Following a strong freshman season at Alabama, Labaron Philon tested the NBA Draft waters this spring before ultimately returning to the Crimson Tide for his sophomore season in 2025-26. While the NBA wasn’t quite ready for him to make the jump, FanSided NBA Draft expert Christopher Kline expects the league to have strong interest in the 6-foot-4 point guard next time around.
Following Night 1 of the NBA Draft on Wednesday, Kline released his way-too-early 2026 mock draft, with Philon ranked as his 12th overall player and highlighted as one of the most intriguing returners.
Labaron Philon already projects as a lottery pick in the 2026 NBA Draft
The 2025 high school class is strong and has real depth at the top of the draft. Now that players are able to be paid to play college basketball, more top talents have flooded back to the NCAA one-and-done pipeline, which is a more direct translation to the NBA than pre-professional options like Overtime Elite or the NBA’s failed G-League Ignite experiment.
With that new landscape, Kline projects nine of the 11 players ahead of Philon to be college freshmen, with the two exceptions being Kentucky sophomore Jayden Quaintance, who was not draft-eligible this year after re-classifying to the 2024 class, and Karim Lopez, a teenage prospect from New Zealand.
So, effectively, Philon could be the top sophomore NBA prospect heading into next season. As a freshman at Alabama, Philon started 29 games and averaged 10.6 points, 3.8 assists, 3.3 rebounds, and 1.4 steals. His 90th percentile assist rate is promising, especially paired with his explosiveness as an on-ball creator, but the likely feedback from the NBA that sent him back to school is that he needs to improve as an off-ball guard because he’s unlikely to be handed the keys as the primary initiator of an offense at the next level.
Philon shot just 31.5 percent from three, and finished the year with an above-average but far from elite true shooting percentage of 55.4 percent. He’ll need to improve his catch-and-shoot game to be a viable off-ball guard at the next level, or he could be reduced to an off-the-bench role running the second unit.
Philon got some valuable experience playing off the ball with Mark Sears last season, and his usage rate of 20.9 percent will almost certainly increase as he grows into the lead facilitator role for the Crimson Tide. So, it will be a balancing act between Philon, Aden Holloway, and Nate Oats toggling between what is best for Alabama to win games vs. what’s best for Philon’s NBA projection. Though we know that, no matter what, in Alabama’s wide-open offense, there will be plenty of catch-and-shoot opportunities to be had.
No Alabama player was selected in the first round on Wednesday night, and if Sears or Grant Nelson do hear their names called on Thursday, it won’t be until late in Round 2, but if Philon delivers as one of the best sophomores in the country, that will change next June.