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After testing the draft waters this spring, forward AK Okereke will remove his name from the draft pool and transfer from Cornell to Vanderbilt, he tells Jon Chepkevich of DraftExpress (Twitter link). Okereke had a solid junior season in 2024/25, putting up 13.9 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 4.1 assists per game while making 59.5% of his field goal attempts.
It wasn’t until 1998 when Kleiman got his first taste of the music industry, at OneLevel.com – a hip-hop community commerce website – alongside a pair of Cornell University graduate friends. As a third partner, he solicited marketing opportunities, and built relationships for the site’s board that included Robert De Niro, Heavy D, and Q-Tip. Around this time, Kleiman also landed on a relatively unknown Mark Ronson’s radar. Ronson would run into him at star-studded high school basketball games around the Big Apple, where tastemakers from the city would link up for must-see matchups. “[Rich] always walked around with this aura — it wasn’t like he was scary, but he had a sense of purpose,” the British DJ-turned-producer tells Billboard. “He had a level of gravitas which I was curious about. At first, you’re like, ‘Who is this guy?'”
The stories are endless. Kobe challenging a rookie to a fight. Kobe mocking a fringe backup’s limited skills. Kobe demeaning another’s worth. And another’s worth. And another’s worth. He could be unambiguously mean, and one need not dig deeper than the 2003 training camp experience of a former Loyola Marymount standout named Pete Cornell, who happened to fall into Bryant’s sight line while drinking a Gatorade. “Hey rook!” Bryant yelled. “Rook, you know I need a Gatorade! Grab me one!” Cornell handed a 12-ounce bottle of red Gatorade to Bryant.
“Come on, rook,” Bryant barked. “I need a big bottle!” Cornell shuffled back to the cooler and dug out a larger red. “Rook,” Bryant shouted, “You must not realize I only drink orange!” On and on it went — a soul-sucking experience for Cornell (who, it should be mentioned, wasn’t actually a rookie) that ended only when Shaquille O’Neal, the team’s star center, barked from a nearby perch, “Yo, Kobe, chill the (expletive) out!”
Chase Hughes: Tomorrow’s Wizards pre-draft workout is another one with options for the second round and their G-League/Summer League teams: Raasean Davis (NC Central), Garrison Mathews (Lipscomb), Matt Morgan (Cornell), Marcquise Reed (Clemson), BJ Stith (ODU), James Thompson IV (E Mich)
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For the third straight year, Matt Morgan is entering the NBA Draft, the senior guard announced on Twitter on Tuesday. After declaring for the draft and ultimately withdrawing and returning to Cornell after each of the last two seasons, Cornell’s all-time leading scorer wrote that he will be represented by Klutch Sports Group.
“The way that the league has progressed since I played in it during the 2005-06 season is incredible,” Northern Arizona Suns head coach Cody Toppert said. “Back then, there were A contracts, B contracts and C contracts. I was on a C contract, so I made $12,000 for the whole season. That was definitely an adventure. My friends at Cornell would joke with me all the time because when you’re at an Ivy League school, people make a big deal about your starting salary. My friends would say, ‘You must have the worst starting salary of any Ivy League graduate ever! Jeez, you’d make more working at McDonald’s!’ They eventually got rid of the C-level contracts because that was cruel and unusual punishment to some degree (laughs). Also, back then, you didn’t get paid if you were an inactive player. That was really tough because you would be giving everything you had to the team and then not get paid just because you were inactive. They fixed that, which is great.
Junior guard Matt Morgan announced Monday on Twitter his intention to declare for the NBA Draft, after leading the Ivy League in scoring for the third straight year. [...] Morgan said while he hopes to be drafted by an NBA team, he will return to Cornell for his senior season if he isn’t selected. “I’m going into this process with the intention of getting selected to play for a NBA organization, but I don’t want to lose my last year of college if that opportunity isn’t there for me,” he said.
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VanVleet is uncomfortable lending details to the narrative of hard-done-by Rockford, a town with the familiar intertwined epidemics of poverty, racism and violence. When asked about the perception of the city, he encourages people to look up the statistics. The damning reports are not hard to find. In 2010, Rockford was listed by the FBI as the ninth-most dangerous city to live in the United States. The financial website 24/7 Wall Street listed Rockford as the 16th-worst city to live in the country, citing, among other things, that 22.4 per cent of the city’s residents live below the poverty line. Cornell recalled having to do backflips to find his mostly black AAU team court time, while the white teams had no such trouble.
VanVleet and his family were victims of their surroundings. Fred was just five when his father was murdered, shot twice in another man’s apartment. After a period of living with her parents, VanVleet’s mother, Susan, eventually entered a relationship with a Rockford police detective, Joe Danforth. That was good in that it gave VanVleet some stability. It was not a cure-all, though. Danforth and his tough-love, toe-the-line approach was probably positive for VanVleet in the long run, but it was surely difficult to handle at the moment. (Danforth also might not be the best basketball evaluator. He elected to coach Fred’s older brother’s AAU team, leaving his cousin, Cornell, to lead Fred’s younger team. Guess which one had more success over time.) Beyond that, no one person was going to be able to make up for the loss of his father, and no one person was going to instil a sense of belonging in VanVleet.
As an Asian American point guard who played at Harvard before finding sustained success in the NBA, Jeremy Lin has enjoyed a fairly unique basketball journey. Less enjoyable were the preconceived notions he had to overcome in the pros, but, he said recently, his most upsetting treatment came while playing in college. “The worst was at Cornell, when I was being called a c—k,” Lin told Nets teammate Randy Foye on the latter’s podcast (via ESPN). “That’s when it happened. I don’t know … that game, I ended up playing terrible and getting a couple of charges and doing real out-of-character stuff.”
Jeff Goodman: Cornell sophomore guard Matt Morgan will test waters without agent for NBA draft, source told ESPN. Leading scorer in Ivy his first 2 years.
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