J. Cole Odds: How Much Will Rap Megastar Play For Chinese Basketball League?

By Christopher Boan

Apr 2nd, 2026 11:33 AM EDT

Andaluz The Artist of Queens, N.Y., completed a mural in honor of J. Cole in downtown Fayetteville (USATODAY)

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While you're sweating which teams make the NBA playoffs, Bookies.com put together hypothetical odds based on the news that rap megastar, J. Cole, has signed to play a few games with the Nanjing Monkey Kings in the Chinese Basketball League.

How many minutes will the 41-year-old actually log?

How Much Will J Cole Play?  

While J Cole (whose birth name is Jermaine Lamar Cole) didn’t play basketball past his high school days in North Carolina, he did try to walk-on when he was at St. John’s, reportedly being one of the 10 men to get a callback during his sophomore year there.  

Still, at 6’3, Cole can definitely fill a need for a team, having shown what he can do on the court during various NBA Celebrity Games and during brief stints with the Patriots Basketball Club in Rwanda and Scarborough Shooting Stars in Canada.  

With those two professional teams, J Cole played a total of seven games (three with Patriots Basketball Club and four with the Scarborough Shooting Stars), giving us some indication of how much time we’ll see him on the floor with the Monkey Kings.  

Given that J Cole is 41, we’re guessing that his on-court time will be as limited as it was with his previous professional basketball stops, with +200 odds that he averages 5-to-8 minutes per game during his run in China.  

For comparison’s sake, J Cole averaged around 15.2 minutes per game during the three contests he played in 2021, which is why we’re also giving him +250 odds of averaging 8-to-12 minutes per game with his new team and +300 odds that he plays 12-to-20 minutes per game with them.  

The odds that J Cole gets to China and becomes a starting-quality player for the Monkey Kings are quite long, checking in at +1200 that he’ll play more than 20 minutes a game for them, though that’s something we’ll have to wait and see about.  

How Has J Cole Performed On The Court?  

During that seven-game run with his two prior teams in Rwanda and Canada, J Cole’s averaged 1.7 points per game (in Rwanda) and 2.4 points per game (in Canada), though he did shoot 50% from behind the arc with the Shooting Stars.  

Back in 2020, J Cole described his one-time goal of playing professionally, discussing his hope as a younger artist that one day he’d get a shot overseas, with all roads leading to a basketball career here in the States. “If I can blow up in the next three years, that means I'll only be 27,” J Cole wrote in his article that ran in The Players’ Tribune. “That still might give me enough time to train and pursue a professional basketball career. I'll work hard enough to go play overseas and then try to work my way to the NBA. I smiled at the possibility. Still holding on.”  

As of now, that American professional basketball career has not panned out, though J Cole will give it another crack with the Monkey Kings during the upcoming Chinese Basketball Association season.  

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