Emoni Bates, the wunderkind turned cautionary tale, is declaring for the 2023 NBA Draft. As a high schooler, Bates looked like the future, a budding Kevin Durant clone who graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2019 and became the first sophomore to win the Gatorade National Player of the Year in 2020. For years, high school and college felt like a detour, a pointless digression until Bates could finally turn 19 and jump to the NBA. And now, according to The Athletic's Shams Charania, it's time for Bates to enter the NBA—that is, if the NBA will have him;
After reclassifying up a year and skipping his senior year of high school, Bates enrolled at Memphis for the 2021-2022 season. It went badly. Despite playing on a loaded roster alongside Jalen Duren, Bates was one of the least productive players in all of college basketball, averaging 9.7 points per game on 38.6 percent shooting from the field. To wit, his showing at Memphis' pre-season pro day would rank him among the very worst athletes in the NBA. Perhaps most damningly, Memphis transformed from a borderline bubble team to a powerhouse as soon as Bates got hurt.
This year, Bates transferred to Eastern Michigan University, hoping that a step down in competition would galvanize some of his latent talent. It kind of did. While Bates did show flashes of the high-scoring dynamo he once was (19.2 points per game, including an incendiary 30 piece against Michigan), he also struggled to stay above 40 percent shooting for the year and his team went 8-23.
As such, Emoni Bates is ultimately declaring for the 2023 NBA Draft because he has no other choice. Another year in college would more or less doom his NBA prospects—by the 2024 NBA Draft, Bates would be an upperclassmen with three years of bad-to-middling college production. According to most mainstream draftniks, Bates isn't considered a draftable player at this point.
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