Paul the Apostle really cooked when he became the first published writer to refer to the body as a “temple”. While Paul was urging followers of Christ to “honor God with their bodies,” and though the metaphor has became over-saturated to the point that you may hear it from anabolics-pushing fitness influencers, conceptualizing our bodies this way is quite healthy.
They are, after all, the only tangible thing we’re guaranteed, from birth to death, and treating them as we would a sacred place of worship is an act of self-love that isn’t inherently religious. Viewing healthy physical habits the way a spiritual leader views the upkeep of their temple breeds gratitude, if not for a divine creator than simply for having your body to begin with. Of course, such gratitude leads to self-acceptance, and we’re more encouraged to do our daily stretching or follow our diets when we think of them as treating our bodies/temples kindly, rather than being bred out of dissatisfaction with what we’ve been given.
So believe me when I tell you I feel like a reprobate in saying that Nikola Topić is an uncommonly gifted 18-year-old hooper regarding his processing, his understanding of where the pressure points of a defense are at any given moment, and that I’d trade a whole lot of those smarts away for his f***ing shins to be a few degrees more malleable.
First, let’s focus on the rare basketball sense Nikola Topić has, which he displayed this past season in both his time with Mega Basket of the Adriatic League, and after his call-up to Red Star, where he mostly faced Euroleague competition when he wasn’t on the shelf with a left knee injury. (His season was ended by a partially torn ACL).
With Mega, Topić was the offensive engine entrusted with running repeated pick-and-rolls, which became the layout for many of his reads. Over 13 games, he averaged seven assists and three turnovers, but given how often the ball was in his hands, conservative decision-making actually depressed each of those categories, as Topić was occasionally too smart for his own good.
Here, Topić sees two defenders come to the ball as his screen-setter dives to the rim, with the ‘lift’ shooter rising from the strong-side corner. That defender sticks with the shooter instead of recovering to the roller. Great! But then, Topić realizes there’s surely a defender in the other corner he has to worry about, and technically, he makes the right decision to skip it to that other corner to create a catch-and-shoot jumper.
I went through this season’s tape chronologically after watching many of his shots/assists/turnovers from the prior season with Beograd to get a baseline, and it was immediately clear that the young Serb had the 2-on-2 situations down. You know, drive-and-kicks one pass away, hitting the dunker spot on drives, hitting the roll-man vs. drop coverage, dynamic situations in transition, that was all great. Sometimes awesome:
But you saw the wheels really turn for Topić when considering the whole court, and earlier in the season, particularly with Mega, it felt like he perceived potential advantages at a high-level, but not the actual ones, as in that first clip: It’s exciting to see an 18-year-old guard immediately processes two on the ball, and then one help defender, and then another one in the opposite corner…but the highest-value read was probably just to hit the roller anyway, right?
Same thing here, on an empty pick-and-roll where two defenders come to the ball. Topić hits the big at the top of the key, whose defender was the only helper who could recover to that roller; now he has to guard the pall, and Topić is pointing to the next read as soon as the ball leaves his hands:
But Topić probably could have made that play himself, had he not been knee-capped by a fixation on the admittedly correct help defender to fixate on. Which is why I was jumping out of my seat by the end of his season, when Topić frequently took matters into his own hands by not only analyzing help defenders, but manipulating them himself.
Look at him manipulate the low-man on this pick-and-roll with his eyes, allowing him to make the highest-value pass by not just recognizing the potential advantage, but actualizing it:
This is where I believe Topić will add value as an NBA contributor, perhaps next to a renowned advantage-creator. His ability to exploit advantages is on a clear incline, and his sense of defensive pressure points does not disappear when he’s not the ball-dominant, pick-and-roll puppeteer he was at Mega Bemax. Across eight games with Red Star, where he had a larger share of off-ball opportunities, he displayed the type of quick decision-making and connective passing every team wants to surround their big guns with:
Yes, I am high enough on Topić’s decision-making that I’m not overly worried about his 29% 3-point shooting this season with regards to his future as an off-ball contributor, though that should improve too. (He is, historically, a high-80’s free-throw shooter.) But certainly, his sell as a prospect is that of a high-volume on-ball creator who gets into the paint at will, but that’s not all he can be.
Here’s a clip from the very first game of Topić’s 2022-23 season with Beograd, where he roasts a closeout that doesn’t come near the 3-point line:
It’s another positive bit of decision-making off the catch, but it’s also instructive as to the type of driver that Nikola Topić is, even in more static situations like a half-court pick-and-roll. He will pick that ball up early, often beyond the free-throw line, and trust that he can get all the way to the rim or somewhere near it afterwards. For most of his career, this has been a fine strategy, given his straight-line burst and wonderful body control/touch while in the air.
Per Synergy, he shot 68% with Mega this season on half-court attempts at the rim, which does not include a single dunk. That’s explained by a combination of a reported 6’5.5″ wingspan and that tendency to pick the ball up early, which again, didn’t matter much with Mega against Adriatic League competition.
Plenty of his buckets looked like this, where he operates the pick-and-roll, and despite taking his final dribble outside the 3-point line, finishes over the outstretched arms of a big man whose technique and/or athleticism could use just a bit of work:
Or, perhaps something like this, where Topić executed a no-frills, straight-line drive against a big man on a switch, just blowing by him with two dribbles that don’t cover a ton of ground.
No, those don’t dribbles don’t cover much ground, and sigh, it’s time to talk about those shins.
What I’m referring to is a concept known as “shin angle,” referring to the angle between a player’s shin and the floor; the more acute (closer to parallel) it gets with the floor, the more torque/later mobility they have off that step. Think of the most flexible players you know, who can bend tight corners by getting low to the ground or change directions and demonstrate a damn-near truly parallel shin angle like the inhuman Shai Gilgeous Alexander:
This is decidedly not Nikola Topić, who has exemplary north-south pop, but with lateral mobility that belongs on a pavement court the morning after it rained. His routes to the rim take the shape of a banana, rather than a zig-zag. On his very first possession with Red Star in 2023-24, he blows by a poorly executed switch, but instead of careening right off the defender’s hip, his wide angle to the rim allows that defender to recover, though Topić evades him by hanging in the air:
On that play, we see Topić’s other athletic flaw, in that he’s not very flexible with his upper body. His shins get reasonably low to that ground there, but his center of gravity is not. Of course, if SGA and Kyrie Irving are the bar, then we’ll never be satisfied, but this is still quite the difference:
Against Euroleague bigs, Topić started to feel the weight of his driving limitations, for perhaps the first time in his life. He shot just 6-of-14 at the rim, per Synergy — small sample size, I know — but it matched the eye test, as wide driving angles that were exacerbated by aborting his dribble too early turned would-be makes against weaker competitions into some blocked shots and impossible floaters against more mobile defenders:
That said, Topić still showed flashes of downhill production, exposing weakness in point-of-attack defense. When switches and hedges were slightly off-kilter, or defenders were the slightest bit confused by, say, a ghost screen, Topić was more eager to take advantage of that daylight. Somewhat similar to his playmaking strengths and weakness, the tantalizing guard prospect has no problems identifying advantageous driving lanes. It’s creating them that we have to worry about.
I do say tantalizing guard prospect intentionally. Despite a lack of horizontal shake and a consistent outside shot, Topić offers enough talent at such a young age (18 on draft night) that I wouldn’t balk at anybody who has him in the top-tier of prospects.
That does bring me to the first larger question when evaluating Topić, though, one you might be able to guess if you’ve read the title to this piece, and that’s one of complementary skills. In a vacuum, a guard with plus-positional size who has both excellent feel and excellent touch who’s already displayed advanced acumen in the NBA’s preferred pick-and-roll style has to be near the top of your big board, right?
Well, not if you don’t believe in the glue that connects those skills. For Topić, the glue could be the horizontal shake needed to access that superb touch and feel on the ball and shooting off of it; there’s reasons to be skeptical in both areas, particularly the former. And this season, we often saw a lack of burst in small spaces dim his playmaking. Do we think he couldn’t process and execute these baseline drive-and-kicks, or could he not access these because he couldn’t turn the corner on his matchup?
This is the crux of Topić’s defense as well, where his processing and understanding of rotations is as strong as it is on offense, but the end of the floor where his lack of lateral movement skills come back to bite him even more. And speaking of defense, NBA teams will let him access his strengths even less often than Adriatic and Euroleague teams, even beyond the improvement in individual defenders.
Why would an NBA team put themselves in rotation by hard-hedging Topić, the coverage we saw in many of his on-ball passing clips from the first section? Before we even get to drop coverage, will he not have years of seeing teams test him by going under ball-screens or switching? He’s not shy to pull up from three, but brashness is a long way from effectiveness, not to mention a lack of mid-range counters that seem antithetical to his full-speed-ahead driving nature.
Finally, can a worthwhile bet be made on exposing the cracks and slippages of an NBA defense? This, after all, is what I’m most confident about in Nikola Topić’s game, that the spaces created by confusion at the point-of-attack are ripe to be uncovered by his aggressive, north-south nature. However, is a truly enticing ball-handling prospect not one who primarily thrives on creating something out of nothing?
Nikola Topić might have been the most polarizing prospect — non Zach Edey division — in this NBA Draft class before he clocked in with a negative wingspan and a partially torn ACL this month. And after diving deep into his film, despite the obvious combination of production, youth, and skill, I can say I understand the skeptics for the reasons I delved into above.
However, I disagree with them. There is feasible skill acquisition within reach that would secure Topić’s outlook as one of the best bets in the 2024 NBA Draft class to return value as an offensive creator an NBA team can depend on. We’ve gone 2,000 words without discussing his ball-handling ability, just his tendencies.
But those tendencies, namely the early pickups and lack of ground coverage, have far more to do with the shin-angle and flexibility limitations that I think will see marginal improvements as he nears legal (American) drinking age. But even if they don’t, Topić’s handle itself is where my optimism lies.
Topić has the ball on a string, both trusting it in tight spaces and in north-south situations:
There was even a glimpse or two of a late change-of-direction, such a spin move after Topić realized he didn’t have the angle to the basket simply going full speed.
Watching him prove that these dribble counters — particularly that spin move in the lane — are in his bag, but so infrequently pulling them out, is a sign that Topić has rarely had to rely on them when his signature sprints to the rim have been enough to get by. I don’t know how much I trust his horizontal shake to improve, but I do trust that he start taking the extra dribble more consistently.
In his age-18 season, it was in his bag, just unnatural for him. Still, that coveted extra dribble was the difference on possessions like these, first where he draws a foul, and secondly where he makes a poor decision with the ball, resulting in a turnover:
Topić has beaten defenders to the rim all his life by putting his head down and turning it into a track-meet, facing real resistance for the first time in his mid-season jump to Red Star this past winter. There, his circuitous driving routes were exposed a bit, but more importantly, so were his lack of counters. We hardly saw late spin-moves in the lane, or shielding a shot-blocker with his body, and jumping off two feet. It would have helped here:
The glue that has bound Nikola Topić’s strengths together has been his straight-line burst, an ability that’s forced defenses to trap and hard-hedge him in an effort to prevent him from wreaking havoc in the lane. That, however, opened up his advanced play-making; the counter then would be frequent switching, but competition with Beograd and Mega rarely featured a big who could keep up with him. Transition offense was child’s play.
The glue to connect his playmaking and finishing in the NBA will change. No longer will it be enough to put his head down and go, and while the side-to-side athleticism will rarely leave defenders in the dust, this is where skill acquisition will elevate Topić’s game. Shooting, of course, is an obvious swing factor, but so is taking extra dribble to get further into the lane, or to the other side of the basket, prolonging his decision-making window.
Against Euroleague competition, Topić would frequently find himself with no live dribble, about to jump off of one-foot without having created an advantage, a situation he rarely found himself in with Mega or Beograd. His drive was hitting the fan, and he’d have to find a bail-out option rather than a high-level read:
I believe Nikola Topić has the necessary ball-handling ability to build a web of counters, to continue his downhill marches against NBA defenses particularly as his shooting improves, especially as he provides enough off-ball value to earn a longer leash with whatever team drafts him.
Would I still trade much of his basketball sense for that east-west shake we desire in our lead guards? It’d be the safe move, as it would likely assure Topić’s main selling point would translate to the NBA, that he’d at least be able to get into the paint vs. anybody, regardless of the decision-making surrounding his drives. Whoever drafts him would more likely be getting the version of him they’ve seen on film.
Yet, I’m a believer in this version of Topić, the only one we’re going to get, perhaps for the same reason I’m a believer in doing ten minutes of yoga a day. He is a uniquely challenging prospect to evaluate with extreme strengths and weaknesses, but in leaning toward acceptance rather than dissatisfaction, analyzing what tools he has rather that what tools he doesn’t, I’ve found the improvements Nikola Topić has to make are within reach.
Tags:
Related Podcasts
No items foundRelated Articles
