Georgia Tech guard Josh Okogie missed the first eight games of the season with a dislocated finger (the first six of which he would have missed anyway with an NCAA suspension). He saw teammates Jose Alvarado and Curtis Haywood suffer season-ending injuries.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Okogie said that the prospect of injury will weigh into his decision about whether to stay in the draft. Okogie, a sophomore, declared for the draft Thursday, but will not hire an agent to preserve his college eligibility.
“Injuries are something you really can’t plan for,” he said Friday. “It’s something I have to take into consideration.”
Okogie called the NBA a lifelong dream and an ambition that has influenced every basketball decision that he has made.
As he considered his choice of colleges out of Shiloh High – Tech, Kansas State and Tennessee – “the biggest question was which school was going to put me in better position to take me where I wanted to go,” he said.
Okogie, who was named second-team All-ACC this season after averaging 18.2 points per game, can begin working out for teams April 24 and attend the pre-draft combine May 16-20. He has until May 30 to withdraw from the draft.
Okogie will take part in offseason workouts with his Tech teammates, but also plans to work individually to ready himself for NBA tryout sessions.
“The process definitely starts now,” he said.
Okogie said he hasn’t set any sort of draft position as a threshold to stay in the draft.
“We’ll see where I’m at, talk to my family and go from there,” he said.
Coach Josh Pastner said that he told Okogie and his family that if he is guaranteed to be a first-round pick – if a team tells him it will take him with its first-round pick if he’s available – then he should stay in the draft.
“Obviously, if he wants to come back, that’d be up to him,” Pastner said. “If you’re not a guaranteed first-round draft pick – and this isn’t about Josh, this is just my general opinion – you should come back.”
Pastner went on to say that Okogie will make “the smart decision” and that he believed that if Okogie “doesn’t get that feeling (that he’ll be a first-round pick), that he’s going to come back.”
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