In three seasons at Villanova, point guard Jalen Brunson won two NCAA championships, and this year won the Wooden Award for most outstanding player in the nation.
Now he’s ready for his next challenge — he’s declaring for the NBA draft.
Adrian Wojnarowski at ESPN broke the story.Villanova junior guard Jalen Brunson, the consensus NCAA player of the year for the national champion Wildcats, will enter the 2018 NBA draft.
“After careful consideration and prayer, I have decided to enter the June NBA draft and hire an agent,” Brunson wrote in an essay for ESPN.com.
Brunson is projected as a late first, early second round pick.
He’s a smart pick-and-roll point guard and, as he showed at Villanova, he’s a strong team leader. He’s a good playmaker who is physically strong and can get to his spots on the floor, plus teams have to respect his shot, both off the bounce and off the catch. He can knock down threes. What holds him back in the draft is he’s not an elite athlete at a position stacked with those kinds of guys around the NBA. He’s an average NBA athlete and not terribly long, which leads to defensive questions. He’s going to be a good floor general, he knows how to run a team and teams see value in that, but he’s not going to just physically take over an NBA game.
