Hawes Will Declare For Draft, But Could Still Return

Bob Condotta of the Times was there, and has the scoop on his blog.

The basics are these:

--Hawes will declare for the draft
--He will not hire an agent
--Thus, he can pull out of the draft (the deadline is June 21) and return to school.

NBA rookie salaries aren't negotiable, they are automatically pegged to draft position, so Hawes could base his decision on whether he wants to stay a year and improve his draft stock (thus improving his salary).

Condotta reports that Hawes will go to pre-draft camps and individual workouts with NBA teams, and, presumably, obsessively check NBAdraft.net, which currently projects him as the 11th pick in the draft.

Last year's #11 pick in the draft automatically received a guaranteed two-year, $2.1 million contract . By contrast, the #1 pick received a guaranteed two-year, $7.5 million contract.

Once you are drafted, the club has you locked in for a third and fourth-year option, so you are locked into that salary structure for four years, no matter how good you are. So there's more than a little incentive to stay in school until you move up on the board.

This is why Seattlest is waiting for a reallllllllly bad college class (caused, perhaps, by a nuclear holocaust) before we declare for the draft.