The pre-NBA Draft process is beginning to heat up. The G League Elite Camp (featuring a few Kentucky Wildcats) begins this week in Chicago, immediately followed by the NBA Draft Combine. We’ve also got the NBA Draft Lottery on Monday and a little over three weeks until the stay-or-go deadline (May 28) hits for college-eligible prospects.
Which means we still have a while before we learn what All-SEC guard Otega Oweh decides to do. The expectation (and hope from the Big Blue Nation) is he’ll return to Kentucky for his senior year as the Wildcats’ centerpiece for Mark Pope‘s second season. While he’d likely make more money by coming back to college as a candidate for Preseason SEC Player of the Year, the allure of starting his professional career could be more appealing.
However, if he made that jump to the NBA, it would likely come in the form of a late-second-round draft pick or even as an undrafted prospect. And that’s where Bleacher Report’s Jonathan Wasserman has Oweh in his latest NBA Mock Draft update from Wednesday morning. Wasserman projects Oweh to go 59th overall — the final pick in this year’s draft — to the Houston Rockets.
As a junior in 2024-25, Oweh led Kentucky in scoring with 16.2 points per game on 49.2 percent overall shooting and 35.5 percent shooting from deep. He chipped in 4.7 rebounds, 1.7 assists, and 1.6 steals in his team-high 28.3 minutes per outing, as well.
The word going around is Oweh will only stick in the NBA Draft if he can earn a first-round guarantee. As of right now, he has plenty of work to do if he wants that promise. Bleacher Report is the only major draft outlet calling for Oweh to get picked as of right now. He would need to blow away the scouts and NBA personnel at next week’s Combine to boost his stock that much, but it’s certainly not impossible.
But Oweh isn’t the only Wildcat on Wasserman’s list of 59 predicted picks. Fellow Kentucky guard Koby Brea is slotted at 44th overall to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Most mock drafts have Brea going somewhere in the mid-to-late second round. A good showing at the Combine could solidify that positioning and maybe even bump him into being a borderline first-round selection.
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