5 N.B.A. Draft Prospects to Know

From the cheap seats at Barclays Center on Thursday night, the N.B.A. draft might appear to be back to normal. Fans will be in attendance, and so too will some of the league’s future stars. When their names are called, they’ll saunter up to the stage, greet Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., and show off their custom suits.

But for the franchises resting their hopes on these prospects, the draft process has been anything but normal. During a typical season, N.B.A. decision makers need nothing more than a passport and a plane ticket to evaluate the best basketball talent across the country and around the world. This year, though, they had to navigate a hodgepodge of coronavirus protocols.

The N.C.A.A. did not impose uniform restrictions on scouting trips for its schools, so only some allowed visitors at games. And scouting visits to Europe and Australia could mean up to a month in quarantines.

“A lot of teams threw their hands up in the air and said, ‘We’re not doing this,’” said Jonathan Givony, an ESPN draft analyst and founder of the scouting service DraftExpress.com. “They were worried about their health. They didn’t want to leave their teams. And they didn’t want to get stuck in god knows where. The traditional talent evaluation process was just not possible.”

That means, in all likelihood, there will be teams in this draft who select players they have never scouted at a live game in person. For a league that invests tens of millions of dollars a year in talent evaluation, that might be rarer than selecting a future superstar with a first-round pick.

Almost every team took the time to see top-tier players like U.S.C.’s Evan Mobley, the best big man in the draft, and the G League Ignite’s Jalen Green, an electric guard who already signed a lucrative shoe deal. But later picks will have the opportunity to surprise even the teams that select them with their ability to shoot from deep (Gonzaga’s Corey Kispert), make spectacular passes (Australia’s Josh Giddey) and lock down on defense (Tennessee’s Jaden Springer).

Here are five players to know.

Jared Butler

6-foot-3, 195 pounds, Guard, Baylor

When a stranger approaches him on the street or in an airport terminal and says, “Congratulations,” Jared Butler sometimes gets surprised. Then, as he’s shaking a hand or signing an autograph, it’ll hit him: He won the Most Outstanding Player Award as part of Baylor’s N.C.A.A. men’s championship-winning team just over three months ago.

After averaging 16.7 points and 4.8 rebounds during his junior season, the splashy scorer became the first player since Carmelo Anthony to post 20-plus points and 7 assists in a men’s national championship game. But Butler’s summer has been full of life-changing moments. In June, he was referred to the N.B.A.’s Fitness-to-Play panel because of an unspecified medical issue that Butler had known about and played with since he was a teen.

“When I was first diagnosed, it was like a truck hit me,” Butler said, while declining to identify the condition. “I spent my whole college years with this big question mark over my head. I didn’t know if the N.B.A. was going to clear me. I don’t know if I was doing all this for no reason.”

While he awaited word from the panel, Butler was barred from any official basketball activities, including the draft combine and private workouts with teams. He continued to train in Los Angeles until one morning earlier this month, when he woke up at 4 a.m. local time for a meeting that was scheduled for 7 a.m. on the East Coast. The panel told him he’d been cleared to play.

“That whole month, it felt like my future was hanging on by a thread,” Butler said. “Now I’m so relieved. Hearing that news was as exciting as getting drafted. No matter what happens from here, no matter where I get drafted, I’m happy. I’m playing with house money.”

Tre Mann

6-foot-5, 190 pounds, Guard, Florida

Tre Mann didn’t expect to spend two seasons at Florida. A McDonald’s All-American and consensus 5-star recruit in high school, Mann believed that he’d be in Gainesville for less than a year before moving on to the N.B.A.

Instead, Mann’s freshman season was a struggle. After starting the first four games, he missed the next two with a concussion. He was moved to the bench for the rest of the year, averaging just 5.2 points per game and posting a negative assist-to-turnover ratio. By the time the Gators’ season ended, Mann had come to see that getting to the N.B.A. was no guarantee.

Feeling down, he found a familiar source of inspiration: himself. He began watching his own YouTube highlights. “I’ve been making plays my whole life,” Mann said. “Getting buckets for myself, getting buckets for my teammates — that’s what I do.”

Last June, as Mann was training for his sophomore season, he tested positive for the coronavirus. For two weeks, he lost his sense of taste and smell, along with about most of the muscle he’d put on after the season. With Florida’s facilities closed because of the pandemic, Mann found an open gym an hour and a half from his house in Central Florida, and drove back and forth every day to get back into playing shape.

When he returned to campus in the fall, he was surprised to learn that not only had he regained all of the weight, but that he’d also grown two inches. “I was feeling taller in all kinds of ways,” he said. On the court, he became Florida’s primary playmaker, leading the team in points (16), assists (3.5) and win shares (3.3). He also secured the Gators’ first-round N.C.A.A. tournament win over Virginia Tech with a clutch step-back 3-pointer in overtime.

“When I tell N.B.A. teams about my freshman year now, I tell them it was a blessing,” he said. “I didn’t transfer. I didn’t run away. I faced adversity, and I fought through it. I know I’ll face even more challenges at the next level, but I’m ready for them.”

Trey Murphy III

6-foot-9, 205 pounds, Guard, Virginia

Trey Murphy cherished his time in the N.C.A.A.’s transfer portal two years ago. As a high schooler in Durham, N.C., Murphy had been a lightly recruited 2-star prospect in the backyard of three college basketball powerhouses. But after two years of high-level play at Rice, Murphy was one of the most sought-after transfers.

Many college transfers choose schools that will give them more minutes or more offensive touches, but Murphy had something different in mind when he chose to play for Virginia: He wanted to be a better defender.

“I really don’t think I was under-recruited in high school,” Murphy said. “I was 6’4” and 150 pounds. The offers I got reflected where I was at the time. But at Rice, I saw a path to playing in the N.B.A. My goal posts changed. And I knew I’d have to challenge myself to get there.”

Murphy is now considered a mid-first round pick as a so-called 3-and-D player. As a junior last season, he shot 43.3 percent from 3 and 92.7 percent from the free-throw line. And at 6-foot-9 with a 7-foot wingspan and a 8-foot-9 standing reach, he is a long and pugnacious perimeter defender who can cover multiple positions.

Murphy remembers telling friends when he was in high school that he would make it to the N.C.A.A. tournament in his junior year and turn pro afterward. Of course, at the time he thought he would be at the tournament with Rice and in Europe for the pros. But his actual future has turned out better than his prognostications, so far.

“Nothing really happened the way that I expected,” he said. “But everything has worked out better than I could have imagined.”

Joshua Primo

6-foot-6, 190 pounds, Guard, Alabama

Joshua Primo has done more than a dozen private workouts and interviews with N.B.A. teams in the past two months, and one question has come up every time: How does it feel to be the youngest player in the draft?

For Primo, who won’t turn 19 until Dec. 24, it feels normal. He’s the baby of his family — his brother is 20 years older, and his sister is 12 years older. But they didn’t treat him like the youngest, especially not on the basketball court. Keisha Primo, who played for Southern Connecticut State from 2010 to 2014, would run up the score against her little brother on their driveway court every chance she got.

“I don’t think I scored a point against her until I was 12,” Joshua said. “Around that time, she decided she didn’t want to play against me anymore. I bet the all-time score between us is like 10,000 to 3.”

In organized basketball, Primo always played ahead of his age, making him the youngest player on just about every roster. A native of Toronto, Primo was 16 years old when he played for Canada in the FIBA U-19 World Cup. He was 17 when he started his first game for Alabama as a freshman last year. But that didn’t stop him from averaging 8.1 points per game and shooting 38.1 percent from 3 in 19 starts on an Alabama team overrun with upperclassmen.

Those numbers won’t stand out among a crowded pack of guards looking to be selected in the first round, but Primo’s age makes him a coveted commodity. N.B.A. teams tend to prefer younger players in the draft because they have developed fewer bad habits, and because they possess that ever-elusive attribute: upside. Plus, when it comes to playing up to the competition, Primo is an old hand.

“I’ve always made a point to learn from older players, from my sister to my U-19 teammates to Alabama,” Primo said. “Going to the N.B.A. will be the same thing. I’m hungry. I’m humble. I’m ready to learn.”

Alperen Sengun

6-foot-9, 240 pounds, Center, Turkey

Statistically speaking, there may not be a more impressive player in this year’s draft than Alperen Sengun. Sengun, who turned 19 on Sunday, was an almost unstoppable force in the Turkish Super League, which is widely considered to be second only to Spain’s Liga A.C.B. in European basketball.

In 28.3 minutes per game this season, Sengun averaged 19.2 points, 9.4 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.7 blocks per game. He shot 64.6 percent from the field and 81.2 percent from the free-throw line. His player efficiency rating, a measure of a player’s per-minute efficiency, was 32.9. According to The Athletic’s John Hollinger, who created the statistic, no player in Turkey has posted a P.E.R. above 30 in the past decade.

“If you had told me he’d be a lottery pick a year ago, I would have argued with you,” said Jason Filippi, a longtime N.B.A. scout and the director of international scouting for the draft service Prospective Insight. “I thought he’d slow down after the preseason. He didn’t. I thought he’d slow down once teams started doubling him. He didn’t. I kept waiting to see someone kick his ass, but it never happened. He beat every big man in Europe.”

At 6-foot-9 and 240 pounds, Sengun would appear on paper to project as an N.B.A. power forward. But in the flesh, he is an old-school, low-block player who has post moves for days and whose hands are magnets for rebounds. Sengun’s primary growing pains will be on defense, where he may struggle to switch onto more athletic players in pick-and-rolls. But, to N.B.A. teams, those are small concerns compared with his potential for offensive production.

“There’s never been a guy who’s produced the way he has and not found some level of success in the N.B.A.,” Givony said. “The question is not: Can he get you a double-double in the N.B.A.? It’s: How does he hold up defensively? How will the shooting evolve? But when you’re that productive at that age, it removes a lot of doubt.”