s recruitment ends with yet another unorthodox decision by a top prospect, one that goes against the blue bloods and will take him on an unconventional route to the NBA Draft.
This story was originally published May 12, 2021 at 10:30 AM.
