Who won a college basketball national championship, and then won an NBA Championship the following season?
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar came close, and so did James Worthy, among others, but just five players in the history of basketball won the NCAA title and got The Ring the next year.
Former Kansas star Christian Braun is on the list.
The NBA trivia nugget was brought up during the Denver 120-101 blowout of the Los Angeles Clippers in Game 7 of the first round of the playoffs.
Braun was one of the main men for the 2021-2022 Kansas Jayhawks, averaging over 14 points with 6.5 rebounds and 2.8 assists in the national championship season. Selected 21st overall by Denver in the 2022 NBA Draft, he averaged 4.7 points per game with 2.5 rebounds per game in his 2022-2023 rookie season.
Even though he was a part-time player in the playoffs, he helped the cause with 15 points in Game 3 of the NBA Finals on the way to the win over Miami.
And he got his championship.
So who were the other four players on the list of college-pro championship double-doubles?
The most obvious was Magic Johnson, winning the 1979 national title with Michigan State, and then taking home an NBA championship with the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980 season – highlighted by the 42-point series-clinching Game 6 win over Philadelphia.
Bill Russell was the other big-name who pulled it off. He won back-to-back national titles at San Francisco, and then came off the 1956 championship and kept it all going as the young star of the 1956-1957 Boston Celtics.
The other two parts of the trivia question are tougher.
Henry Bibby won three straight national championships with UCLA from 1970 to 1972, and was a key bench player for the 1972-1973 New York Knicks.
Billy Thompson was one of the stars of the 1985-1986 Louisville Cardinals, and in his first season in the NBA he averaged 5.6 points per game for the 1986-1987 Los Angeles Lakers.
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