2011 NBA Draft
- Charlotte Bobcats (Traded to Milwaukee Bucks)
- Round 1
- Pick 19
Welcome to the only intended one-and-done player for Tennessee basketball that Rick Barnes didn’t recruit. Tobias Harris was a five-star who signed with Bruce Pearl. He was part of a dramatically underachieving team, but it wasn’t enough to be held against him.
Harris played for UT with another five-star in Scotty Hopson, who was in his third year at the time, and he had other experienced players like Melvin Goins, Cameron Tatum and Brian Williams playing with him. That team started 7-0 and got into the top 10. However, this was the year the Pearl scandal with the NCAA broke.
That scandal got Pearl suspended for eight games in the SEC and eventually led to his firing at the end of the year. With those distractions, the Vols ended up stumbling to a 19-15 record and a first-round exit from the NCAA Tournament.
Still, Harris was elite all year. At 6’8″ 226 pounds, he averaged over 15 points and seven rebounds a game. Although he wasn’t efficient from three, shooting just 30.3 percent, he didn’t take too many shots from beyond the arc, and he was 75.3 percent from the foul line, giving him a .540 true shooting percentage.
It’s hard to have Harris over Kennedy Chandler because Chandler actually played much more to his potential, but production matters as much as potential, and you can’t ignore Harris’ production. As a result, he is Tennessee basketball’s best one-and-done ever.