For a long time, the running joke around top college basketball prospects having second thoughts about turning professional was along the lines of “he can’t afford the pay cut.”
It was a nod to years of rumours and occasional truths about some college players being paid to play back when that was explicitly against NCAA rules.
But with the arrival of the NIL era — where college athletes can profit from their “name, image and likeness,” which began in 2021 and has only picked up momentum since — the old joke has never been truer.
With the NBA draft set for June 23rd and 24th, fewer athletes than ever are leaving school early since the prospect of a multi-million dollar payday in college outweighs the benefits of being drafted for all but those guaranteed to be taken in the top half or top two-thirds of the draft.
For 2026-27, the 20th pick in the NBA draft is eligible for a two-year contract that can be worth as much as $4 million in the first season. The 30th pick is eligible for a two-year deal starting at $2.56 million. Players taken in the second round often sign two-way deals that are not fully guaranteed and are projected to be worth $580,000 this coming season.
Some college players have looked at the math and decided they will make more than that by staying in school.
As a result, the challenges of finding NBA-quality talent outside of the draft lottery and certainly into the second round have gotten increasingly difficult.
“I would say it’s definitely been impacted by the new NILera that we live in. It seemed like (picking) in the 20s range … there was more certainty in terms of being able to find guys for sure that that we really liked back in the day,” said Raptors assistant general manager Dan Tolzman on Tuesday as he gave a briefing in advance of next week’s draft, where the Raptors are scheduled to pick 19th and 50th. “ … I think that some of those guys that would have been in this conversation, they went back to school (and among the) guys that have now stayed (in the draft), I think a lot of teams are seeing them as their targets for a lot of teams, (so) there’s not as much of a chance to, like, have guys kind of fall through the cracks as there used to be.”
Ja’Kobe Walter has proven to be another in a long line of Toronto Raptors success stories, a player taken in the bottom third of the draft who has proven to be a worthy NBA rotation player and maybe something more. He was an underclassman who could have had a good NIL deal but decided to jump to the NBA.
The 19th overall pick in the 2024 draft out of Baylor led the Raptors in three-point point shooting percentage (minimum 100 attempts) and showed signs of being a viable multi-positional defender. The second-year wing had some impressive moments in the playoffs also, averaging 19.0 points per game and 38.7 minutes played to go along with 3.3 steals and 43.3 per cent three-point shooting over the final three games of the Raptors seven-game first-round series against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Over two seasons, he’s given every indication of being a long-term organizational fit and an exceptional find.
He joins a long list of gems the Raptors have unearthed in the later stages of the draft process, albeit before NIL was such a factor. They include Norman Powell, taken 46th overall and Delon Wright (20th) in 2015, Pascal Siakam (27th) in 2016 and now two-time champion OG Anunoby (23rd) in 2017, along with signing undrafted free agents Fred VanVleet (2016) and Chris Boucher (2018). Few teams have done more with less.
While the top 10 or 12 of the 2026 draft is unquestionably deep and talented, with the consensus top four of (in no order) AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson, Cameron Boozer and Caleb Wilson each tabbed with star potential, the draft class gets more uncertain after that.
“I think there’s a fairly known consensus up at the top, but then after, say, 10, 11, 12, it’s like kind of wide open in terms of like what order anyone could go in,” said Tolzman. “So we don’t necessarily know who we’re going to be looking at come 19, but we know there is like a large group of players that we really know in the event that any one of them could be there. But it seems like most of the guys up top, there’s less of an opportunity for some of these guys to slide down, which has been a case in the past.”
There are also fewer overall prospects to consider. Because of the opportunities in college basketball, where there are reports of returning players that would otherwise be on the NBA radar earning anywhere from $2-to-$6 million — significantly more than a second-round pick NBA pick would likely earn, and competitive with what a mid-to-late first rounder would get — fewer players have even tested the draft waters.
Only 71 underclassmen declared for the draft back in April, the fewest since 2003. And after several pulled out of the draft to stay in school before the deadline to do so passed on Sunday, the list of underclassmen candidates was down to 31. The rest of the draft will be made up of players who have used up their college eligibility or international players.
Tolzman said that — as always — the Raptors will favour overall talent rather than positional need come draft night and that despite the competition for talent presented by the NIL era, he’s still optimistic the Raptors can find someone who can help them.
“We really like 19 where we’re at. We’ve always kind of enjoyed how the draft plays out because there’s always guys that maybe surprisingly go up higher and it pushes some guys down that, like, we most like,” he said. “Like we didn’t get Ja’Kobe in for a workout or an interview … but we felt really good about our background on him and him as a player (and) from all our work, we were comfortable pulling the trigger on a guy sight unseen. We just got to be ready and have all that work done beforehand, just because you never know who could end up being there.”
Sometimes less is more.