The Importance of Margins and Some 2024 Sleepers

Sequels. Everyone’s seen at least one, everyone’s enjoyed the culmination of their favorite characters diving back into their world to achieve a new task, sometimes even exceeding expectations and driving you further into the mythos of that story. The 2024 draft class forms somewhat of a parallel to that idea, following an extremely stacked class, the expectations left by the 2023 draft class leave a large void for the 2024 class to fill.

Every year a plethora of players declare for the NBA draft. In fact, 242 players declared for the draft in 2023 but only 58 were formally selected by NBA teams. Some of these players get picked up in the undrafted market but that still leaves a large percentage of the pool. So what makes it so difficult to attain this level? Why are the benchmarks so high, when in most cases, players are transitioning from the next best level of competitive basketball? Two words answer these questions: scarcity and margins.

The two causes are interdependent, with only 450 guaranteed roster spots and an additional 90 spots for two-way contracts, the competition for each single NBA roster spot is cutthroat. In economics, scarcity occurs when demand dramatically outweighs the supply causing the lack of availability of a resource. Here, the demand for roster spots is exceptionally high and yet there’s an abundance of players that enter the draft pool each year, so how do teams navigate what players are worth giving attention to and then acquire the resources to aid them in their development curves?

While it is a league that loves to imitate, each NBA team has its own unique drafting and development philosophy, however, at the same time there are a few principles that are underlying across the foundations of these teams’ ideologies. With the lack of roster spots, this means only the best of the best in the world can truly attain this level of play, causing the margins to be effective on an NBA court to become razor thin. Teams have to make decisions on prospects with these margins in mind. Questions about how a player works in narrow NBA windows have to be consistently recalibrated throughout the scouting process to effectively project a player.

For teams at the top of the draft, it can be an easier time to navigate this with more well-rounded prospects and “sure-fire” talents at the top of the draft such as Wembanyama, Doncic, and Zion in recent history. Teams have become far more effective at drafting even when comparing it to draft classes from 7-8 years ago. From there, when the “sure-fire” prospects are off the board, teams try to look into prospects that are highly talented and skilled but maybe one or two swing skills away from becoming far more threatening in their roles as NBA players. The Thompson Twins, Tyrese Haliburton, and Jayson Tatum are astute examples of this where teams can deploy the resources to severely alter a player’s development curve and hone in on those players’ weakest link, and this is generally why these prospects are taken in the lottery. Whether that comes in shooting, handling, playmaking, or even feel development, improvement is only possible so long as there is a feasible, achievable pathway to said development.

For instance, to project that a player may improve in a given skill ‘A’, there needs to be an implied pathway where the player is consistently put in positions to develop skill ‘A’ while also ensuring that the prospect even possesses the requisite toolset that gives them the gravity to draw those situations. For example, it does not take much intellectual prodding to realize that a player cannot meaningfully improve as a short roll passer if they can not effectively get downhill, roll to the rim, collapse, draw the defense in, and find the advantage created. If the player does not have the requisite tools to even draw the advantage in the first place, how are they expected to improve on the pattern recognition aspects of feel in those situations? This is where margins kick in from a developmental perspective.

Margins are the crux of how I project NBA players. Essentially, margins are the bandwidth to make errors that do not detract from a player’s immediate on-court value and their development curve, stemming from how a player’s blend of tools and skills aligns with the demands of an NBA context. For instance, it’s been much easier for Jaden Ivey to make handle improvements because of how quickly he gets downhill and gets through the first layer of defense. This enables Ivey to operate with way more space, and his elite burst has warranted the Pistons to run more creation reps through him. In contrast, a far less bursty prospect like Jalen Hood-Schifino doesn’t have the same extent of tools, and that has consequently lagged the development of his handle due to how much thinner his margins for error are.

Margins have always been more of an innate understanding to me but I would like to quantify and systematically visualize how I do that in this piece, highlighting some sneaky returners in the 2024 draft class who fit the margins to be an NBA player along the way. 

Before I begin, I would like to put out a disclaimer. The framework I am laying out is not a one-size-fits-all glove that you can apply on a 1:1 basis to every NBA draft prospect. With how archetypes and comparatives are used to describe prospects, I want to emphasize that evaluating prospects should not be treated like the bottle of Irish Spring 5-in-1 you would use as a swamped college kid because you did not have the time nor the effort to take care of yourself as you trucked along to your 8:00 AM “Intro to Sociology” class. This is only to streamline the process of identifying NBA players and how they could potentially grow and should be applied as a template to do so. Too often archetypes and comparatives are used to put prospects in these neatly defined, cookie-cutter frameworks, and due to the innate biases that this creates, it takes away from the minutiae of evaluation. Each prospect is completely unique in their own way like the crystalline structure of every snowflake; no two prospects are the same and neither will their margins to play in the NBA and grow.

FRAMEWORK: The ‘Funnel’ Method

Once these players who are one or two skills away are drafted, finding NBA players gets even tougher, akin to finding a needle in a haystack the size of Texas. This is not because there is any massive dropoff in talent; rather, the differences in talent and skill sets become so marginal at that point that it truly depends on how a team invests in that player and the team context the player inherits. In these instances when the player is not a primary advantage creator or does not warrant the ball in their hands consistently, I find that betting on outlier production or outlier skills allows a player to carve out a niche on the court and consistent playing time as they scale up to their NBA context. Betting on the outlier gives the player the margins to both play on the court, directly affecting their ability to exponentially grow their development curve.

First, let’s take a stroll down High School Lane. Bad memories incoming? Don’t worry, I just need you to remember a couple of lessons from your math and science classes from back then. This framework takes some inspiration from two key concepts: bell curves and the separating funnel experiment. A bell curve is a graph that depicts a normal distribution, essentially presenting the distribution of a set of values across a sample. It can show a sample’s central values, the highs, and the lows over a symmetrical graph based on deviations from the average. 

On the other hand, the separating funnel experiment is used to separate liquids with different densities. Due to the difference in densities, liquids such as oil and water are easier to separate. Here’s a graphic to explain these ideas better.

While scarcity is a primary consideration from a roster spot standpoint, the issue from a player and roster management standpoint is better defined through saturation. Saturation refers to the chemical principle that nothing extra can be absorbed by a substance. In this scenario, the teams are the substance and there is such an abundance of players with talents and skillsets that fit, teams can do nothing more with their limited roster spots. In the separating funnel experiment, saturation does not occur because when substances cannot mix or be absorbed by one another. Instead, they separate into different levels which can then only be separated to intricate detail through apparatus like the separating funnel. For teams to solve this problem in the same intricate detail, I present the Funnel Framework, combining the ideas of distribution from bell curves and the separation ideology of the funnel experiment.

Let’s flip that bell curve onto its side and map it to the sample of all potential NBA players. The deviations from the average (depicted as standard deviations) are the range of values a player can have on the NBA court and that can be further envisioned with the help of the funnel, where each level is like an immiscible liquid of different densities. These differences in ‘densities’ and how each player separates into each of these levels is how their margins affect the NBA court. As the margins increase for players, they trickle down into the lower levels of the funnels. While I plan to do a more analytical approach to qualify and apply this framework through statistical analysis of the NBA sample in a future piece, this is more of a way to visualize how margins functionally work in the NBA. Each colored level represents a specific set of qualities that improves a player’s margins, intrinsically changing the degree to which a player can carve out a role on the court.

For the sake of simplicity, I have used differentiators for margins at a more surface level rather than pointing out specific tools or skill sets that can provide more value whether in an immediate sense or developmental context. For example, the funnel will not break down whether a player has more touch or burst, or which of those skills is more valuable because the requirements can vary highly between NBA roles. Instead, the framework will focus on what is required for a player at each level, defining how the margins let them trickle down the funnel from both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball from a playoff perspective. Remember as we go through the framework, each level of the framework compounds similarly to the added density of each liquid. This means that each prior level still applies to a player even as they get deeper into the levels of the funnel.

Range of On-Court NBA Value

Functional Basketball Athlete:

This is what gets a player’s foot through the front door of the NBA landscape, what even gets them on the radar of NBA teams. What this level talks about is whether a player’s athleticism functionally allows them to play basketball at an NBA level. I relate this idea to the concept of performance outcomes. From a biomechanics perspective, performance outcomes talk about how effectively an athlete can operate an action or function of the sport they are playing. For example, with basketball, this can be how a player’s biomechanics allow them to effectively lift the ball, swing it up to their shot platform, and being able to release the shot. Another example is whether a player has the leaping mechanics to perform a dunk functionally.

What separates a player who is only a functional basketball athlete versus the levels below this one in the funnel, is that these players can functionally operate the biomechanics function but that performance outcome does not lead to a good basketball outcome. This is where the idea of being “skilled” comes through; just because a player can functionally release the basketball using his biomechanics, it does not mean that the player is accurately getting the ball through the hoop consistently. To be a consistent NBA player, the player needs to have the requisite athleticism to function in their role but they also need to be skilled enough to consistently reach a good basketball outcome.

One-Dimensional Player:

This next level talks about players who tend to be functional NBA players on one side of the ball but they actively take away from their team with how ineffective they are on the other side of the ball. These players can carve out a niche with their functional athleticism and skill on one side of the ball but their longevity in the league tends to be short because of how often they often lose their team’s possessions on the other side of the ball. An example of these types of players can be someone like Shake Milton who can be a microwave scorer off the bench but is consistently hunted on defense or Killian Hayes who was a great team defender but will consistently be sagged off of as an offensive player, taking away from his team’s spacing.

Functional NBA Player:

The next level of the funnel talks about players who can functionally operate on both sides of the ball but do not give a team outlier value in any form. These players are often at the back end of rotations of high-level teams because they can be playable without being a detriment on either side of the ball but they can not drive a team’s identity or provide enough value to help change the outcome of a game. An example of a player like this is someone like Drew Eubanks who can operate as an effective rim protector and as a roller offensively but his ability to do these things does not drive the complexion of a defense or offense which makes him quite replaceable from a team context.

Advantage Creator/Advantage Mitigator (With Help):

The average NBA player on a real playoff rotation can create advantages offensively or mitigate advantages on the defensive end with the help of their team. As PD Web defines it, advantage creation is the ability to create extra rotations for a defense and easy buckets for the offense. Advantage mitigation is the other side of the advantage creation coin where a defensive player can take away the opportunity for an offense to create those extra rotations and get easy buckets, often by mitigating the space an offensive player can operate in. The players at this level are often functional on one side of the ball and can create/mitigate advantages on the other end, for example with the help of a screen to get downhill offensively or when a team uses peel-switching to take away advantages and enable a defender to accentuate their ground coverage. The upper threshold of players at this level tends to create offensively and mitigate advantages defensively effectively with team help. High-end examples are players like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Andrew Nembhard, and Isaiah Hartenstein.

Advantage Creator/Advantage Mitigator From A Standstill:

The best players in the NBA can create advantages from a standstill or mitigate advantages solely using their margins. This level talks about the players who have high margins for error because of the combination of their tools/skills allowing them to create truly outlier value for their team. When creating advantages, these offensive players can automatically draw two players due to the gravity they have with the ball in their hands without needing the team to help them. This can be through shooting gravity like Tyrese Haliburton, downhill explosion to collapse defenses like Ja Morant, or even using strength and size in the post like Anthony Davis. On the flip side, advantage mitigators at this level can take away these extra rotations without the team over-helping using their tools/skills, whether that’s through high-level rim protection like Rudy Gobert or outlier point-of-attack defense like Jimmy Butler. These are high-end examples that help paint a clearer picture of these margins but there is again variance within this level due to the degree of value you can provide as a standstill advantage creator/mitigator. I have defined this variance in value through the two blue levels on the funnel diagram, with the darker blue representing higher-end examples like Haliburton, Gobert, and Morant. Examples of players lower on this spectrum and within the lighter blue level would be someone like Marcus Smart or Desmond Bane where the margins do create some of this value but not to the degree of the aforementioned examples.

The Outliers Within The Outliers:

When a player can create advantages or mitigate advantages to a historic level, it is due to a combination of highly unique tools and skills that enable them to attain this level of production. These tools and skills intersect in such a strong manner that these players can determine the outcome of a game through their margins. Often the players at this level can create advantages or mitigate them through different facets like feel, coordination, strength, speed, length, etc. This causes the margins to be truly unique and therefore affect the game at a historic level. Examples of players like this are Lebron James, Stephen Curry, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Larry Bird. In today’s NBA, players like Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama seem to be on this trajectory as long as health remains their friend.

Developmental Margins

“The grass may be green on the other side, but the grass is always greener where you water it.”

– Wolfgang Puck

The funnel framework helps define the range of on-court value across the NBA sample using margins, but a crucial aspect of this framework is how margins also help slide players down the funnel. Margins are key to helping initially carve a role in the NBA but it is also vital in setting up thresholds for skill development. Margins open up the developmental pathways to add micro-skills or even new skills altogether due to the margin of error caused by their tools, to add onto the initial role they’ve carved out. Having outlier margins in certain areas should allow a player to improve on their flaws because the combination of their tools and skills inherently puts them in a position to have those flaws improved.

An example of this is how I talked about how a lob threat with outlier vertical gravity has the pathway to improve as a passer on the short roll due to the defensive attention they would require. This could also be applied to all types of toolsets if they are outliers. For example, a player with elite burst can expand on their handle due to the defensive attention the player will get as he slices through the earlier lines of defense. Think of Jaylen Brown and how he developed his handle from his days at Cal to where it is now on the Boston Celtics; it’s a byproduct of the defensive attention the combination of his burst, size, and shooting touch provides. These margins to develop are available to the outliers and are often not to players who are not because they do not have the same thresholds to make those same errors due to the depth and quality of talent in the NBA, and this is why it is also a crucial part of how I project players in the NBA Draft.

The Sleepers Of The 2024 NBA Draft

Now that we’ve gone over how margins affect development and playtime in the NBA, how do these concepts project to the 2024 NBA draft?

The average draft class produces approximately 20 NBA players, and these are the guys who often play beyond their rookie-scale deal. Correlating this to the funnel framework, the majority of these players would be defined under the level of players who can create or mitigate advantages to outlier value with team help. When projecting an NBA draft class and creating a draft board, I grade the players that will be at this level of outcome or have the opportunity to reach this level of outcome as first-round grades. The rest of this piece will use the funnel framework and the idea of margins to spotlight a few players I believe fit this mold while also being mocked outside of the top 30 picks on Rookie Scale’s Consensus Big Board:

Honorable Mentions: KJ Simpson, Jaylon Tyson, Melvin Ajinca, and Adem Bona.

Isaiah Crawford

Positive margins: strength, feel, length, coordination, and touch. | Potential pitfalls: vertical explosion and medical history.

Isaiah Crawford is a 6′ 5.25″ (without shoes) wing/forward with a 7′ 0.5″ wingspan who has dominated as a defender and primary creator for Louisiana Tech this past college season. While he has been tasked to create a high degree of offense for Louisiana Tech, he shines as an exceptional advantage mitigator on the defensive side of the ball. Crawford is very effective at ending offensive possessions and creating events as a defender which is apparent from his 5.7 block rate and 3.5 steal rate.

So how does he do this? This is where Crawford’s margins kick in as he combines his feel and athletic traits to consistently create events that lead to early offense for his team. Using his excellent strength, he can impede drives from the perimeter or absorb contact from drivers as a low man. Crawford also stifles offensive players using his hand-eye coordination and length to mitigate scoring advantages, whether it is in a context where he has to recover and block shots or take away space to dribble the ball.

Just look at this play where Crawford (#22) operates as a weakside tagger. For most players, the pass to the weakside corner is available because of how deep the roller has gotten into the paint and collapsed the defense. Crawford completely erases that passing window within the blink of an eye, targeting the ball extremely accurately mid-air with his length and restricting any angle that could have made the pass possible.

As an on-ball defender, Crawford can slide his feet well and move laterally. However, he mainly mitigates advantages here by using his balance and strength to absorb contact to get drivers off balance on the initial bump, where he then uses his length to dislodge the ball and create steals. Even when Isaiah Crawford initially gets beat on drives or space-creating moves from the perimeter, he’s able to consistently recover with his ground coverage and length to get back into the play and take away that scoring advantage. If I had to use one word to describe Crawford’s defensive prowess, it would be the word protean. He’s someone who can be extremely malleable on this end whether it is as someone who can rotate backline and protect the rim, help at the nail, or guard on-ball.

On the other side of the ball, Crawford gives you everything you want out of a dribble-pass-shoot wing. As a driver, he leverages his strength to carve space on drives which enables him to weaponize his touch and body control around the rim and in the intermediary.

Crawford’s driving is accentuated by the threat of his shot from the perimeter; it gives him the momentum to get downhill and further leverage his strength in advantage situations. There shouldn’t be too many questions about Crawford’s shooting where he has had a strong sample throughout his college career of being efficient as a shooter from multiple areas of the court:

His feel is prominent defensively but it also exudes itself with his passing, processing decisions quickly, and acting upon passing windows consistently. Making passes on the move on drives is no stranger to Crawford, consistently making dump-off passes to the roller and kickouts to the perimeter when the advantage is created.

At the NBA level, Crawford will not be asked to create every advantage for his team, and his role will scale down to an off-the-catch scorer who will process decisions well and use his scoring in the intermediary as a counter on drives. Being able to provide positive value in these facets of offense while being a defender who can change the complexion of a defense makes Crawford a highly valuable player within any team context.

The main concern with Isaiah Crawford is the extent of his vertical athleticism, especially after dealing with two ACL tears in the same knee. At the NBA level, this could somewhat affect his ability to protect the rim but as you can see from the tape, these injuries have not taken away from his impact as a rim protector. Teams will have to do their due diligence on his medical history but the combination of Crawford’s tools should alleviate these vertical limitations and give him a higher margin for error.

Ajay Mitchell

Positive margins: positional size, feel, touch, and change of direction | Potential pitfalls: vertical explosion, defensive versatility, and complexity of passing reads.

Complementary guards with size, touch, and strong processing are often tough to find in the NBA, and they are often quite valuable when they can play off of bigger advantage creators. Enter Ajay Mitchell, a 6′ 3.25” (without shoes) guard with a 6’6.25” wingspan tasked with the primary advantage creation responsibilities for UCSB this past college season.

Mitchell is not someone who will create advantages from a standstill in the NBA but it is more about what he can do once he is provided a screen to create space for him. He uses a combination of handling craft, size, and touch to score at all three levels of the court which he leverages with his outlier change of direction and lateral movement. Mitchell can often find finishing avenues in short, tight areas with how well he decelerates and can swivel on the transverse body plane (the plane that passes through the middle of the body and divides the body horizontally). His 58.8% on halfcourt drives, a whopping 3.89 unassisted rim attempts per 40, is a product of these movement patterns that allow him to jostle into tight, but open spaces.

Apart from scoring on drives, Ajay Mitchell (#13) has exceptional passing feel where he mixes in quick trigger single-level reads with manipulation. He does well at maintaining advantages while being able to use hesitation and his eyes to throw off defenders and create new passing windows.

Coming into this college season, Mitchell made huge improvements to his athleticism and shooting efficiency from 3. He had improved on his verticality, strength, and even straight-line burst with more optimal shin angles.

Mitchell does not have the burst to create advantages, but take a look at how much his straight-line burst has improved in the span of two years. His shin angles are far better and due to how much closer they are to being an acute angle from the floor, his ability to generate more explosion laterally from the floor (lateral banking) is improved.

Outside of his athleticism, Ajay Mitchell’s shooting has improved over the years at UCSB. He always had good touch but now that is parlaying into his 3-point efficiency with increased volume each year, his increased strength being a reason for the potential improvement from distance:

On the defensive end, Mitchell often struggled not being able to contain ballhandlers. However, I believe this is at least partly due to being overtasked on the offensive end while being asked to guard up a position in most possessions.

The defense should improve at the NBA level when he’s not being asked to create most of his team’s offense and instead used as a secondary or tertiary creator in lineups, thus enabling him to leverage his lateral movement skills on defense while benefiting from easier scoring opportunities. This could be a potential pitfall with Mitchell if this never improves, which would put more emphasis on the offensive traits that are lacking like being a sub-par leaper in traffic and a lack of volume with multi-layered reads while on the move.

However, as long as the defense is not a detriment, the margins with his touch, positional size, and change of direction should allow him to reach an outcome where he is an advantage creator who uses team help and can functionally operate on the defensive end.

Jonathan Mogbo

Positive margins: vertical explosion, feel, ground coverage, and standing reach. | Potential pitfalls: positional size and shooting gravity.

Jonathan Mogbo is probably the ‘weirdest’ prospect in the 2024 NBA draft. Weird is good though: it’s just another way of saying he is an outlier in multiple areas. Standing at 6′ 6.25” without shoes and a 7′ 2″ wingspan, Mogbo has been the crux of the San Francisco Dons’ offense. He’s an explosive athlete both vertically and in a straight line, which is why the Dons used him as their rim-runner, often springing over the top of the defense for lobs with his elite catch radius. He has some special qualities as a vertical threat: a near-zero load time off of one or both feet, great hang time that allows him to catch lobs that are poorly placed, highly syncopated footwork, and a 9′ 0.50” standing reach that allows him to extend into finishes with ease.

What’s especially intriguing about Mogbo is that he started college as a 6′ 4″ guard but had a huge growth spurt that catapulted him to a smidge under 6′ 8″. All of the skills he acquired as he played as a guard for the longest time like handling creativity and passing feel stayed. For that reason, Mogbo (#10) is an outlier ball handler for a big and when that is coupled with his tremendous vertical gravity, the results tend to look like this:

Where Mogbo really shines is his processing and passing reads. Lob threats that tend to put the amount of pressure that Mogbo does on the rim do not usually have the passing volume or the complexity of reads that can shift defenses. In fact, the group of players who have had over 50 dunks and an assist percentage above 20 is miniscule.

Given the popularity of the Delay action in the modern NBA, Mogbo should be able to weaponize his passing by operating handoffs and finding cutters. This would also enable him to counter with his handle when there are open lanes to the rim out of fake handoffs. When his defender sags off of him, this should give Mogbo the runway to get downhill and collapse the defense, where he can find open passing opportunities to the perimeter on the short roll. Another valuable indicator of Mogbo’s passing is that he throws a good volume of high-risk~high-reward passes while keeping his error rate low at an assist-to-turnover ratio of 2.0.

Mogbo also projects to have a high impact on transition offense. As a good defensive rebounder (29.6 defensive rebounding rate), he is fantastic in grab-and-go situations where he can use his handle and open-court athleticism to shift defenses early and open up easier opportunities once the half-court offense is set. Playing him out of the dunker spot can also give Mogbo better opportunities to position himself for offensive rebounds off of misses.

The questions about Mogbo that persist are his lack of shooting and what defensive role he can translate to in the NBA. Mogbo covers ground well and moves in space well enough to mirror the movements of wings and forwards, which can be functionally seen in his 3% steal rate. The common idea is that Mogbo will be an undersized big as an anchor but I believe he projects more as a team defender who erases shots at the rim from the weakside and is switchable enough to guard similar-sized players out on the perimeter.

Playing as a guard for most of his life, Mogbo used to take jump shots but that volume drastically reduced as he grew larger and his role morphed into more of a traditional big. He took no threes this past year, but he notably shot 24 jump shots in 2018 at the Under Armour circuit and 79 attempts throughout his career in JuCo. Although I would not bet on his shooting to improve in a vacuum, there could be an avenue for Mogbo to become a low-volume catch-and-shoot 3-point shooter if a team believes they can improve Mogbo as a shooter and alter his chain of skills. Typically, I would not bet on a 22-year-old to improve their shooting acumen to change this drastically but Mogbo is anything but your typical player. He’s clearly an unorthodox prospect and he’s had an unorthodox development curve as a college basketball player. Perhaps, Mogbo’s physical changes have delayed his functional touch development, with some evidence in his improving free throw shooting: 42.5% on 80 attempts from the charity strike the year before but now at 69.6% on 102 attempts.

Regardless of whether Mogbo shoots or not, his margins with verticality, passing, handling creativity, ground coverage, and reach should help overcome some of his issues of scalability on either side of the ball. Mogbo can scale next to the bigs due to his handle, enabling him to operate as a tertiary handling valve and create advantages with his creativity and explosion.

All in all, these three players have the margins to carve out extremely effective and valuable roles within most team constructs. They can give teams outlier value in different ways while not being a detriment on the other end, expanding their margin for error on the court. While they bring high-level skillsets from day 1, these same margins can allow them to expand their game in NBA spacing, granted that the team that drafts them invests resources in the development of these skills. It could be Mogbo’s shooting improving due to the number of open reps he will get being sagged off of, Ajay Mitchell’s defense improving through better technique and leveraging his tools more as his scaled-down offense keeps him on the floor, or even Isaiah Crawford making multi-layered passing reads on drives because his pattern recognition improves with the number of off the catch drives he’ll need to operate. Using the ideas I have talked about through the funnel framework, I believe these three players will bring back first-round value for teams, and drafting them anywhere beyond the first round will give those teams a true steal in on-court value relative to the players’ contracts.