Bassey leads my Pangos AA Camp “big four” picks

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NORWALK, Ca. – The three-day, 15^th Pangos All-American Camp wrapped up Sunday afternoon with a couple of all-star games that provided final moments in the Cerritos College spotlight for some of the very best prep high school basketball players in the country.

To paraphrase a question I got asked often over the weekend, “How does this camp compare to some of the others that Dinos (Trigonis, the camp founder and director) has put together?”

A definitive response can’t really be offered up for at least three or four years, when the makeup of several McDonald’s All-American rosters and NBA drafts are etched into our collective consciousness.

For a couple of examples, 12 of the 24 players selected to the 24-member 2017 McDonald’s squad were among the standouts at the 2016 version of the Pangos AA Camp.

And at least five Pangos AA Camp alumni – Lonzo Ball, De’Aaron Fox, Zach Collins, T.J. Leaf and Terrance Ferguson – will be selected in the first round of the June 22 NBA Draft.

Two more Pangos alumni – Russell Westbrook and James Harden – are among the three finalists for NBA Player of the Year.

And four more 2017 all-pro selections – DeAndre Jordan, Demar DeRozan, Anthony Davis and John Wall – were also Pangos AA standouts.

From my perspective, four players at the most recent camp separated themselves as both “players” and “prospects” from the other 110 or so who participated this past weekend.

First and foremost among them is 6-foot-10 Charles Bassey, a member of the Class of 2019 (current) from Nigeria – he came to the United States in late summer of 2015 – by way of St. Anthony High in San Antonio.

Bassey was a standout at the camp a year ago when he held up quite well against the likes of 2017 McDonald’s AA and Arizona-bound DeAndre Ayton.

And, not surprisingly, he was ever better this time around while dominating every opponent he matched up against while leading his “Arizona” camp team to a 4-0 record and then helping “Team Westbrook” to a 103-91 win over “Team Harden – and 7-1 Moses Brown and 6-10 Kofi Cockburn of New York City – in the Top 30 all-star game.

The other three were guard Anfernee Simons and forward Reggie Perry (Class of 2018) and Cole Anthony, the son of former NBA guard and now-broadcaster Greg Anthony who may just be the most physically gifted prospect at point guard in the Class of 2019.

Simons, who plans to sign a national letter of intent with Louisville in November, joined Anthony as one of the two best perimeter-based scorers in the camp.

And Perry (who is set to sign with Arkansas in November) could ultimately prove to be one of the three best “power forward prospects” in the upcoming national senior class.

Those four are among the 20 guys I’ve listed below in my “Top 20 players in the camp” list that is based upon “how well they played when I watched over the weekend” and isn’t “the 20 best college or NBA prospects in camp).

Some guys who played just limited games (half of camps or less), including center Bol Bol (Santa Ana, CA, Mater Dei), Cassius Stanley (Studio City, CA, Harvard-Westlake) and Moses Brown (Queens, NY, Archbishop Molloy), aren’t included in the list:

 

My Top 20 Pangos All-American Camp participants

Precious Achiuwa (Class of 2019/6-foot-7/Bronx Our Savior of Lutheran High)

Cole Anthony (2019/6-0/Queens, NY, Archbishop Molloy)

Charles Bassey (2019/6-10/San Antonio St. Anthony)

Riley Battin (2018/6-8/Oak Park, CA, Oak Park)

Darius Bazley (2018/6-8/Cincinnati Princeton)

Jules Bernard (2018/6-5/Los Angeles Windward)

Jalen Carey (2018/6-3/Montclair, NJ, Immaculate Conception)

Kofi Cockburn (2019/6-10/Middle Village, NY, Christ the King)

Ayo Dosunmu (2018/6-3/Chicago Morgan Park)

Devon Dotson (2018/6-0/Charlotte Providence Day)

Logan Johnson (2018/6-3/Mountain View, CA, St. Francis)

Tre Mann (2019/6-2/The Villages, FL, Villages School)

Luther Muhammad (2018/6-3/Hudson, NJ, Catholic)

Orlando Payne (2019/6-9/Kissimmee, FL, Osceola)

Bryan Penn-Johnson (2018/6-11/Las Vegas Coronado)

Reggie Perry (2018/6-9/Thomasville, GA, Thomasville)

Kevin Porter (2018/6-4/Seattle Rainier Beach)

Will Richardson (2018/6-4/Hinesville, GA, Liberty County)

Anfernee Simons (2018/6-3/Orlando Edgewater)

Elijah Weaver (2018/6-5/Oldsmar, FL, Christian)