Draft Week Is a Kentucky Holiday. It Began With Five Men Who Bought the Team.

The Fabulous Five — Alex Groza, Ralph Beard, Wallace 'Wah Wah' Jones, Cliff Barker and Kenny Rollins — won 36 of 39 games and the 1948 national championship, then formed the core of the U.S. Olympic team that took gold in London that summer with Adolph Rupp on the bench. The professional league barely knew what to do with them. So in 1949, Groza, Beard, Jones and Barker, joined by former teammate Joe Holland, solved it themselves: they founded the Indianapolis Olympians. It remains the only time in professional basketball history that five players from one school joined one pro team together — and the only time the players owned the franchise. They were not a novelty act, either. Groza poured in 1,496 points that first season, second in the league only to George Mikan, and the Olympians won their division in 1949-50. Kentucky's first great draft-week story was five men deciding they didn't need to be drafted.

The modern archive is no less absurd. In 2010, John Wall went first overall and brought four teammates with him into the first round — DeMarcus Cousins fifth, Patrick Patterson fourteenth, Eric Bledsoe eighteenth, Daniel Orton twenty-ninth. No school had ever put five players in a single first round before. Two Junes later, Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist — fresh off the 2012 title, the program's eighth banner — went one and two. More than a decade on, they are still the only teammates in NBA history taken with the draft's first two picks. Then 2015: Karl-Anthony Towns first overall, one of six Wildcats drafted that night, an NBA record for one school that matched Kentucky's own six from 2012. Three number-one picks in six drafts. The seasons that produced them — 35-3, 38-2, 38-1 — all began as 1-seeds and live in the Ledger's happiest pages.

Which brings the Ledger to its newest page. Oweh arrives the old way — four years of work, 18.6 points a game his final season, a 35-point tournament night as his closing argument, and a long Wednesday ahead. Quaintance arrives the modern way — four games, one surgically repaired knee, and a first-round projection built on what scouts saw before the injury. The archive holds both kinds of stories. It holds Olympians who owned their own team and seniors who waited deep into the second round for a phone to ring. What it records, always, is the same thing: when the names are called in June, an outsized share of them belong to Kentucky. The Ledger will be open Tuesday night.