The 2016-17 NBA season tips off Tuesday night, so Rivals.com national analyst Eric Bossi ranks his top 10 players in the NBA and looks back at his memories of scouting them as high school prospects.

MORE BOSSI'S BEST: Seniors outplaying their ranking

Of all the places I’ve been and players I’ve seen in more than 15 years in the industry, nothing bothers me more than not having seen LeBron play in person during his high school days. His breakout summer, 2001, it seemed if I would go to Orlando he would go to Las Vegas. If I went to Nike Camp, he was at Adidas.

Then, the summer of 2002 he was out because of injury. Even while injured he gave me two lasting memories at the 2002 Nike All-American Camp. First, I overheard Mike Krzyzewski tell LeBron he would wear braids like those LeBron had if he went to Duke. Then, later that night after the gym was pretty much cleared out, I sat a row behind Roy Williams and we watched LeBron hoist up jumpers with a cast on his arm by himself for a good 30 minutes.

The level of hype surrounding him coming out of high school and expectations are like nothing we’ve seen since and that he’s surpassed it all is mind blowing. Along with Michael Jordan, he’s one of the two best players I’ve seen in my lifetime.

The only time I really ever got to see Curry in high school was at the 2005 NBPA Top 100 Camp. Back in those days it was held on the campus of VCU in Richmond and Curry looked to be pretty far over his head.

He couldn’t have been much bigger than 6-foot-1 and 150 pounds at the time, and you could see that he had a great feel for the game and he wouldn’t miss if left open. However, with a slow release at the time, he had to be wide open and he didn’t get a lot of opportunities to show what he could do during camp.

Looking back, it’s still almost impossible to think that he would go on to win back-to-back MVPs, an NBA championship, rewrite three-point shooting records and become the face of Under Armour.

One of my favorite summer games involved Durant and his team, the D.C. Blue Devils. It was April of 2005 on the campus of Hampton University for the Boo Williams Invitational and he helped lead the Blue Devils to a big win over Nike Team Texas and its star forward, Darrell Arthur.

The things Durant did that day blew my mind as he rained in deep jumper after deep jumper, attacked off the dribble and showed a level of perimeter skill I would have never imagined possible for a 6-foot-9, 17-year-old. The game was also memorable for Arthur shaking off an awful first half and pretty much matching Durant bucket for bucket in the second half.

It was then that I was convinced that Durant was bound for superstardom and he’s certainly lived up to that earning a league MVP, leading the NBA in scoring four times and making seven All-Star teams by the age of 28.

Like most others in the scouting industry, I only got to see a little bit of Westbrook during his high school days. He was very athletic, but he was also very wild and he’s just not somebody I knew a lot about.

What I remember most is that Montana State head coach Brian Fish, who was an assistant at Creighton at the time, saying how good Westbrook was and he would be one of the biggest recruiting steals ever if they could somehow get him before UCLA offered him a scholarship. UCLA finally offered in April of his senior year and the rest is history.

I didn’t know much about Harden until the summer of 2006. Even then, it took until the very end of that summer for me to really understand just how good he was, and that he belonged among the very best of the loaded high school class of 2007.

I remember his Pump-N-Run team played the D.C. Assault and Michael Beasley in the championship game of the Adidas Super 64. What stood out most to me was that I had never seen a high school player get to the free throw line as much as Harden did during that game. Over and over again, his skill level was so good that all the D.C. kids could do was foul him and hope he missed his free throws.

The first time I saw Leonard was in the spring of his junior year, April 2008. I thought he was a competitor, I thought he was a big-time athlete but I didn’t know how well he handled the ball. I had notes about not being able to fully know his strengths and weaknesses because he played with a guard who had poor shot selection. Funny enough, though, I did note that he would develop into a good shooter because I liked his mechanics.

Maybe what I remember most about Leonard, though, was how much my colleague at the time – Rob Harrington of Prepstars.com – loved Leonard. After watching him play in a Christmas tourney during Leonard’s senior year, Harrington told me that he should be a McDonald’s All-American and that he would be a first-round pick before it was all said and done. He proved to be pretty far ahead of the game with that assessment.

The story of Davis' growth spurt as a junior in high school and meteoric rise to recruiting fame between his junior and senior years is well-known. While most in the scouting business went crazy for him immediately, it took me a little while to warm up to him.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked Davis a lot but initially thought of him as more of a top 10-15 prospect than potentially the best player in the country because I was worried that injuries would be an issue. Well, that is until I saw him at the Flyin’ to the Hoop event in Dayton, Ohio, during January of his senior year. It wasn’t until I saw how good he was on an awful high school team that I realized how special of a prospect he really was.

I’ve seen some really good players on bad teams during my days, but outside of perhaps Marvin Williams Jr.’s 2004 Bremerton (Wash.) High team, I’ve not seen an elite player with a worse supporting cast than Davis had at Chicago Perspectives.

Paul is another one of those guys who didn’t really burst onto the national scene until after his junior season of high school. Like everybody else who was around at that time, one of my first memories of the perennial NBA All-Star point guard was that while he was the coach at North Carolina, Matt Doherty once told Paul he would have to walk on for at least a year if he wanted to go to UNC.

In all fairness, Doherty did eventually offer Paul a scholarship but by then it was too late as Wake Forest was closer to home and had built a strong lead. Still, Paul initially being asked to walk on at North Carolina is one of the all-time great recruiting stories.

Bossi memory: I only ever saw Lillard – one of the most notorious two-star prospects in Rivals.com's history – play at one event during his time in high school. It was an event in Las Vegas during April of 2007 and Lillard was playing for the Oakland Rebels at the time. I was running a scouting service for college coaches and doing freelance work.

Anyway, I remember catching him on a Friday night and he went for somewhere in the area of 40 points and was very fun to watch. However, he couldn’t have been much bigger than 6-foot and he looked like more of a natural shooting guard than a point guard. I watched him one more time and remember talking with some people and thinking there’s no reason he couldn’t play for somebody in what was the Pac-10 at the time.

To make a long story short, I rated him as an upper mid-major to lower end high-major prospect and never saw or thought about him again until he started going bonkers at Weber State. Looking back, I severely underrated him, but at least I thought he could play in a high-major conference.

Bossi memory: Towns was always an interesting guy to scout because he didn’t play in too many grassroots events and when he did in the summer prior to his senior year, he had some struggles. Towns was outplayed by Skal Labissiere at the 2013 NBPA Top 100 Camp and then a month later Cliff Alexander clearly outplayed him at an event in Milwaukee.

While Towns was highly skilled, I worried what kind of toughness he had and if he was a little too caught up in crafting his image and persona. Luckily, for me at least, Towns was absolutely incredible during practices the week of the McDonald’s All-American Game and I had the good sense to at least move him into the national top five from just outside of the top 10. Looking back, he’s one that I’ll regret not ranking higher and I truly believe he’s going to make the leap from potentially great player to legitimate star during his second year in the NBA.