2023 NBA Draft Auto-Eligible Prospects

We’ve provided real-time updates regarding 2023 NBA Draft early entrant declarations up through the April 23rd early entrant deadline, but what about the rest of the NBA Draft pool? Other draft candidates that need not declare early entrance (though dozens post about it anyways) are considered auto-eligible.

The rules regarding draft eligibility can be found within the Article X Section 1(b) of the 2017 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement. There are a lot of nuances within these clauses (and a few more one-off triggers), but to simplify things, there are effectively four primary triggers of draft auto-eligibility:

1) Collegiate prospect who fully exhausts their college eligibility

Example: Jalen Pickett | Penn State

2) International prospect who turns 22 years old in the calendar year of a given NBA Draft

Example: Malcolm Cazalon | Mega Basket

3) Prep-to-pro prospect who is at least 19 years of age in the calendar year of a given NBA Draft and at least one NBA season removed from high school graduation

Example: Amen Thompson | City Reapers

4) Prospect who leaves college with eligibility remaining, does not file for early entrance, and signs/plays professionally

Example: Prentiss Hubb | Notre Dame → MHP Riesen Ludwigsburg 

Triggers 1 and 2 are your more standard, run-of-the-mill auto-eligible draft candidates. The population of players that fall into these categories is very, very large (many of whom are not relevant prospects). As such, it’s not practical (or worthwhile) to build a fully exhaustive list of all these players.

We will attempt to include the prospects in these standard categories who have even an inkling of draft/overseas buzz per the Rookie Scale consensus prospect ranking algorithm and/or those for whom we have clarity on their agency situation.

Triggers 3 and 4 are the more interesting auto-eligible prospect cases, which are a bit more complicated to track. Trigger 4 particularly has a much higher volume of prospects this year as a result of the necessity of traditional four-year seniors to declare as early entrants last year (and for the next 4 or so drafts). Through a combination of confusion and indifference, many prospects with a remaining year of eligibility kicked off their pro careers in the G League and abroad without declaring as early entrants for the 2022 NBA Draft. We will include as many of these as we are able to verify.

This looks to be the last hurrah for this specific set of eligiblity rules, as some of this will reportedly be simplified once the newly agreed upon CBA kicks in.

We also have our ear to the ground on agency representation intel, as indicated below.

 = Signed with agency + publicly announced

 = Intel-based agency projection