Luka Garza withdraws from Draft, will return to Iowa

American center has confirmed he will play his Senior year.

Luka Garza has withdrawn from the 2020 NBA Draft and will return to Iowa. “I love this place too much to leave it,” he said in a Sunday news conference.

Garza lost the two-man race for last season’s Wooden Award and will be a projected national player of the year in 2021. The center, who recently received an invite to the NBA combine, said he “felt strongly” he would have been drafted and said he had offers in Europe.

“It’s been really strange and difficult with COVID-19,” Garza said. “It added a lot of uncertainty. At the end of the day, I felt very confident that I wanted to come back and finish my career at the University of Iowa.”