Las Vegas plans a trip to Asia.
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Well, the board is set. We know all the big decisions on early entries — including a yes on Notre Dame’s Jackie Young. We have every last drop of data and game film. And now, teams and players alike have just hours remaining to prepare.
For some, the destination is New York — Kalani Brown smiled at the thought late Sunday night as she walked to the Baylor team bus, a national champion. Her teammate Chloe Jackson, the late-game hero, will head home to spend draft night with her family.
The biggest takeaways, to me, from the early entry decisions is that an extremely deep draft remains so, while the number of players who will be heading to 2020 instead will help shore up what looks like a weaker draft in depth overall, at least right now. At the top of it will be Sabrina Ionescu and, should she recover in time to play next year, Lauren Cox.
The Cox injury was so demoralizing for that reason alone, not to mention taking her out of a seminal moment of her career, the national title game. Kim Mulkey said Cox would have been the number one overall pick in 2020 at her postgame presser, and every bit of that was significant — Mulkey is right, and her “would have been” formulation was devastating for its implications. Thankfully for all, she won’t require surgery, though there is no timetable for her return.
Still, there’s plenty of time to talk 2020 draft. Let’s look at 2019 first!
So where does that leave us?
TO THE BIG BOARD WE GO!