NBA draft

NBA draft

The NBA draft is an annual event dating back to 1947 in which the teams from the National Basketball Association can draft players who are eligible and wish to join the league. College players who have finished their four-year college eligibility are automatically eligible for selection, while the underclassmen have to declare their eligibility and give up their remaining college eligibility. The NBA Draft Lottery is a state-lottery style process in order to determine the first three picks of the draft, until 2018. The team with the worst record receives the best odds of receiving the first pick.

About NBA draft in brief

Summary NBA draftThe NBA draft is an annual event dating back to 1947 in which the teams from the National Basketball Association can draft players who are eligible and wish to join the league. College players who have finished their four-year college eligibility are automatically eligible for selection, while the underclassmen have to declare their eligibility and give up their remaining college eligibility. Since 1989, the draft has consisted of two rounds; this is much shorter than the entry drafts of the other major professional sports leagues in the U.S. and Canada, all of which run at least seven rounds. Sixty players are selected in each draft. No player may sign with the NBA until he has been eligible for at least one draft. The NBA Draft Lottery is a state-lottery style process in order to determine the first three picks of the draft, until 2018. The team with the worst record receives the best odds of receiving the first pick. The league uses the ping-pong ball system with 14 balls numbered 1–14, and 1,000 four-digit combinations are assigned to the first four picks. The first three draft picks were determined in 2019, and so on, starting on January 1, 2019, the worst teams will have an equal chance of winning the top overall pick. Those teams will be ordered in reverse order based on their previous record in the previous season, like the previous system in 2013-14. The worst team in each division flips a coin to see who will receive the first picks in the upcoming draft.

Since 2015, players could enter the draft and participate in the NBA Draft Combine multiple times and retain NCAA eligibility by withdrawing from the draft within 10 days after the end of the mid-May NBA draft combine. Some players have chosen to use that year to play professionally overseas for example, such as Brandon Jennings, Emmanuel Mudiay, and Terrance Ferguson. Thon Maker was eligible for the 2016 draft despite not going to college because he chose to undertake a postgraduate year, so he was technically one year removed from graduation. There had been only 44 draftees from high school to college to play in theNBA throughout this process. Not many high school players went directly to the NBA draft for almost 20 years after Darryl Dawkins in 1975 because of the exposure of the college games. In the early years of theDraft, teams would select players until they ran out of prospects. By 1974, it had stabilized to 10 rounds, which held up until 1985, when the draft was shortened to seven rounds, which gives undrafted players the chance to try out for any team. By agreement with the Nationalasketball Players Association, the drafts from 1989 onward have been limited to two rounds. From 2009 through 2015, the college underclassman had until the day before the April signing period to withdraw their name from thedraft and retainNCAA eligibility. The NBA introduced the lottery process in 1985.