Is the top undecided college basketball recruit for next season nearing a decision?
The month of May is two days away, and the college basketball recruiting world is still waiting on the nation’s No. 4 overall prospect to make his final decision.
And there’s still some uncertainty over where he’ll end up.
Patrick Baldwin Jr. — a perimeter-oriented 6-foot-9 forward — has previously been ranked as the No. 1 overall player in the 2021 class. He’s still one of that group’s most highly touted prospects, despite missing almost all of his senior season of high school with an ankle injury.
Where he ends up for college remains a guessing game, but a decision should be coming soon.
There have been signals in recent weeks that Baldwin is getting close to a college announcement. Technically, he still has Kentucky on his list — the Wildcats extended a scholarship offer early in the process — but no one expects him to choose UK at this point.
For the past several months, Baldwin’s recruitment was expected to come down to Duke, which offered him as a freshman, and Milwaukee, where his father, Pat Baldwin, is the school’s head coach.
Baldwin has stayed fairly quiet on the topic himself. And the recruiting chatter has been all over the place in recent days.
The circus began back in February, when a handful of Duke insiders changed their 247Sports Crystal Ball picks from the Blue Devils to Milwaukee. National analysts Eric Bossi and Jerry Meyer also logged picks in favor of Milwaukee around that time, cementing the hometown program’s status as the team to beat.
Earlier this month, however, Georgetown emerged as another possible landing spot, with the recruiting rumor mill churning to such a degree that it looked like the Hoyas might actually land a commitment from Baldwin last week. That obviously didn’t happen.
Then, on Tuesday, one of those Duke insiders on Baldwin’s Crystal Ball page flipped his prediction back to the Blue Devils amid talk that Duke’s trio of five-star signees — Paolo Banchero, AJ Griffin and Trevor Keels — have been pushing hard for Baldwin to join them in Durham next season.
As it stands, Duke’s class (which also includes four-star point guard Jaylen Blakes) is ranked No. 2 nationally, behind only Michigan. A commitment from Baldwin would give the Blue Devils the No. 1 class in the country for the first time since 2018 after Kentucky and Memphis took the top spot the past two years.
Bossi and Meyer are among those who have stuck with their Milwaukee predictions (as of Thursday morning) and uncertainty continues to reign with a commitment seemingly on the horizon.
Baldwin and star combo guard Jaden Hardy — the No. 2 overall recruit in the 2021 class — are the only two uncommitted players in the top 20 nationally, according to the 247Sports composite rankings. But Hardy is still widely expected to go pro straight out of high school, and that has thrust the attention of the college basketball recruiting world on Baldwin.
We’ll just have to continue to wait to see where he ends up.
