Ja'Kobi Gillespie is heading to the San Antonio Spurs after being selected with the 42nd overall pick in the second round of the 2026 NBA Draft on June 24. The 6-foot guard leaves Tennessee after a final college season that put his name on the board in a hurry.
The pick made Gillespie the second of Tennessee's three NBA Draft selections and pushed him into a small but familiar lane for Knoxville area players. He joined Elston Turner, Doug Roth and Paul Hogue as the only players from that area to reach the NBA Draft, a list that now gains a guard who went home, put up numbers and kept climbing.
That final season gave the Spurs a clear statistical case. Gillespie led Tennessee with 18.4 points per game, 5.4 assists per game and 2.1 steals per game while playing all 37 contests at 34.8 minutes per game. He also shot 33.8% from 3-point range on 8.2 attempts per game and 41% from the field, production that earned him All-SEC First Team honors and kept him in the middle of Tennessee's run to a fourth consecutive Sweet 16 and third straight Elite Eight appearance.
He did not get to that point in a straight line. Gillespie spent two seasons at Belmont before moving to Maryland as a junior, then returned home to Tennessee for the season that changed his draft stock. Rick Barnes kept pressing him to sharpen his midrange game, and that mattered because the next level does not forgive every shortcut. A 6-foot guard can score and create, but he is less likely to be an elite, switchable defender when bigger guards start hunting mismatches.
That is the part the Spurs will have to solve. Gillespie gives them a live dribble scorer, a steady passer and a guard who finished third in the SEC in steals, but his size sets a ceiling on what he can erase defensively on his own. He also said he had never worked with alley-oop targets like Felix Okpara and J.P. Estrella before arriving at Tennessee, which is one reason his value may come from reading the floor as much as attacking it. The question now is less whether Gillespie belongs in the NBA and more how San Antonio uses a guard whose best college trait was making the game look faster than it was.
