Draft season brings with it countless reports that player X has met with team Y, stirring up a frenzy of discourse about how that player-team fit must now be considered a lock. In reality, most prospects meet with every team during the pre-draft process, and gleaning information from the simple report that a team has met with a player tends to be a losing proposition.
But sometimes, there’s more information than that. Sometimes, it comes out that a team is consistently meeting with a player, or has been monitoring him all season, or even longer. That’s been the case with prospects in this draft already as it pertains to the Chargers: UCLA guard Atonio Mafi said Los Angeles has been watching him since his freshman season in 2018.
