The NBA has begun sending emails to select players telling them they’ve been selected to attend this year’s draft combine, reports Jonathan Givony of ESPN (Twitter link).
However, that message comes with a caveat, per Givony — the league says no decisions have been made yet about when or where the combine will take place, what form it will take, or even if it will occur at all. As Givony adds (via Twitter), the NBA is asking prospects to fill out a pre-combine questionnaire by this Friday and has promised more details as they become available.
The 2020 draft combine was scheduled to take place in May in Chicago, but has been delayed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Word broke last week that the NBA had sent a memo to teams informing them of the 105 prospects who received the most votes to be invited to a combine, if one takes place. Adam Zagoria of ZagsBlog.com has a list of those 105 players right here. The expectation is that about 60 or 70 of those players would ultimately attend a combine, either virtually or in-person.
Reports are surfacing identifying some of the players who have received combine invitations. Most of those names are unsurprising and overlap with the players on ESPN’s top-100 list, but that’s not the case for all of them.
For example, Josh Newman of The Salt Lake Tribune reports that BYU forward Yoeli Childs has been invited, while Zagoria says (via Twitter) that Gonzaga guard Joel Ayayi and Illinois center Kofi Cockburn are among the invitees. None of those players show up on ESPN’s top-100 big board.
With as many early entrants as there are and nearly every team having a minor league affiliate now, I think it is time for the draft to re-expand to 3 and maybe even 4 or 5 rounds. Of course thy would have to tweak roster rules. Perhaps something like baseball’s option system could work.
Just have more players with two-way deals. About 3-5 total?
I really think they need to get a regular farm system going. That way each franchise can have legitimate control over their prospects instead of having to rush them because they are required to be on a 15 man roster spot.
If the NBA is determined to start letting high school players into the league, they should learn from the last big group of high schoolers from the late 1990s/early 2000s. Sure there were some immediate legit superstars like LeBron, KG and Kobe that came from that group, but there were far more players that were rushed and struggled against competition. Even players that succeeded in the long term like Tracy McGrady, Tyson Chandler and Jermaine O’Neal took a few years before they broke out. More lotto players like Jonathan Bender, Darius Miles, Kwame Brown, and more could have really used a couple of minor league years to acclimate to the league and the lifestyle.
It’s fine to give these young men a chance to earn money immediately, but more important than the money is a chance at legitimate sustained success.