Mailbag time: Submit your questions here
The portal may be closed, but the mailbag is always open
A fun analysis of the NBA Draft from ESPN’s Jonathan Givony made the rounds Tuesday: Just 106 players entered the 2025 draft, the lowest number of early entrants since 2015, just before the NCAA loosened rules on signing agents, testing waters, and returning to college.
In 2021, just before the NIL era began, 363 players tried to go pro in one draft.
All of those same rules about testing the waters still apply. The difference now, of course, is that for marginal draft picks — and in some cases even for players with real prospective NBA futures — it makes more sense to stay in college basketball, get paid a bunch of money, and figure out your pro career a year or two later. Givony is a pure NBA draft scouting type with (seemingly) little emotional investment in the college game, and even he concludes that this represents an “incredible boon for college basketball to retain so much talent.”
And he’s right! People have been particularly annoyed about the portal the last few years, as it has reached last-gasp-of-the-gold-rush levels of wild abandon. There has been a real end times, what happened to the game I love vibe to some of the commentary this spring. But wherever these players end up, they end up in college basketball. They are not throwing themselves into the draft just in case. They are not taking $80,000 salaries in the third division in Croatia. They are playing college basketball. This is awesome.
This is the sort of stuff we’ve been thinking about lately, and we nearly wrote a whole post about it, and then we thought, you know what? Let’s run the gamut. Mailbag time. There is a ton to cover. Transfer impressions, coaching changes, all of the stuff we didn’t write about when we got home from the Final Four because we were too tired — all of it.
Send your questions in via the comment section below — which you have to be a paid subscriber to do, of course — and there will be a column answering all of them in the next couple of days. You know the drill. See you in there.
In the portal era, have there been any big impact transfers that came in May or later or are fans resigned to rooting for a bubble team if their program is still looking to add significant pieces this late in the cycle? Is this year different? Are you seeing the potential withdrawals from the NBA Draft influence a delay on roster finalization? More specifically, I’m talking about Thomas Sorber at Georgetown.
Eamonn - thanks as always for the mailbag! Initial takes on the DeVries era at your alma mater? Overly optimistic to think they can be at or near the top of the Big Ten standings in Year 1?