About 200 miles of interstate highway separate Dallas and Austin, but Max Abmas never stopped there. The latter city was always on the way to something else, or an ever-growing skyline breezed by on the drive home. The state capital was a figment. Never a destination. Never the place Abmas needed to be.
While Austin still isn’t the end of the line, it’s now a necessary stopover that will dictate every move from here.
Four years of scoring a bunch of points at Oral Roberts, plus a couple dips into the NBA Draft process, amounted to a bit of a basketball time loop, in which Abmas kept waking up in the same place with the same things to prove despite his best efforts to move forward. In a few weeks, though, he’ll be wearing Texas practice gear. He’ll be a Big 12 guard. He’ll have the same questions to answer, only with a better chance to do so definitively.
“To those on the outside, it shows me playing at the highest level,” Abmas says on an evening in early May. “It’s a gauntlet, night in and night out. Playing against these stronger, faster, longer, athletic guys, they’re more of your prototype NBA-type bodies. That’s what scouts want to see. I know how much time I put in the gym. I know the things I’m capable of. It’s about those at the next level, those higher-ups making those decisions, and what they need to see to feel comfortable.”
Portal season produced more than a few intriguing player-program matches, and we’ll enumerate more of them below. Max Abmas and Texas, though, resonates as a potential escape from a flat circle. Across four seasons in the Summit League, Abmas scored 2,561 points, shot better than 50 percent from 2-point range and 38.8 percent from 3-point range. He also never grew. He’s still listed as a 6-foot guard, and that’s with the help of some generously soled shoes; at the 2021 NBA Draft Combine, Abmas checked in at a fraction above 5-foot-10 barefoot. There is absolutely no other reason why he will still be a college basketball player in 2023-24.
The dynamic at Abmas’ new program, meanwhile, is fascinating, because of the responsibility potentially foisted on him. Going to Texas and fitting in with a deeper, more talented roster seemed to be the play at first. Then transfers and five-star recruit decommitments scattered that talent. A potential backcourt mate and returning lead guard, Tyrese Hunter, dipped his toe into the draft waters. While Hunter didn’t receive an invite to either the NBA Draft Combine or the G League Elite Camp and therefore is likelier than not to play at Texas next season, the sum of the changes prompts a thought: Is Abmas going to wind up having to do all the stuff he’s done for four years, just so the Longhorns have a chance? Does he actually have a better opportunity to prove himself than he even initially thought?