Dick Weiss on College Basketball
The NBA is putting the finishing touches on the Academy Games in United States for the first time, opening the door for more global recruiting.
The third annual camp will be held from July 9 to July 14 at the Atlanta Hawks practice facility and will feature eight teams of 90 players from around the globe, including 60 from seven NBA Academies. The academies consist of the NBA Global Academies in Australia, Senegal, Latin America in Mexico, Indiana and China (which has three separate facilities around China.
Players will range in age from 15 to 19, with the majority being recruitable prospects for college coaches, who are invited to attend the event and will likely make up most of the spectators, along with NBA executives and league personnel.
The final NCAA live recruiting period is July 11 to 14 and this is a certified event that will be held close to other shoe company-affiliated camps like Nike and UAA in Atlanta and Adidas in Birmingham. Mojave King from Australia, who is considered an NBA prospect, is expected to participate and Joshua Ojianwuna from Nigeria is considered a high major college prospect in the class of 2021.
The NBA Academy started in Oct. 2-016 and has sent a dozen athletes to Division I colleges such as Virginia, TCU, Davidson, UNLV and New Mexico. The league has one of its athletes drafted this past April when Han Xu from China was picked 15th overall by the WNBA New York Liberty.
For the first time, the NBA will also invite two teams of international prospects from Europe who aren’t part of the Academy program but are playing high school basketball in the United States. Among those invited are Olivier -Maxence Prospher of Canada and Lake Forest, Ill. Academy, Jeremy Sochan of Poland and La Lumiere and Ibrahima Bayu of the Netherlands and Westtown, Pa. Academy.
