2018 WNBA Draft Big Board, v. 3.0: Ranking underclassmen

Let’s discuss the WNBA early entry.

So the league allows players to enter the draft if they turn 22 the year the draft is held — in this case, 2018 — or their original college class is graduating.

That has led to some players gaining the chance to enter the draft before exhausting their collegiate eligibility, and some of these players have taken advantage of the rule and entered early, from Jewell Loyd and Amanda Zahui B to Aerial Powers and Morgan Tuck. There’s certainly no reason they shouldn’t, if that’s what is best for them.

The vast majority of these players do not leave early. That’s okay, too. I’ve spoken to WNBA talent evaluators about why, and the answers range from wanting that diploma to the WNBA money not being life-changing in a way that delaying an extra year matters much to simply enjoying the college experience.

The real question for our purposes, of course, is how to treat potential candidates for the draft in a mock scenario. We include too many of the players who don’t enter, we’re skewing the projection. But if we pretend none of the early entry candidates will come out, we’ll often miss the mark.

There was no way, if Morgan Tuck chose to come out early in 2016, that some team wasn’t going to grab her, and early, given her broad base of skills. Same with Powers. Ignore early entry candidates in 2015, and a mock draft would have missed the top two picks in Loyd and Zahui B.

So we’re trying something different here at the Big Board. We’re doing all we can to chase down best available information on players leaving early. When in Starkville, we found out Teaira McCowan intends to stay in school. We’ve heard the same about Azura Stevens and Connecticut.

We’ll add early entrants to our Big Board if we have specific information that they are leaving, or they announce it themselves. In the meantime, though, to get a sense of who could leave, we’ll be ranking the draft eligibles and providing a round we’d expect them to be chosen if they did decide to leave school before completing their college eligibility. To be clear: this is where they’d be projected to get selected in the 2018 draft, not their ultimate draft ceiling if they waited until 2019.

There’s no perfect system, really, but this is what we’re trying, to be sure our readers are as fully informed about the draft in the weeks ahead as possible. Enjoy the ever-expanding Wayne Gethers video breakdowns of the prospects, too, with more to come!

So what is the new-look Big Board like? Wait no longer, here it is! All stats courtesy of HerHoopStats.com and National Statistical, as of March 2.