Mizzou’s Jabari Brown to skip senior season, enter NBA Draft

Missouri lost another basketball player to the NBA Draft on Wednesday when junior Jabari Brown announced that he would forgo his senior season.

Brown and the Tigers made the announcement two days after fellow junior Jordan Clarkson announced that he would enter the NBA Draft.

“This was a step I needed to take in order to make the most educated decision possible with regards to my NBA opportunities,” Brown said. “My time here at Mizzou has been incredible. This is a special place and a second home for me. However, I must approach this looking at the bigger picture. This is a decision that impacts my family as well and that is most important to me.”

Brown’s father, David, is battling Stage IV adenocarcinoma.

“Jabari’s approach to life and basketball is so impressive,” Missouri coach Frank Haith said. “So many things right now point for him to enter the draft, hire an agent and move forward, but he will do his due diligence in this process and then make the decision best for him and his family. I am really proud of Jabari and know Tiger fans are too with how he has conducted himself in the face of such great adversity this year.”

Brown, a first-team All-Southeastern Conference performer who led Missouri in scoring at 19.9 points per game and also averaged 4.4 rebounds with 1.9 assists last season, has not signed with an agent.

He has until April 15 to change his mind if he doesn’t like the evaluation he receives from the NBA.

Brown — who shot 46.7 percent from the field and 41.0 from three-point range, connecting on 80 total three-pointers — played two seasons at Missouri after transferring from Oregon, where he started the first two games of his freshman season before leaving coach Dana Altman’s program.

Brown, a native of Oakland, Calif., who scored 1,040 in the last two seasons with the Tigers, averaged 13.7 points and 3.4 rebounds in 25 games as a sophomore. He was the fifth-fastest to reach 1,000 points in program history (59 games).

He led the SEC in scoring and finished with 19 twenty-point games, which was the most in a season for the Tigers since Anthony Peeler in 1992 and included 12 20-point games in 18 conference contests.

This story was originally published April 2, 2014 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Mizzou’s Jabari Brown to skip senior season, enter NBA Draft."