Georgetown forward Otto Porter Jr. averaged 16.3 points and 7.4 rebounds per game, becoming the sixth Hoya to earn first-team all-American honors from AP. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
Georgetown’s Otto Porter Jr. and Michigan’s Trey Burke tied as the leading vote-getters for the Associated Pressall-America team, joining Indiana’s Victor Oladipo, Gonzaga’s Kelly Olynyk and Creighton’s Doug McDermott on the first team.
Burke and Porter both received 62 first-team votes and 319 points from the same 65-member national media panel that selects the weekly Top 25. Voting was on a 5-3-1 basis and was completed before the NCAA tournament.
Oladipo got 58 first-team votes and 306 points. McDermott had 44 first-team votes and 279 points, one more than Olynyk’s total points. The Gonzaga junior got 47 first-team votes.
Porter, a 6-foot-8 sophomore, is a smooth, solid forward whose coach describes his efforts this way: “Otto was Otto.”
“I’ve defined it all year — probably without saying it — in that he is a selfless player, in that all of his actions, all of his thoughts are on how can he help our team win,” Hoyas Coach John Thompson III said. “And because he’s so talented, with such God-given ability, because he is the worker that he is, because he is as coachable as he is, he has been able to succeed on many different fronts. Not just scoring. I don’t want to say he’s a complete basketball player — he’s not finished — but he excels at many different aspects of the game, many of which show up in the stat sheet, many of which don’t.”
What does show up on Porter’s stat line is 16.3 points and 7.4 rebounds per game while shooting 42.7 percent from behind the three-point line. He is Georgetown’s sixth first teamall-American and first since Allen Iverson in 1996.
Burke, a 6-0 sophomore point guard, averaged 19.2 points, 3.1 rebounds and 6.7 assists and shot 40.1 percent on three-point attempts. He is Michigan’s fifth first-team all-American and first since Chris Webber in 1993.
“Every now and then you think about individual accolades, and that was definitely a goal of mine coming into my freshman year,” Burke said. “I didn’t know it would be this quick, but it happens.”
McDermott made Creighton history last season when became the school’s first AP all-American. Now he’s done it again.
The 6-foot-8 junior forward, the second-leading scorer in Division I, was a repeat selection Monday, the 51st player to earn the honor in consecutive seasons.
“It’s pretty crazy. I couldn’t expect to have as good a year as I did,” said McDermott, who averaged 23.1 points and 7.5 rebounds while shooting 56.1 percent from the field and 49.7 percent on three-point attempts.
Oladipo, a DeMatha graduate, is Indiana’s first all-American since A.J. Guyton in 2000 and the eighth overall. He was impressed to be joining the likes of Scott May, Kent Benson, Isiah Thomas, Steve Alford and Calbert Cheaney.
“I’m kind of speechless to be with the great names in college basketball, the NBA, in basketball history,” Oladipo, a 6-5 junior swingman, said. “To be put in a sentence with them only makes me want to work harder.”