Early Entries To Nba Draft Give Sonics Great Opportunities

They used to call them hardship cases, but it seems ludicrous to call them that now. After all, where’s the hardship in being young and rich and playing basketball for a living?

Those are the qualities that 18 players, most of them underclassmen, will share some time after the June 28 NBA Draft for which they’ve declared themselves eligible. Nowadays they’re called early entries.

And they keep getting earlier and earlier.

This year’s bunch, in fact, features Kevin Garnett, the Farragut (Chicago) High School star seeking to become the sixth player to jump from high school to the pros. Joe raboski, Bill Willoughby, Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins and Seattle’s Shawn Kemp were the first. Some believe he’ll make it.

“He could be a late lottery pick,” said Bob Kloppenburg, SuperSonic vice president for player personnel and scouting. “He could be a Danny Manning-type of player.”

If Garnett goes in the lottery, he could have as many as seven other underclassmen for company. In fact, the top four picks in the draft now are projected to be sophomores - Antonio McDyess of Alabama, Joe Smith of Maryland and Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace of North Carolina. Whoever goes No. 1 will be the third sophomore to lead off the draft, Magic Johnson being the first in 1979 and Chris Webber the second in 1993.

Smith, Stackhouse or McDyess probably will go first. The Sonics’ Kloppenburg is extremely high on the Alabama star.

“McDyess reminds me a lot of Shawn Kemp, athletically,” he said.

This latest stampede generally is attributed to the possibility of a rookie salary cap. If so, they all could be in for a surprise.

The new collective-bargaining agreement is expected to be finished within the next month or so and is expected to contain a rookie salary system. If the bargaining agreement takes longer, a moratorium on player contracts may be declared right after the 1995 draft is finished, in an effort to impose a rookie cap on this year’s draftees.

If they don’t hire agents, early entry candidates can re-enroll in school, but their rights will be retained by the team drafting them until a year after their eligibility is exhausted.

If all of this year’s early entry candidates are drafted, and it appears they will, this group will be bucking a recent trend. The previous five years, 38 of the 74 early entry candidates went untabbed.

All this is good news for teams drafting near the bottom, including the Sonics (26th).

“Going into this year, the draft looked bad,” Sonics president Wally Walker said. “All the underclassmen give us a chance at a better player. The young players who are drafted high will go on enormous potential, rather than ability to turn a team around. That should give us a shot at a player who is a little more mature, a little more NBA-ready, just maybe not as talented.”

Most estimates have 10 or 11 of the underclassmen being taken among the first 20 picks of the first round. The top seniors generally are considered UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon, Arizona’s Damon Stoudamire, Michigan State’s Shawn Respert and Duke’s Cherokee Parks.

So the Sonics really aren’t too far out of reach of some decent talent.