Former Georgia Tech forward Moses Wright’s legitimacy as a draft prospect has been further enhanced.
The ACC player of the year was invited to the NBA draft combine, which starts Monday in Chicago, providing him with the opportunity to perform and compete against many of the top draft prospects. Octagon, the agency representing Wright (as well as Tech guard Jose Alvarado) confirmed the invitation to the AJC on Tuesday.
A total of 69 players are expected to attend the event, which consists of interviews with team officials, five-on-five games, skill work, strength and agility testing and medicals. It will run June 21-27.
The combine invite by no means guarantees that Wright will be selected among the 60 picks in the NBA’s two-round draft that will take place July 29. But it certainly is confirmation that NBA general managers and scouts see him as a draftable prospect. Tech coach Josh Pastner previously asserted his confidence that Wright will be drafted, based on his conversations with NBA scouts and his confidence in how Wright would perform if invited to the combine.
“I don’t think people realize how talented he is, and he’s just scratching the surface,” Pastner said in April.
Wright, who has committed to staying in the draft and not returning to Tech, might well hope to follow in the steps of former Tech star Josh Okogie, who used a strong showing at the combine in 2018 to catapult himself into the first round, where he was selected by the Minnesota Timberwolves with the No. 20 pick.
Wright’s inclusion in the combine follows Monday’s announcement from the NBA’s G League that Alvarado will take part in the G League’s pre-combine camp, also in Chicago. That opportunity could lead to an invitation for Alvarado, the ACC’s defensive player of the year, also to attend the combine.
The combine invitation is one more step along an unlikely path that Wright has traveled since arriving at Tech in 2017 from Raleigh, N.C., as a lowly regarded signee. Wright played intermittently as a freshman and was the team’s fifth-leading scorer as a sophomore before emerging as a scoring and rebounding force as a junior, leading to his standout season as a senior.
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