French player Victor Wembanyama is expected to be the draft’s No. 1 selection of the San Antonio Spurs.
What to know about the 2023 NBA Draft
- The 77th NBA Draft, when the league’s worst teams hope to land transformational talent and elite clubs look for diamonds in the rough, unfolds tonight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
- The San Antonio Spurs will be on the clock at about 8 p.m. EDT. French sensation Victor Wembanyama is expected to be the top pick.
- The first round can be watched on ABC or ESPN and streamed on ESPN’s website and app. ABC is set to televise the first round and ESPN both rounds.
- The draft is as much art as science with teams blowing lay-up early picks and finding late-round nuggets. For example, Denver got future, two-time MVP Nikola Jokić with the 41st pick in 2014 before he led the Nuggets to their first NBA title. While Michael Jordan is considered the greatest player in NBA history, was no lock for Springfield as the No. 3 selection in 1984.
NBA hoop dreams of the world’s most elite players reach a key milemarker at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn tonight.
For the 10th time in 11 years, the NBA Draft will unfold at the Barclays Center, in what’s become the unofficial home of the league’s biggest summer event.
Since the Brooklyn Nets arena was first tapped for the 2013 draft, it’s been there every year other than the remote Covid-19 summer of 2020. It returned to Barclays in 2021.
The NBA Draft has been a Big Apple, or nearby, fixture for most of this century. The 2011 and 2012 drafts were held at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, after the drafts between 2001 and 2010 were at Madison Square Garden.
The last non-New York or Jersey draft was at the Target Center in Minneapolis in 2000.
PARIS — Victor Wembanyama has long been seen as basketball royalty in the making, with fans and experts buzzing on both sides of the Atlantic about a prospect some view as the best to enter the league since LeBron James.
And those who know the 19-year-old best like Vincent Collet, the coach of the French national team who also worked with him daily at Parisian team Metropolitans 92, are expecting even greater things once he takes his “special” talents to North America.
“When you are so tall, plus you have skills and ability to move well, which was the case, obviously, you know that this kid is special and will be something special after,” Collet told Us.Mistertruth last Wednesday.