photo by: Chance Parker

Kansas freshman Elmarko Jackson shoots the ball during the Bill Self Basketball Camp scrimmage on Wednesday, June 7, 2023, at Allen Fieldhouse.

We just saw the 28th and 29th players of the Bill Self era get drafted into the NBA and sports media is already speculating about who could be the 30th. Typical.

I have to be honest, though — I do find excessively early mock drafts pretty compelling in the NBA, where players can go one-and-done (as Gradey Dick just did), meaning that draftniks frequently have to evaluate an athlete’s professional potential without even seeing him in college first.

I should note that paths to the NBA are becoming somewhat more varied. Just one of the top five picks Thursday night, Alabama’s Brandon Miller, attended college. Victor Wembanyama played professionally overseas — not an incredibly novel path for an incredibly novel prospect — but Scoot Henderson opted for the NBA’s G League Ignite development program, and twins Amen and Ausar Thompson shone in the independent Overtime Elite league for high-level prospects.

That said, I don’t think college basketball is going extinct anytime soon. There’s no substitute for the nationwide exposure or, of course, the actual potential for material improvement under a coach like Self, with a proven record of sending players to the next level. Also, the possible revenue from name, image and likeness as a college basketball star now often exceeds what many players can get professionally. (North Carolina’s Armando Bacot kind of became a defining example of this phenomenon over the last few years.)

Self, for his part, played coy when asked Thursday night if he saw any current players getting selected next year.

“Yes,” he said. “I think there is. Without question. I hope they all do if they choose to leave, but I would be very disappointed if we didn’t have a pro or two on our team this upcoming season.”

With that in mind, let’s see if we can figure out in some vague way whom he might be referencing. I took a quick survey of the 11 extant 2024 mock drafts I could find Friday — most a few hours old, some a few months older. Two just projected the lottery and five just the first round.

One trend quickly emerged: So far, in the minds of these analysts, it’s Elmarko Jackson and then everybody else.

Elmarko Jackson

McDonald’s All-Americans are nothing new in the KU program, and Jackson, a four-star guard prospect from New Jersey, had already been committed to KU for several months when he received the honor in January and became the 50th Jayhawk to do so.

They’ll need to find a way to get him sufficient playing time, which will be a challenge on an extremely experienced team that features returning starters in Dajuan Harris Jr. (point guard), Kevin McCullar Jr. (small forward) and KJ Adams Jr. (probable power forward), plus do-everything center Hunter Dickinson coming out of Michigan, and then two more transfers in Nick Timberlake of Towson and Arterio Morris of Texas vying for one last spot.

This should probably go without saying, but you generally need to be on the court to become a legitimate draft prospect. And if you don’t become a draft prospect, you often need to be on the court to want to actually stay at your school. KU recruited three McDonald’s All-Americans in 2022, but while Dick turned into a star and a lottery pick, MJ Rice and Ernest Udeh Jr. averaged seven and eight minutes, respectively, and both transferred after the season.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Jackson finds his way into the picture via that final Timberlake/Morris spot. The experience and shooting acumen of Timberlake will be hard to pass up in late-game situations, and I figure that the combo guard Jackson will get his minutes, at least early on, coming off the bench to spell either Timberlake or Harris. From there it will depend on whether he takes advantage of those minutes.

We know from the early scrimmages at the Bill Self Basketball Camps this month — yes, we know this, even though Self himself would urge us not to analyze them — that Jackson can be exceptional in spurts. In the second exhibition, he flashed his athleticism, scoring 10 of his 12 points in a single 17-5 second-half run that helped his freshman-centric team take a brief lead over what looked like a potential starting lineup. In the first scrimmage, he had finished alley-oop dunks and sunk 3s with equal ease, though after the game, he said he hoped to help out primarily on defense this season, probably a wise approach for a freshman.

Nearly half the mock drafts think Jackson will be one-and-done. Four (NBAdraft.net, OddsChecker, SBNation and the Washington Examiner) have him going in the first round, as the former two expect him to slip into the late lottery as Dick did. NBA Draft Room has him at the top of the second round.

None of the mock drafts I surveyed expected any other KU player to get drafted.

And then everybody else

That struck me as strange given that McCullar has frequently told media he could have gone in the second round this past Thursday — as his teammate Wilson just did — if he had stayed in the draft. He certainly has the aptitude on one side of the ball as a two-time Naismith Defensive Player of the Year semifinalist.

Kansas guard Kevin McCullar Jr. (15) pulls up to the bucket against Kansas guard Nick Timberlake during a scrimmage before the Bill Self basketball campers on Wednesday, June 14, 2023 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

But he has a couple factors working against him. He has shot just 30 percent from deep over the course of his career and hasn’t shown much improvement there over his four years of collegiate action, which leads to another salient point: He’ll turn 24 during his first professional season. The question will be whether teams believe he has much more room to grow in the NBA. The NBA Draft Room site ranked him the No. 81 prospect in 2024.

Just above McCullar in that ranking was Harris, a member of KU’s 2021-22 national championship team who elevated practically every aspect of his game as a redshirt junior and earned defensive player of the year honors from the Big 12 Conference. The talented distributor averaged more than six assists and two steals per game to go along with 8.9 points and 2.5 rebounds. He and Dickinson have talked extensively about how they can help each other excel on the court this year. As KU lives and dies by that relationship, so too will their draft stock.

That brings me to Dickinson himself, who, like Harris and unlike McCullar, technically has two years left to play. He hasn’t committed one way or the other regarding his intentions after 2023-24. Dickinson has already shown his potential as a collegiate star after nearly averaging a double-double in consecutive seasons at Michigan. For one thing, given his national profile, he could stand to benefit in financial terms from more time at Kansas (On3 puts his annual NIL value at $281,000, and Dickinson has previously said on his podcast that he made just five figures at Michigan). On the court, already a strong scorer inside and outside, he’ll hope to find a new gear while surrounded by the most talented team he’s played with.

No one else from the KU roster was ranked by any of the draft services I found, but that’s not to say that someone else couldn’t take off this year. Morris, for his part, shared a picture of himself along with a countdown to next year’s draft on Instagram Thursday night. He began his career as one of the nation’s most highly touted prospects but didn’t stand out much in his freshman year at Texas. Anything can happen, however, over the next 51 weeks and four days.