Listen, I know. I KNOW. This isn't what this blog is about. This is a gaming blog, it's a place where I talk about video games. Shut up. Sometimes, the autism takes over, sometimes I go down thought experiments and I need an outlet and you know what. Basketball? It's a game! I'm correct! So we're doing this. Besides, it'll be a short one, and not the monoliths I usually write, this should be a win for y'all. I'm not even really doing a preamble. You all know who Troy Bolton is. Let's get into it.
What NBA team would draft Troy Bolton?
Okay, so I should probably actually fill in who Troy Bolton is. Troy Bolton is the main character of the High School Musical trilogy, a series of films that originally aired on the Disney Channel before making their way to a major theatrical release for their third installment after their second installment was literally one of the most watched things to ever air on television and to this day remains the peak of Disney Channel's viewership. In the HSM films, Troy is a basketball prodigy, the star player of the East High Wildcats of eastern Albquerque who is set to not only lead his team to the state championship and, later, multiple back-to-back state championships, but is set to follow a path that would lead him to being a prominent college player and, maybe, even an NBA player. This all gets shaken up when he does karaoke at a ski lodge over winter break with a shy, bookish girl and accidentally discovers a love of singing and, eventually, musical theater. He spends much of the first movie being ridiculed for this newfound interest by his peers, who somehow believe that Troy's focus on basketball and his focus on musical theater are completely exclusionary ideas despite, you know, basketball being a seasonal sport and the school doing multiple musicals a year. It's a clique thing, I know, people are more mad about Troy disrupting the status quo because it means that they have to acknowledge that people can be two things.
Eventually they come to accept Troy's hobbies after almost ruining his life and have to stop the school's resident mean girl, head of the drama club, and all around terrible performer Sharpay Evans, from robbing Troy and love interest Gabriella Montez of their chance to join the play as she petitions the school's drama teacher to move the date of the callback auditions to the same day as Troy's championship game against East High's longstanding rivals, the West High Knights. Troy gets the role, gets the girl, and wins the state championship all in one night, a true triple threat. The remaining two movies deal with Troy thinking heavily about his future, as he struggles with the fact that he has been set on this path to play for the University of Albuquerque like his father before him and live out his father's dreams because, you know. YOLVTYC. You Only Live Vicariously Through Your Children. While Troy is starting to realize that, while he does want to play basketball and it's a thing he wants to do in life, he might genuinely want to pursue a career in theatre. He loves singing and loves being on stage and his drama teacher, Mrs. Darbus, once a source of comedy and now the most emotionally significant figure in Troy's life, even put his name in to go to Julliard. Eventually Troy decides to balk his father's plan and go to the University of California in Berkley, where he will double major in both basketball and in musical theater. This is literally how they say it. As if basketball was a major.
However, I'm curious about what happens after. Troy Bolton is, allegedly, an amazing basketball player after all. He not only won back-to-back state championships, maybe even back-to-back-to-back state championships, but he had the opportunity to play real college ball with the University of Albuquerque team and kept pace the entire time as a Sophmore! Or Junior! We'll talk about it! Troy Bolton is, needless to say, good at basketball, so good that I think him being drafted by the NBA is almost an inevitability. The question, though, is by who. What team would align with Troy's specific timeframe and would end up drafting someone at Troy's position, a slot for Troy Bolton to fill in within his alternate universe?
But first, some qualifiers.
Now, obviously, it's impossible to truly know what would happen with Troy Bolton's draft. Namely because Troy is a fictional character and without him making a surprise guest appearance in a basketball video game, though he absolutely should, we are at a loss for his actual statistics. Literally all we have to go off to say that he is a good player is that he singlehandedly turned around a failing high school team and made it one of the best teams in the country during his years at East High. As nice as it would be to point to Troy's record and then go "he's as good as this player, so he'd be picked at x point in the draft", we don't really have those statistics and as such can't make definitive calls. For my purposes, given his specific interests, I'm assuming Troy kind of takes it a bit easy in college and splits his focus a bit between basketball and performing. He's serious enough about the sport to be on people's radar but he's not exactly going to be someone who people are chomping at the bit to get. Truly, I actually just think people will be sleeping on him because he's "the theater kid". I am assuming he will be a first round draft pick but that he'll be passed up by quite a few teams, I'm thinking somewhere between 10th overall and the end of the first round of the draft.
For similar reasons to the previous one, as well, I am operating under the assumption that teams in our reality would also be picking up someone at Troy's position in his reality too. Which is to say, I am only looking at teams that drafted Point Guards. Troy is a point guard if you didn't know, though I feel like that's obvious given his "team captain" role. This just makes it easier on me, the exact year Troy would be drafted is not exactly set in stone as we'll soon find out and the easiest way to narrow down the teams that would potentially draft Troy is just to look at those who would be drafting a Point Guard anyways. Otherwise, with my limited NBA knowledge, I would have to theorycraft what 15 separate teams in three separate years might possibly do in a draft from 15 years ago and like. I like basketball, I ain't that kind of basketball andy, you feel me? This is more me being an HSM fan.
Also, Zac Efron's actual basketball skills will not be coming into play for this. I feel like that's obvious, but the first thing people tend to note about the question of whether or not Troy Bolton would be drafted by the NBA is that Zac Efron is not particularly good at basketball. We have plenty of footage of him playing, four films worth in fact, and like, he's fine enough for pickup games at the park but he's certainly no future NBA player. But we are meant to understand that Troy is, textually, a seriously talented player regardless of his actor's skills on the court. I feel like we can afford some leeway for a film franchise that believes basketball is a major. And it's not even the most egregious example of an actor who is playing a character who is amazing at sports despite their own skill in this franchise, Corbin Bleu's Chad Danforth, the worst character in this trilogy, is literally said to be an amazing baseball player in the second film and Bleu had never played baseball before filming.
Finally, this is just for fun. Like I don't really know ball like that, somebody more into basketball and also more into High School Musical can and probably has figured out who Troy would play for and that is probably a more entertaining and informative thing than what I'm writing here. But it's an interesting question and I've been consumed by what the answer might be so we're doing this. I promise I'll get back to actual video games after this, this will not become a basketball blog, I will not start posting my love for the Toronto Raptors, a team I love just because their the funniest team. With all that out of the way, onto the actual Draft teams.
Except this is where it gets complicated.
So I mentioned that what Troy's draft year would be is a surprisingly complicated question. For the most part, basketball players are drafted at some point during their college careers, sometimes after a single year of college, more often after two years, some players even finish up their four years of college before entering the draft pool. This adds a lot of nuance to when Troy could possibly be drafted but I think that the most likely scenario is that he finishes up his degree before joining the NBA, so four years. That being said, I could see him going in for two or three years and then finishing his degree later, either in the off season or when his contract is up, as such, I will be accounting for those time frames as well, meaning that Troy will be showing teams from three drafts across three different years.
Or at least that's what I want to say, but that's not why this is complicated. See, there is a lot of ambiguity on when Troy Bolton actually graduated. The High School Musical trilogy consisted of annual releases from 2006 to 2008 and covered either two or three school years, based on your interpretation. The films either are HSM1 and HSM2 both being set in Sophmore year, with HSM3 being set in Senior Year, or both of the former films being set in Junior year with the latter being set in Senior Year. That means that there are at least two possible different graduation years based on your interpretation of the films, which doubles the number of draft years we're working with. I.e., HSM1 takes place in 2006, meaning that if you go under the Sophmore interpretation, they graduate in 2008, but if you go by the Junior interpretation, they graduate in 2007.
However, we don't definitively know if HSM1 takes place in 2006. It is not uncommon for films to take place the year prior, or the incoming year. High School Musical 1 could be the second semester of the 04-05, 05-06, or 06-07 years easily. Really it could take place any time, there aren't exactly hard grounding points to the mid-to-late 2000s, meaning Troy could hypothetically have been in this year's draft and ended up being cursed with being stuck on the Charlotte Hornets. But we're using 2006 as a grounding point just because that is when the film came out. As such, we have to rework all our years. Troy could, effectively, graduate anywhere from 2006 (if HSM1 is in 2005 and it's their junior year) to 2009 (if HSM1 is in 2007 and it's their Sophmore year). These years obviously would end up having a lot of overlap because it's not exactly a very massive difference, three years means that Troy in scenario A would be eligible for the two year draft window when two other Troy scenarios would be entering college, but it is noticeable. It brings our total number of drafts up to 6, with the Troy in scenario A in the previous statement first entering the draft in 2008 while the Troy in scenario B graduates college in 2013, which would be when he's eligible for the draft in our "does all four years of college" scenario. And while it may be only 6 possible drafts overall, it's 18 Troy Boltons living through them! The number of Troy Boltons is actually irrelevant to the data I just thought it was funny that this experiment creates 18 Troy Boltons. For context they are:
Troy Bolton graduates in 06, enters the draft in 08
Troy Bolton graduates in 06, enters the draft in 09
Troy Bolton graduates in 06, enters the draft in 10
Troy Bolton graduates in 07, enters the draft in 09
Troy Bolton graduates in 07, enters the draft in 10
Troy Bolton graduates in 07, enters the draft in 11
Troy Bolton graduates in 08, enters the draft in 10
Troy Bolton graduates in 08, enters the draft in 11
Troy Bolton graduates in 08, enters the draft in 12
Troy Bolton graduates in 09, enters the draft in 11
Troy Bolton graduates in 09, enters the draft in 12
Troy Bolton graduates in 09, enters the draft in 13
Let's just finally get to the drafts, please, okay?
Right, sorry, the drafts. That's what we're here for. So again, I am assuming Troy will be a first round draft pick, for a team that was already drafting a point guard, but not within the first 10 picks. This means that his options are the following:
The 2008 NBA Draft
- Portland Trail Blazers, 11th overall draft pick, traded from the Pacers
- San Antonio Spurs, 26th overall draft pick
The 2009 NBA Draft
- Milwaukee Bucks, 10th overall draft pick
- Philadelphia 76ers, 17th overall draft pick
- Denver Nuggets, 18th overall draft pick, traded from the Timberwolves
- Atlanta Hawks, 19th overall draft pick
- Utah Jazz, 20th overall draft pick
- New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans, 21st overall draft pick
- Dallas Mavericks, 25th overall draft pick, traded from the Thunder
- New York Knicks, 29th overall draft pick, traded from the Lakers
The 2010 NBA Draft
- Los Angeles Clippers, 18th overall draft pick, traded from the Thunder
- Memphis Grizzlies, 28th overall draft pick
The 2011 NBA Draft
- Portland Trail Blazers, 21st overall draft pick
- Oklahoma City Thunder, 24th overall draft pick
- Miami Heat, 28th overall draft pick, traded from the Bulls
- San Antonio Spurs, 29th overall draft pick
The 2012 NBA Draft
- Phoenix Suns, 13th overall draft pick
- Memphis Grizzlies, 25th overall draft pick
- Chicago Bulls, 29th overall draft pick
The 2013 NBA Draft
- Philadelphia 76ers, 11th overall draft pick
- Atlanta Hawks, 17th overall draft pick
- Dallas Mavericks, 18th overall draft pick, traded from the Hawks
And those are all the teams! Now, this gives us a good data set, but it's no fun to just say "well here's every team he COULD play for" and call it there, so let's try and pick a favorite from this list, shall we. I think the most immediately appealing option for Troy is to put him on the Suns. Troy is a New Mexico boy and Phoenix is very close to home, so I think that's an immediately earmarked favorite. A number of these teams obviously appear multiple times and thus have a stronger case for Troy playing for them, the Trail Blazers, the Spurs, the 76ers, the Hawks, the Mavericks and the Grizzlies. I feel like of these six the Grizzlies and the 76ers are right out? Like I don't know, Troy doesn't seem like he'd be at home on either team and while I didn't mess with the draft in this hypothetical, I feel like Troy would want to be traded almost immediately in either place. I also feel like he just wouldn't be doing enough on the Spurs to be happy there either? Also this is petty but the Mavs are definitely out too just because Troy would look terrible in a Mavs jersey. The Trail Blazers and the Hawks are still on the table though, although I'm feeling less passionate about the Hawks than the Trail Blazers. I think that they are just a "if Troy went to this team, it'd be fine" thing but not a favorite, you know?
Which actually brings me to an important part of this data: where the Troys overlap the most. A majority of the Troys are focused in the 2010 and 2011 NBA drafts, the median of our draft years, meaning those teams are probably the most likely. We've already talked about the Grizzlies and the Spurs, neither one would probably fit Troy. And the Trail Blazers are a current favorite. But of the other three teams (the Clippers, the Heat, and the Thunder), I gotta say. I kinda like the Thunder vibe. I almost said the Clippers but I think that while Troy would probably fall in love with Cali, I think he'd be more committed to NorCal than California as a whole. I don't think the Clippers would be a good fit for him. And the Heat is just whatever, I don't feel strongly about the Heat, it's a perfectly average team for Troy to be on but it's not one of my standouts.
I think the Jazz is a surprising favorite. First of all, imagine the PR win for the Jazz. Their new starting point guard is a multiple time state champion who is ALSO a musical guy? And he's also a homegrown desert boy, it's an environment that would be mutually beneficial, Troy could suck and the Jazz would get a lot of mileage out of him. Similarly, I think the Knicks would see a lot of value in just the PR Troy would generate but I think that option is less entertaining than the Jazz and the Jazz would get to pick him first so I think the Knicks are a pretty definitive no on this list, to be honest? The Hornets (later Pelicans) I think would be kind of funny since they were originally the Charlotte Hornets but then moved out of Charlotte to New Orleans which led to the a new Charlotte team popping up, the Bobcats, which is like literally the only cat themed team in the NBA. And then they renamed to Hornets. I'm not saying Troy should play for the Pelicans but I am saying it's probably the funniest option.
Which leaves the Bulls, the Nuggets, and the Bucks. I was originally going to say the Bucks were right out, because I could never see Troy in a Bucks jersey. Basically the same reason I said no to the Mavs. But like, looking at the Bucks jerseys from that era and just feeling the vibe? Gotta say, the Bucks grew on me. I think it'd be kind of a cool vibe the Bucks are probably my fifth favorite team for Troy to play for overall. The Nuggets I have no opinion on, take em or leave em. I think Troy would like being in Denver but I don't think he'd like being a Nugget. And every time the Bulls come up in a hypothetical like this you kind of want them to grab and hold in. I was a fan of the Jordan Bulls, I would love to see the Bulls get another all-star and build a dynasty like that. But, realistically, the Bulls are right there with the Hawks, the Nuggets, and the Heat. Just a perfectly average team for Troy to go to.
Which means my favorites are the Suns, the Trail Blazers, the Jazz, the Hornets, and the Bucks. When I first posed this hypothetical to one of my friends, my immediate rip was Trail Blazers. I don't know what it is, but I think Troy belongs in Rip City. I think he is just a Trail Blazer, there's something about him. But like, looking at every team and thinking about it a bit, like. You can't ignore the PR win that the Jazz would get out of it. It's too perfect. My heart says Trail Blazers but I think that, overall, I'd send Troy to the Jazz. He'd be like their own Magic Johnson over there. An absolute threat on the court and a charismatic face of the team off it. But regardless of who Troy plays for, the following things are certain:
- everyone will sleep on Troy Bolton because he did do a bunch of musical theater in college and so they think his game is soft
-he will lock-in the moment he gets drafted, will become an absolute menace on the court due to his play making
- he'll be like one of the top 5 point guards of the decade, probably won't lead his team to any rings but will be considered a ringless GOAT second only to CP3, retire after like 12 years in the NBA
- he'll leverage his super stardom into a debut on Broadway, everyone will think he's just a basketball player with no acting talent, he'll prove them all wrong, win a Tony, get a big superhero franchise, and be known as the best athlete turned actor of all time
Thus will be the legacy of Troy Bolton, the starting point guard for the Utah Jazz. And no matter what, Gabriella will always fall for the dumbest lies and run from him each time she's feeling insecure instead of just having a conversation with him because Gabriella Montez is the absolute worst.
