The NBA will honor the sterling tradition of Black college basketball by holding its third HBCU Classic on February 17 at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Indiana as part of the All-Star weekend events. Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) programs Winston Salem State University and Virginia Union will meet in the conference pairing.
The game will be simulcast on TNT, ESPN2 and NBA TV.
The WSSU Rams are 13-6 overall, 7-3 in all CIAA games and 2-3 in the Southern Division. The VUU Panthers are 9-12, 4-5 in the conference yet 3-0 in the Northern Division, tied for first place with 3-0 Lincoln University (10-10, 6-4).
Earl Monroe (Winston Salem State), Willis Reed (Grambling), Sam Jones (North Carolina Central)—who passed away in 2021—and Ben Wallace (Virginia Union) are all members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and alumni of historically black colleges and universities. Dick Barnett (Tennessee State), Charles Oakley (Virginia Union) and the late Anthony Mason (Tennessee State), a trio of former Knicks, also took the HBCU path to the NBA.
Since West Virginia State’s Earl Lloyd became the first HBCU player drafted to the NBA in 1950 and the pioneering first Black player to appear in an NBA game, also in 1950, 350 more men have been selected in the NBA draft. The American Basketball Association (ABA), which operated from 1967 to 1976, when it merged with the NBA, also had notable HBCU stars such as Prairie View A&M’s Zelmo Beaty, a two-time All-NBA performer who left the NBA’s St. Louis/Atlanta Hawks for the ABA’s Utah Stars in 1970 before returning to play for the Los Angeles Lakers later in the decade.
But the number of players coming from HBCUs to the Association, as the league is commonly called, has dramatically declined over the past 30 years. The last HBCU player drafted to the NBA was Queens, New York native Kyle O’Quinn, taken in 2012 out of Norfolk State in the second round (49th overall) by the Orlando Magic. O’Quinn, who now plays in China in the country’s top league, the Chinese Basketball Association, also suited up for the Knicks from 2015 to 2018.
