I feel like it’s a good idea. It’s a win-win for the players. You can go out and work out for NBA teams, get some feedback from them and if you don’t like what you hear or you do like what you hear, you can either stay in the draft or return to school. – Utah State men's basketball head coach Tim Duryea
At the conclusion of the Utah State men’s basketball season in March, junior forward Jalen Moore and his father Jimmy requested a meeting with Aggies head coach Tim Duryea.
There, the Moores expressed Jalen’s interest in declaring for the 2016 NBA draft in June. Duryea felt like it was a wise move to make, and on March 25, Moore announced his intention.
The 6-foot-9 Sky View High School product has had a few solid collegiate seasons, earning second team All-Mountain West Conference honors as a sophomore and third team as a junior, but wasn’t exactly being discussed far and wide as a bona fide NBA prospect.
So why were all parties in such agreement that Moore should declare?
Thanks to new NCAA rules that went into effect in January, college basketball players now have much more flexibility to test the draft waters without risking loss of eligibility, and Moore is just one of many who is taking advantage of them.
Although multiple measures were passed that help players come draft time, the one with the most immediate impact concerns the deadline for deciding to remain in the draft.
Prior to January, players had to decide by mid-April whether they were going to remain in the draft, a date that came just before the NCAA’s spring signing period opened. Now, they have until 10 days after the invitation-only draft combine in mid-May (the 2016 combine concludes Sunday) to make that decision so long as they don’t hire an agent.
This year’s deadline to remove one’s name from the draft is May 25.
The primary challenge under the old rules was that NBA teams don’t start private workouts with players until May, meaning prospects had no real opportunity to receive feedback from teams about their draft stock. Now, they can go through at least a few workouts before making a final decision about staying in the draft or returning to school.
In all, 117 underclassmen from colleges in the United States declared this spring, compared to just 48 in 2015.
While Utah’s Jakob Poeltl and USU-Eastern’s Lamous Brown declared early, both have hired an agent, meaning Moore is the only player from a Beehive State school who is still taking advantage of the new rules.
“I feel like it’s a good idea,” Duryea said. “It’s a win-win for the players. You can go out and work out for NBA teams, get some feedback from them and if you don’t like what you hear or you do like what you hear, you can either stay in the draft or return to school. I feel like it benefits the college player a lot. I feel like it helps us out, helps us get better, helps us get experience if you come back to college.”
Having only worked out for the Utah Jazz up to this point, Moore said he’s neutral about whether he’ll stay in the draft or return to Logan, but both his father and Duryea said that barring a team showing great interest in the forward over the next few weeks, the plan going into this process was that Moore will go back to school for his senior year.
“Of course Jalen is like most athletes in that his dream is to play at the next level,” said Jimmy Moore, Jalen's father, who himself suited up for Utah State in the 1970s, then played two seasons in the NBA with the Seattle SuperSonics before a 10-year career overseas. “I feel like he has had a really good career here at Utah State. Our whole intent — and we explained this to Coach Duryea — is we wanted to test the waters with the whole intent of returning for his senior year.”
Jalen Moore has workouts scheduled next week with the Memphis Grizzlies, Minnesota Timberwolves and Brooklyn Nets. A date with the Boston Celtics is being planned.
As much as anything else this month, Moore’s aim is to get on NBA teams’ radar screens, both so he can receive feedback from them and also so they’re more familiar with him this fall when they’re scouting for the 2017 draft.
“For me, I thought I would just put my name out there, put my school’s name out there, let people know about me and then just go out and get some workouts with some teams and try to expand my game and try to get some feedback from NBA scouts and NBA organizations,” he said. “Just try to get more experience under my belt as much as I can and get better this offseason.”
Duryea feels as though Moore is playing his cards exactly right.
“He’s not going to make a bad decision and end up without eligibility in the D-League or overseas on a level somewhere he really doesn’t want to be playing,” the coach said. “He’s going into it totally using the process to his advantage. I think if every kid did that, it’s all positive.”
Although Duryea is confident Moore will be smart about his future, both college coaches and NBA front office executives recognize there’s a history of underclassmen making ill-advised choices about staying in the draft when the odds of getting selected are low.
In an effort to help advise prospects, the NBA has created the Undergraduate Advisory Committee, a group of team executives who are available to confidentially counsel potential draftees about the likelihood of getting selected, but all parties agree that it still comes down to making wise decisions.
“I think the kids that make a mistake are the kids that have unrealistic expectations or have been told unrealistic things or don’t have any guidance, which Jalen has tremendous family guidance,” Duryea said. “If you go into the process and make a really bad decision to where you lose your eligibility, you have nobody but yourself to blame. I think if you have a level-headed kid like a Jalen Moore that’s realistic in where he’s at right now and where he hopes to be in a year, I think the rule is great.”
Jazz vice president of player personnel Walt Perrin had similar sentiments.
“When there’s only 60 people who are going to be drafted, I would hope most of them are wise enough that the NBA doesn’t think they’re one of the top 60 players and they’ll go back to school,” he said.
While the rule changes seem to be positive for student-athletes, they do create some challenges that college coaches and NBA front offices will have to work through.
In the case of coaches who are seeing players stay on the fence for a longer period of time, recruiting can become more difficult. Under the old system, players had to decide their final draft intent the day before the spring signing period began, meaning coaches knew exactly what holes on their roster needed to be filled in time to secure commitments.
Now, they may find themselves in limbo in determining both team needs and scholarship availability.
Still, Runnin’ Utes head coach Larry Krystkowiak feels the changes are positive.
“I’d much rather have a kid that declared for a draft find out that he’s not capable of making that move and coming back and maybe risking not having that last spot,” he said. “It can create a dilemma, but at the end of the day, it’s probably more in favor of college players making the best decision.”
The new rules certainly are creating more work for Perrin, who is tasked with organizing the Jazz workouts.
Perrin said the biggest challenge he faces is that instead of working with agents to schedule prospects to come to Salt Lake City, he now has to coordinate with college coaches who can be more difficult to contact.
The Utah State coaches are the ones who are working with NBA teams to organize Moore’s workouts.
“It’s a little tougher,” Perrin said. “It’s an adjustment period. I will adjust to whatever the NBA wants to do in the future, but it has been different.”
No matter what ultimately ends up happening over the next few weeks, Jimmy Moore feels that the pre-draft experience will allow his son to display more of an ability to play on the wing than he gets as a “stretch 4” with the Aggies, and perhaps more importantly, he hopes it will prove to be a good confidence builder.
“We’re just excited for the opportunity,” he said. “Jalen’s excited about it. He’s been working hard. We’ll just give it a shot and see what happens. This is just an opportunity to try to reach his end goal.”
Ryan McDonald is a sports reporter at DeseretNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ryanwmcdonald.