Richard Washington Jr.

NBA Announces 88 Early Entrants Withdrawing From Draft

The NBA issued a press release today announcing that 88 prospects who declared for the 2021 draft as early entrants earlier this year have withdrawn their names from the draft pool.

We’ve passed along updates on most of these players in recent weeks, but the following names on today’s list are ones that we hadn’t written about yet. They’ve pulled out of the 2021 NBA draft and will retain their NCAA eligibility for at least one more year:

  1. Josiah Agnew, G, Denmark Technical College (SC) (freshman)
  2. Dalonte Brown, F, Miami (Ohio) (senior)
  3. D.J. Burns Jr., F, Winthrop (sophomore)
  4. Lydell Elmore, F, High Point (senior)
  5. Patrick Greene Jr., G, National Park College (AR) (sophomore)
  6. Ron Harper Jr., G/F, Rutgers (junior)
  7. Trevor Hudgins, G, NW Missouri State (junior)
  8. David Jean-Baptiste, G, Chattanooga (senior)
  9. Jalen Johnson, F, Mississippi State (senior)
  10. Jaizec Lottie, G, Flagler (FL) (senior)
  11. Loudon Love, F, Wright State (senior)
  12. Issa Muhammad, F, Daytona State (FL) (sophomore)
  13. Jordan Phillips, G/F, UT Arlington (junior)
  14. Antonio Reeves, G, Illinois State (sophomore)
  15. Shawn Royal Jr., G/F, Victory Rock Prep (FL) (post-graduate)
  16. Maleek Taylor, F, Allen University (SC) (senior)
  17. Alonzo Verge Jr., G, Arizona State (senior)
  18. Richard Washington Jr., G/F, San Jose State (senior)
  19. Keith Williams, G, Cincinnati (senior)

Our unofficial list of early entrants is now up to date, to the best of our knowledge. While the NCAA’s early entrant withdrawal deadline came and went this past Wednesday, the NBA’s own deadline is on July 19, so there will still be a number of early entrants removing their names from the draft in the next nine days — especially international prospects, since the NCAA deadline didn’t apply to them at all.

We’ll continue updating our list of early entrants through the NBA’s withdrawal deadline on July 19, and will eventually provide an official list of this year’s draft-eligible early entrants.

NBA Announces Initial Early Entrant List For 2021 Draft

The NBA has officially released the initial list of early entrants for the 2021 NBA draft, announcing in a press release that 353 players have filed as early entry candidates. Of those prospects, 296 are from colleges, while 57 are international early entrants.

That number obliterates the previous record of 236 early entrants, established in 2018. That had been expected, however, since the NCAA gave players an extra year of eligibility due to the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in seniors having to decide between staying at college for one more season or declaring for the draft as an “early” entrant.

Since well over half of the college early entrants are seniors, there are actually fewer college underclassmen than usual in this initial group of early entrants.

This year’s total of 353 early entrants figures to shrink significantly by July 7 and again by July 19, the two deadlines for players to withdraw their names from the draft pool. But it still looks like the pool will remain extremely crowded, with the eventual number of early entrants certain to exceed 60, the number of picks in the draft.

Our tracker of early entrants for the 2021 draft now includes seniors and is fully up to date. It can be found right here. It doesn’t include players who are automatically draft-eligible this year. As Jonathan Givony of ESPN tweets, that list of auto-eligible players includes the prospects who played for the G League Ignite, such as Jalen Green and Jonathan Kuminga.

Here are the changes we made to our tracker today:


Newly-added players:

College players:

These players hadn’t previously been included on our unofficial list of underclassmen early entrants and weren’t on the list of senior early entrants that the NBA sent to teams last week.

International players:

These players weren’t previously mentioned on our list of international early entrants. The country listed here indicates where they last played, not necessarily where they were born.


Players removed:

Despite reports or announcements that the players below would declare for the draft, they didn’t show up on the NBA’s official list.

That could mean a number of things — they may have decided against entering the draft; they may have entered the draft, then withdrawn; they may have incorrectly filed their paperwork; or the NBA may have accidentally omitted some names.

In any case, we’ve removed the following names from our early entrant list for the time being.