Hey, does anyone know if NBADraft.net is reputable? I sure hope they are, because I just used their big board to figure out which NIT alumni might get drafted tonight.
From that 100-man big board…guys who’ve played in an NIT:
- Jalen Williams (2022)
- Ryan Rollins (2021, 2022)
- Jake LaRavia (2022)
- Iverson Molinar (2021, 2022)
- Lester Quinones (2021)
- Jabari Walker (2022)
- Bryson Williams (2017)
- Alondes Williams (2022)
- Scotty Pippen Jr. (2022)
- David Roddy (2021)
- Dereon Seabron (2021)
- Kenneth Lofton Jr. (2021)
- Alex Barcello (2022)
- Kellan Grady (2019, 2021)
- Quenton Jackson (2022)
- Jeenathan Williams (2021)
And…guys who were in the 2020 Virtual NIT:
- Ron Harper
- Iverson Molinar
- Donovan Williams
- Julian Champagnie
- Tyrese Martin
- Buddy Boeheim
Overall, the biggest NIT stars who might be drafted tonight are Jalen Williams, Molinar, Quinones, Pippen, Roddy, Lofton, Jackson, and Jeenathan Williams. While the biggest names come from this year’s NIT, the best performers skew more towards the 2021 side.
- Quinones is the only champion on the board, having emerged victorious two years ago after shooting 11-of-19 from deep on the tournament.
- Had Quinones not shot that well, Mississippi State might’ve won, in which case Molinar might have turned in one of the greatest NIT-long performances of all time, having averaged 22 points per game over the first three round.
- Jalen Williams scored 19 and pulled down a grown-man fifteen boards in Santa Clara’s first-round loss to Washington State this year. No, they didn’t win, but that should be easier in the NBA.
- Pippen, of course, scored 32 against Dayton and then 28 against Xavier this spring, putting his private school in Nashville on the map.
- Roddy scored 17 per game in pre-third place game action in ’21, recording a second-round double-double against NC State along the way.
- Lofton, a legend everywhere he goes, made the NIT no exception, with his 27-point afternoon the most impressive third-place-game performance in years, his 22 in the first round a breakout performance, and his two double-doubles and eleven steals (including one of our hearts) simply remarkable in the shortened affair.
- Jackson, as we all remember, was a massive part of Texas A&M’s run this spring, scoring 18 and 23 in his two games at Madison Square Garden.
- Jeenathan Williams scored 21 in the first-round loss to Colorado State in ’21.
Who’ll have the best NBA career? Well, aside from Lofton, who is destined for greatness in everything he does, Jalen Williams is getting the most hype, and it’s understandable why. Yes, he missed a lot of shots in that 63-50 game, and yes, the score was 63-50, so he had plenty of opportunities for all those rebounds, but still, you can see why he’s flying up draft boards. 15 rebounds in an NIT game? Had he only missed a few more shots. Could’ve had more rebounds than points, at which point I’m pretty sure we’d no longer be having a debate over who’s going to go first overall.
For those wondering, Jack Nunge is not in the NBA Draft. So that and Jalen Williams’s scoring is why it isn’t Nunge vs. Williams for the first overall pick.
More in tomorrow’s notes on what goes down tonight. I would recommend trading all your players for picks and constructing a roster of these guys, but I understand it’s a little late to be giving NBA general managers advice. Instead, we watch, we wait, and we sigh a lot, watching fools take the NCAA’s bait and sages select Kenneth Lofton Jr. in the first round.
