Pacers 2023 pre-draft workout attendees
Who all did the Pacers workout? Here's my annual rundown of workouts and which prospects were brought in ahead of the draft on June 22.
It’s draft season in the NBA.
Teams have binders full of intel on every player and over the final month, leading up to the draft on June 22, they’re looking to add to it. With more background information, measurements, mental and physical testing — and then host them for a workout against their peers.
The Pacers held their first workout with draft prospects on May 12, just before heading to Chicago for the annual NBA Draft Combine. While there, the interviews and testing are the most important things. Unfortunately, all of the players at the top of the draft declined to participate in the two-day scrimmage.
Players then went through medical testing to wrap up the weeklong series of events on May 21.
The Pacers have FOUR selections in the upcoming NBA Draft: Picks 7, 26, 29, 32 40 and 55.
It’s highly unlikely that they use all of them. In fact, team president Kevin Pritchard said on the record that they won’t.
“We’re not gonna keep all five picks, but there’s just a lot of things we can do,” he said after the draft lottery. “And my guess is we’ll get a lot of offers for those picks too.”
The focus for the past month has been on pre-draft workouts, where teams hosts six players at a time. There will also be an occasional solo workout mixed in.
There’s testing, on-court drills and 3-on-3, followed by lunch with a half-dozen staff members.
(Click here to learn about what happens at each pre-draft session.)
The Pacers hosted 54 players over 14 workouts last summer, 45 players over nine workouts in 2021 and 49 players over nine workouts in 2019. There were no pre-draft workouts in 2020 due to the pandemic.
“If you really like a player and they have a bad workout, you can't just throw out years worth of evaluation on a 40-minute workout,” Ryan Carr, who runs the team’s pre-draft process, said of the weight workouts hold. “At the same time, you don't like a player and they come in and hit every shot or do something — how does that affect you? It would be dangerous to be rash on either side, but it is something. I think it's important for them to get a chance to be coached by some of your coaches and see kind of how they handle it, how quickly they pick things up.”
So, who all have they worked out? Below is a full list of names and when they visited.
Running count: 62 players | 16 workouts | 5 solos
No. 1 — Friday, May 12:
Kobe Brown, Missouri
Andre Jackson Jr., Connecticut
Jaime Jaquez, UCLA
Arthur Kaluma, Creighton
Liutauras Lelevicius, Zalgiris II
Grant Nelson, North Dakota State
Larry Bird returns, attends Pacers' first 2023 draft workout
Larry Legend was back in Indiana and back at the Indiana Pacers facility on Friday. The Pacers hosted six prospects to the St. Vincent Center for their first pre-draft workout leading up to the 2023 NBA Draft, set for June 22 in Brooklyn. And sitting there among the team’s front office was
No. 2 — Tuesday, May 30:
Ricky Council IV, Arkansas
Nikola Durisic, Serbia
Tevian Jones, Southern Utah
Darius McGhee, Liberty
Jordan Miller, Miami
Keisei Tominaga, Nebraska