Basketball is an increasingly globalized game, and college teams are taking note.
The last three players to win the NBA MVP over the past six seasons were born outside of the United States. So were each of the last two No. 1 picks in the NBA draft. In fact, the top two picks this year were from France. While the U.S. is still producing plenty of stars, the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. That has led many college programs to ramp up their international recruiting, and that shift in priorities is bringing some of the most highly touted young players in the world stateside. Among them: potential 2025 first-round draft picks Egor Demin, who left Real Madrid for BYU, and Kasparas Jakucionis, who departed Barcelona to enroll at Illinois.
Players such as Demin and Jakucionis taking the college route is a marked change from just a few years ago, when a draft prospect would have almost never considered leaving an elite pro European club to spend a year or two in college. The trend coincides with the explosion of NIL money, which has made playing in college more lucrative than in some overseas leagues. NIL collectives have even funded buyouts of pro contracts.
Jon Chepkevich, the director of scouting for DraftExpress, which works with NBA, foreign and college teams, says that some top overseas player agencies are now hiring staff to manage the U.S. college recruitments of their clients. “It’s hard for 18, 19, 20-year-old kids to play at that [high] level in Europe,” Chepkevich says. “The rotation players for these teams are typically 27 to 35 years old. Despite how talented and how much potential these guys have, they’re just not ready to contribute at that level at this age, whereas college is sort of the perfect incubator for them to come over and get real on-court reps against high-level competition, and have a ton of resources at their disposal to develop.”
Jakucionis appeared in just two games in Spain’s top-flight league with Barcelona last season, trapped on a roster that featured eight former NBA draft picks, including Jabari Parker, who went second overall in 2014. Despite that, Jakucionis popped onto NBA radars after a monster spring at the U-18 level, tearing it up for Barcelona at the Adidas Next Generation tournament and putting together a strong showing with the Lithuanian national team at the U-18 European Championships. Rather than sit behind older pros for another year in Spain, Jakucionis will now be a centerpiece for Illinois.
The Illini had recruited internationally before under coach Brad Underwood, who feels that overseas players often grow up learning to play in an environment that is more professional than the American high school and AAU landscape, giving them better basketball IQs and work ethics. Illinois became even more aggressive in the foreign market this spring, signing Croatian big Tomislav Ivisic and Canadian wing Will Riley in addition to Jakucionis. All three could end up being starters this year. That monster haul is the culmination of years of work from assistant Geoff Alexander, who Underwood said “has been at every event” in Europe over the last two to three years to lay the groundwork for what turned into a loaded class.
Demin comes even more highly regarded than Jakucionis. His choice to play college basketball could be a watershed moment if his time at BYU ends up boosting his draft stock. Two other potential top-10 picks next June, Spanish wing Hugo Gonzalez and French point guard Nolan Traore, also drew significant NCAA interest this spring and summer but elected to stay in Europe. But if Demin gets a draft-day bump from his year with the Cougars, the next wave of European prospects will be that much easier to entice.
Of the 78 programs in high-major conferences, 73 have at least one scholarship player who was born outside of the U.S. Recruiting overseas was once seen as a creative niche for some schools to carve out, one that helped programs such as Gonzaga and St. Mary’s punch above their weight over the last two decades. Now, it’s becoming as essential as spending time in cramped high school gyms or working the transfer portal. One college coach says this summer he saw three to four times as many coaches scouting at the U-18 European Championships in Finland as he had in previous years. And at least to Underwood’s eyes, the future of recruiting may well involve spending as much time in Paris or Helsinki as in New York or Dallas.
“Being a familiar face over there and letting the people see us is vital,” Underwood says. “We have to keep sticking our nose over there and make it just like an event in Atlanta or Augusta [home of Nike’s biggest U.S. recruiting event] or whatever it might be … It’s going to be an important piece of our future growth here.”
