St. John's has reached a point it has not enjoyed in years: its players are being talked about as real NBA Draft possibilities again, and Zuby Ejiofor is at the center of it. The 2026 NBA Draft is set for Tuesday and Wednesday at Barclays Center, and Ejiofor, Dillon Mitchell and Bryce Hopkins could all be among the 60 selections.
For St. John's fans, the search is obvious. Ejiofor was identified as the 2026 Big East Player of the Year, and the conversation around him has only grown since Rick Pitino said Sunday that the Knicks would benefit a lot from the center. Pitino said the team could use another frontcourt player who can defend, rebound, pass and score, and added that he was told Ejiofor had a great workout with them.
That kind of draft attention matters because it marks a sharp turn for a program that just reached its first NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 since 1999. The Red Storm now have multiple names drawing league interest at once, a sign that the program's rise under Pitino is beginning to spill into NBA conversations instead of ending at the college level.
The contrast is still hard to miss. St. John's has not produced a first-round pick since Maurice Harkless went to Philadelphia at No. 15 in 2012, and its last draft pick overall was Sir’Dominic Pointer, who went to Cleveland in the second round of 2015. Before this year, the program's recent NBA footprint was thin enough that two picks in 2000 and three in 1983 already felt like distant history.
Yet the current crop is forcing a different reading of where St. John's stands. Julian Champagnie went undrafted and still became instrumental in San Antonio reaching the NBA Finals to face the Knicks, while Daniss Jenkins went undrafted and emerged as a key player for Detroit. That is part of the new case around the Red Storm: even players who are not selected can still end up on an NBA path, and Ejiofor's stock sits higher than that after a season that lifted him into conference honors and league chatter.
Mitchell, meanwhile, said on Zoom Sunday that getting another chance to play at MSG would mean a lot to him. He called it insane and said he remembers talking with people who understood the atmosphere there, adding that being able to compete at MSG again would be exciting. For St. John's, that is the new reality — not just watching for one player, but waiting to see whether this season becomes the start of a draft pipeline that has been missing for more than a decade.
