The NCAA’s deadline for early entrants to withdraw from the 2020 NBA draft pool has passed — players had until midnight eastern time on Monday (August 3) to decide whether or not to keep their names in the draft.
That deadline applied to college freshmen, sophomores, and juniors (or seniors with eligibility remaining) who decided to test the draft waters before automatically becoming draft-eligible in a future season. As long as they didn’t sign with a non-NCAA-certified agent, those players were able to weigh their decisions up until Monday night.
As our early entrant tracker shows, we’re still waiting for confirmation one way or the other on a small handful of players, but decisions for most college early entrants have been reported and/or announced. Approximately 65 college early entrants decided to remain in the draft, while about 90 pulled out.
The NCAA’s early entrant withdrawal deadline – which had originally been scheduled for June 3 before the coronavirus pandemic forced it to be pushed back by two months – only really applies to college players.
The NBA’s own withdrawal deadline doesn’t arrive until October 6, so a player who has decided to remain in the draft can still pull out before then, and many international early entrants will do just that. But if a college player withdraws from the draft between now and October 6, he won’t be able to recover his NCAA eligibility.
Interestingly, due to pandemic-related postponements, the deadline for early entrants to declare for the draft won’t arrive until August 17. That means that a college early entrant who declared for the draft in the spring and withdrew before Monday’s deadline could theoretically still re-enter if he has a change of heart over the next two weeks. If he does so though, he’ll forgo his remaining NCAA eligibility.
Since the August 3 deadline was the NCAA’s and not the NBA’s, we may not get an official update from the league this week on 2020’s early entrants. For now, we’ll have to rely on our unofficial tracker — the next update from the NBA will likely be issued sometime after its new August 17 early entry deadline passes.
The 2020 NBA draft will occur on October 16.