Kris Dunn passed up the NBA -- for now -- and doesn't regret it

— -- PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- The people who run NBA front offices and scouting departments were shocked. According to multiple NBA executives -- who gushed about his length, athleticism and court vision at the point guard position --  Kris Dunn was a probable lottery pick had he entered the 2015 NBA draft.

Kris Dunn's father was surprised. John Seldon would never say his son made the wrong decision to return for his senior year at Providence, but there were more than a million dollars being left on the table and an injury history to suggest there was no time like the (healthy) present.

"If it was me, I would have come out," Seldon admits. "I would have taken the money and been gone so quick, but I couldn't tell him that. I left it up to him."

Kris Dunn's Providence Friars college coach, the only person certain to benefit from Dunn's decision to return, was surprised, too. Ed Cooley had just watched Dunn take home Big East Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year honors while carrying Providence to a No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament, its best showing in over a decade.

"I said, 'Kris, if you were my son, I'd probably have you go to the NBA,'" Cooley said.

But Kris Dunn stayed, and the decision is not difficult for him to explain. Some of it was about academics -- he's on course to graduate with a social sciences degree in May, and he wanted to complete that goal and provide a good example for his two younger sisters. Some of it was about basketball -- "I knew I had to develop my game. I don't want to just go in the NBA and just be there," he says.

Ultimately, the reasons proved to be less revealing than the person who made them. This decision could only have been made by someone who is his own man. And it only could have been made by someone who was forced to become his own man -- a grown man -- when he was still a 9-year-old boy.