Welcome to the Pacific 10 Conference tournament, also known as one-stop shopping for NBA scouts.
With a mother lode of prospects who might give the league a record showing at the NBA draft in June on display, 42 scouts representing 26 of the 30 NBA teams are expected to be on hand.
"The Pac-10 this year is deep and rich in talent," Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak said.
Jerry Reynolds, director of player personnel for the Sacramento Kings, didn't hesitate to assess it.
"The Pac-10 in my opinion is stronger than any league in the country, and most people, I think, agree," he said.
Mock drafts can be a little breathless, and there's no way to know for sure which underclassmen will make themselves available, but DraftExpress.com predicts there could be eight first-round picks from the Pac-10, and nbadraft.net counts nine.
If those predictions are even close, this year's draft will be a record year for the Pac-10, which has never had more than five first-round picks in a year. The 1979 class led by UCLA's David Greenwood set that mark, and the 1995 group that included Arizona's Damon Stoudamire and UCLA's Ed O'Bannon tied it.
The record for any conference is eight from the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1995, with a group led by No. 1 overall pick Joe Smith from Maryland and North Carolina's Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace.
Kupchak said players' decisions and NBA team needs will sort things out as time goes on, calling it "way too early to say who's first round."
That doesn't keep people from making a cottage industry out of trying. The two mock drafts' consensus first-rounders are Stanford's Brook Lopez, Arizona's Jerryd Bayless, USC's O.J. Mayo, UCLA's Kevin Love and Darren Collison and California's Ryan Anderson and DeVon Hardin, although some NBA scouts see Anderson and Hardin as borderline first-rounders and Anderson said last week he wouldn't consider leaving school unless he was a sure first-rounder.
Among others in the mix are UCLA's Russell Westbrook -- probably a first-rounder this season but a likely lottery pick in 2009, when he could be more prepared for the NBA after taking over the point from Collison -- Arizona's Chase Budinger, whose stock has slipped during his college career, and Washington State's Kyle Weaver, whose skills and athleticism are sometimes hidden in the Cougars' system.
