INDIANAPOLIS — Here’s how it looked, 90 minutes before tipoff: The No. 5 UConn Huskies are trotting off the court at Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse after some early shooting, and fans surround Braylon Mullins. Which fans? UConn fans, Butler fans, Greenfield-Central fans – fans, OK? All of them. Looked like the whole building, whoever was here 90 minutes before tipoff, was trying to get Mullins’ autograph or picture. And he was trying to accommodate.
Here’s how it sounded, during pregame introductions:
At small forward, a 6-6 freshman from Greenfield-Central, Braylon Mull—
Hinkle is roaring, drowning out the rest of his name, as Mullins goes trotting through the tunnel of UConn teammates, loping onto the court with a small smile on his face. He knew it might be like this, coming home, his first college game back home in Indiana since leaving this summer for UConn and becoming … this.
What has he become? One of the best NBA prospects in the world. No, really. Less than a year after being named 2025 IndyStar Mr. Basketball, he’s considered a lottery pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. How did it happen? Well, there was a camp in Los Angeles you’ve not heard about, and anyway, we’ll get to that.
Back to Wednesday night at Hinkle Fieldhouse, when No. 5 UConn defeated Butler 80-70, and there were so many Braylon Mullins family members, not even his family members could keep count.
“I don’t know,” said cousin Ben Nickel, wearing a hoodie with Braylon’s image on the front. “Maybe 150?”
“Maybe 300,” said another cousin from Greenfield, David Nickel. “There are a lot of cousins here.”
I’m telling the Nickel brothers – Braylon’s cousins – that there’s a rumor going around that the mayor of Greenfield, Guy Titus, made the 30-mile drive here, too.
“He was here – I saw him!” Ben Nickel shouts.
“The silver fox!” David Nickel concurs, referencing the mayor’s classic head of hair.
After the game, after Braylon Mullins put on a show for the home folks or the road folks – same thing really – I’m walking him toward the UConn bus, telling him about Ben and David Nickel.
“Love those guys,” Braylon says. “We have a big family. Lots of cousins. My grandmother – she had a lot of sisters.”
Did you hear the mayor was here? That’s what I’m asking Braylon. Even Guy Titus was here, I’m telling him.
“I think he’s a cousin, too,” Mullins tells me. “The whole town, everyone’s a cousin … sometimes it feels like that.”
Makes sense. That’s how it looked and sounded Wednesday night at Hinkle Fieldhouse, every time Braylon Mullins did anything. Like a family reunion.
A big one.
And he did a lot.
UConn freshman Braylon Mullins: NBA lottery pick
An NBA lottery pick was sleeping in the bedroom down the hall, and nobody knew. Not Braylon Mullins’ mom. Not his dad, who played basketball at a high level himself. Certainly not Braylon, finishing up his senior year at Greenfield-Central, so humble that he either doesn’t know how big of a deal he’s become – or he doesn’t care.
“It’s surreal,” Braylon’s mom, Katie, is telling me at halftime. She’s walking with her other two sons, identical twins Cole and Clay, senior basketball players at Greenfield-Central who are getting recruited by Franklin College. She’s walking past strangers wearing Braylon’s No. 24 UConn jersey, and she’s just shaking her head.
“It’s surreal to try to wrap your head around all of this,” she says. “The NBA? Yeah, it’s something you talk about sometimes, but we try not to focus on it.”
Braylon says he stays off social media, so he doesn’t know when he’s been trending on Twitter – as he was for a while Wednesday night, when he heated up in the first half – and he seems not to care.
“I try to stay focused in the moment,” he was saying after the game. “If I get out of that, that’s when everything could get messed up. I’m just happy to be at UConn.”
On the concourse, after the game is over and Braylon has visited with as many people as he can and security officers are nicely but firmly telling people they don’t have to go home – but they can’t stay here – Ben and David Nickel are laughing at the idea of Braylon Mullins becoming the fastest-rising basketball prospect in the, gulp, world.
“You’d never know – he’s the same Braylon,” Ben Nickel’s saying. “Like, he probably gets big NIL deals at UConn, but he doesn’t talk about it. He doesn’t put it on social media. He doesn’t act like it’s anything. He might not realize how big a deal it all is.”
“So weird,” David Nickel’s saying. “He was here at Christmas, and it’s so weird that, like, half the country knows who your cousin is.”
A few more nights like Wednesday at Hinkle, and the other half will know Braylon Mullins’ name soon enough.
Pacers watch Braylon Mullins at Hinkle Fieldhouse
Mullins misses his first shot, a 3-pointer. He misses his second shot too, a baseline floater, but if you’re wondering what it means when basketball writers talk about a certain player’s gravity, this is an idea:
UConn rebounded both misses, and scored both times, because that’s how much attention Braylon Mullins commands with the ball in his hands. Defenses scramble toward him, around him, like moons circling a planet. Mullins was one of the best shooters in Indiana for four years at Greenfield-Central – a career 59% shooter from the floor, including 44% on 3-pointers – and now he’s one of the best shooters in the Big East.
Mullins is averaging 11.9 points on 47% shooting from the floor (38% on 3s), but that’s misleading. He missed the first six games with an ankle injury, then worked his way into the starting lineup, and has been heating up in the last nine games: 13.9 ppg on 47.9% shooting from the floor (41% on 3-pointers).
“And he’s being face-guarded,” UConn coach Danny Hurley was marveling after the game, another reference to Mullins’ gravity. “The guy’s a crazy shot-maker.”
Mullins missed those first two shots, and afterward conceded all the pregame attention “gave me butterflies in my stomach.”
He calmed down, scored on a tip-in, then scored on a catch-and-shoot 3-pointer. Then another. Then he backed down Butler’s Jamie Kaiser Jr., and spun away from him for a 14-foot fadeaway. Then he comes roaring off the baseline, off a screen, for a catch-and-shoot 3-pointer from close to 30 feet.
The half ends with Mullins leading all scorers with 13 of his eventual 15 points, putting on a show for the 18 NBA scouts representing 10 franchises. NBA folks see Mullins as similar to 6-6, 215-pound Charlotte Hornets rookie Kon Knueppel, averaging 18.9 ppg – another great shooter with strong defensive instincts, though stronger than Mullins (but not as quick). Another Mullins comparison is former Pacers forward Mike Dunleavy Jr., now the general manager of the Golden State Warriors, who scored more than 11,000 career points from 2003-17.
The Pacers had multiple scouts at Hinkle, though getting Mullins is a longshot. Their No. 1 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft has strings on it, namely these: They get to keep the pick if it’s somewhere between No. 1 and No. 4 overall, or between 10-30. If the Ping Pong balls in the 2026 NBA Draft lottery end up with the Pacers picking somewhere between 5-9, the pick goes to the Los Angeles Clippers in the Ivica Zubac trade.
Mullins, as good as he is, won’t go in the top four. Those players will be, in whichever order you prefer: Kansas’ Darryn Peterson, BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, Duke’s Cameron Boozer and North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson. He could be there at No. 10, but the Pacers probably won’t lose enough to pick that low.
Well, I should clarify something: Mullins probably won’t go in the top four. But he’s rising fast. And the draft is still several months away.
Best two players at NBA camp: Braylon Mullins, Braden Smith
Braylon Mullins wanted to be a police officer. Believe that? He wanted to be a cop.
Well, it runs deeper than that: He wanted to be like his father, Josh Mullins, a 17-year member of the Greenfield Police Department.
“You know how it is when you’re 8,” Josh is telling me before the game, between the autograph and picture requests he was getting as Braylon Mullins’ father. “Kids say, ‘I’m gonna be like dad!’ Or, ‘I’m gonna be a cop or a firefighter.’”
“And I told him: ‘Nah. You’re doing something else.’”
What? Josh had an idea. He’d been a pretty fair ballplayer himself, a 6-5, 225-pound forward at Greenfield-Central who averaged 17.5 points, 9.1 rebounds and 5.6 assists as a senior. He went to what was then called IUPUI – now IU Indy – where as a senior he averaged 12.2 ppg with 45% shooting on 3-pointers.
“I could tell he was going to be pretty good, but I learned you can’t dunk on everybody once you get to college,” Josh was telling me before the game, from his front-row seat on the baseline. “So we worked on his shooting.”
Worked out. Mullins scored 2,158 career points at Greenfield-Central, including 32.9 ppg as a senior when he shot 47.6% from the 3-point line. Still, he wasn’t high on the NBA radar – not for 2026, anyway – until he arrived at the 40-player Nike Academy this past summer in Los Angeles, an event not open to the media, so don’t bother Googling for information. Here’s what an NBA scout at the game Wednesday told me:
“Braylon opened everyone’s eyes with his toughness, shooting, IQ and defense. He was probably the second best player there.”
The best: Braden Smith of Purdue.
“Braden dominated,” the scout said.
Smith will be a pro for a long time, but at 6-0, 180 pounds his draft stock is pegged somewhere between the 20th and 40th picks, while Mullins – 6 inches taller, and three years younger – is seen as a lottery pick in 2026.
“Dude,” UConn center Tarris Reed Jr. said of Mullins after the game Wednesday. “He’s the goods, man.”
Nobody’s saying Mullins will enter the draft after this season, though. Mullins won’t talk about it, and the most you’ll get from anyone from his family – and it’s a big family – is this from his father:
“I love college basketball, so I’d love him to stay all four years,” Josh Mullins says. “But that’s not real. Sometimes, you’ve got to go.”
Braylon Mullins will go pro soon enough, but for now he’s starting on the No. 5 UConn Huskies, seeking their third national title in four years. He’s getting better by the week, by the game, and attracting attention – from opposing coaches, NBA scouts, fans – like Saturn has rings. Gravity, you call that. Spectacular is another word for it.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Doyel: How Braylon Mullins became fast-rising NBA prospect, yet he hasn’t changed
Reporting by Gregg Doyel, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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