Jason Thompson has been compared in recent days to Webber and Karl Malone. So in the interest of fairness and giving TZ a little down time, I did some research.

I decided that the best way to compare the three players was to look at their college stats from the last year they played for their respective schools. I've put these numbers into the table below.

There are a couple of caveats, though. First, for some odd reason, Webber's rebounding and turnover stats from college have vanished from all the player profile pages I looked at. And second, though I tried my best to find the stats for him, apparently God never played college ball. Sorry, Section.

Valid arguments can be made about Thompson playing for a small school in a weaker conference, and I'm sure JT's the best player Rider has ever seen, so his numbers may be a liitle inflated.

Only time will tell what kind of player he turns out to be. I like his game so far, He seems to have a lot of Webber's smoothness and instincts, but it's way too early to call Thompson the second coming of C-Webb.

I think this statistical comparison shows that Jason Thompson belongs in the league, and that, being a 12th pick, he'll end up surprising a lot of people. And at this point, I'm happy with that.