Offense

At a glance, the statistical case for Aday Mara is a fairly straightforward one to make, small sample size notwithstanding; Mara was virtually unassailable across all impact metrics and possession-adjusted statistics.

Despite the stellar analytical resume, I definitely have some consternation towards Mara’s offensive projection. Per Bart Torvik, since 2010 there have been 515 seasons of players labeled as ‘Centers’ in their database who also played in the NBA. The average rim finishing of this ‘Center’ group is 70.9%. Mara doesn’t fall short of this threshold at all — as I write this on 11/8, Mara sits at 69.7% at the rim for his career (76/109). However, further examination of past centers’ touch profile would reveal another unofficial benchmark Mara has fallen short of. Since the summer of 2023, Mara has only finished 56.7% on layups (48/86) in all competitions. As insignificant as this number may sound, underwhelming rim efficiency paired with limited mobility is a fairly airtight method for determining whether bigs are NBA caliber or not.

While the value of queries in draft projections can and will be heavily contested by others, yielding a list of almost exclusively NBA also-rans with so few parameters should sound a major alarm in any evaluation. But in Mara’s case, there are a few contextually-rooted reasons for optimism. This past season, 42% (8/19) of Mara’s missed layups were on putback attempts. In designed offense (PNR Roll-Man and Post-ups), Mara was actually very effective, continuing the trend of improvement from the past few years.

Mara’s enhanced ability as a roller was evident throughout this past season. Mara made significant strides as a screener in addition to improving his patience on the catch. Compare the clips below, for example. The first clip is from a pre-conference game versus Arizona, and the second is from a mid-season conference matchup with Wisconsin. In both clips, UCLA runs a variation of ‘Spain Leak’ versus hedging defenses. And with the hedging coverage forcing the backline defenders to tag the roller early, Mara’s footwork and awareness after the catch are placed under duress. In the first clip, Mara is rushed by the speed of the help rotations, shuffles his feet, and logs a turnover. However, in the second clip Mara up-fakes, nimbly pirouettes around the recovering Nolan Winter, and creates a window for an emphatic finish.

Mara’s improvements as a play finisher and opportunistic scorer materializing within the 2024-25 UCLA team context is nothing short of astounding, considering the restrictions within the environment. In an attempt to streamline my analysis (and perhaps avoid a few query-incited eyerolls), I created a composite metric to describe the quality of an NCAA team’s finishing environment using a variety of team metrics and adjusted for year and position. The rating is called a ‘Context Quality Score’, and I will hopefully write something detailing the methodology in the near future.

In Aday’s case, he played in one of the least-friendly finishing contexts in my entire database which dates back to 2010. The 24-25 iteration of UCLA posted a -61.9 Context Quality Score, which falls in the 27th percentile for all players 6’10 and taller in Bart Torvik’s database. Amongst NBA players who came through the NCAA pipeline, this CQS is in the 21st percentile. UCLA played an extremely half-court heavy style with minimal shooting or passing talent. Mara’s inefficiencies were exacerbated by the fact that he was used as the fulcrum of the Bruins’ offense in his minutes. And while playing in an unfriendly environment doesn’t totally excuse Mara’s finishing, referencing the players who were similarly underwhelming at the rim in bad contexts reveals the path to success for Mara.

Cody Zeller and Steven Adams were the only two players 7-feet or taller who played for teams with 30th percentile or worse Context Quality Scores, finished below average for their position, AND still managed to log more than 3000 minutes. Both players have been career positives and certainly in Zeller’s case, an underrated player despite underperforming relative to his draft slot.

Looking at each player’s scoring output in the pros confirms their issues at the rim did persist, even though Zeller had some years of Kemba Walker-induced positive true shooting influence. Both Adams and Zeller possess negative playtype weighted rTS% (-2.4 and -1.4, respectively). However, both were highly impactful players in a manner I see Aday Mara capable of replicating at the next level, with elite contributions to the possession battle.

The highlighted column above is these players’ possession rank, which consists of their impact on team possessions in terms of net rating. While Zeller and Adams differ in their turnover influence, when it comes to rebounding, both are undeniable positives relative to position. This is where Mara should be able to establish himself amongst the league’s best. In the 2024-25 season, Mara posted a 20.5% total rebounding rate, 94th percentile for all players 6’10 or taller in Bart Torvik’s database. Mara’s presence on the offensive glass places a great deal of pressure on defenses, as even in limited minutes, Mara managed to get opposing bigs into foul trouble.

In the clips above, Mara’s effect on rival frontcourt players is apparent. Any lapse from the opponent, taking them out of position, makes securing a rebound virtually impossible. Mara’s size and consistent hands make early boxouts mandatory from opposing bigs, and when they fail to do so, often times their desperation to prevent easy second-chance points leads to fouls. Albeit in a small sample (555 possessions), UCLA’s free-throw rate with Mara on the floor is 32.3, good for 193rd in the country. In the 1157 possessions without Mara, UCLA posted a free-throw rate of 29.8, which would have been 275th in the country.

For as unambiguously encouraging as Mara’s rebounding translation is, turnover generation is a much more tenuous discussion. Generally, jumbo-sized NBA big men do not have positive defensive turnover value. My theory on the cause is the reliance on drop-coverage and the predictability of help rotations as a result. At the collegiate level, though, turnover generation can be a useful proxy for mobility and processing, and it’s here where Mara really falters historically.

Falling under 1% steal rate isn’t necessarily the kiss of death for Mara and his career 0.7% steal rate, but for a player who I expect to be a limited scorer because of the aforementioned touch issues, Mara’s defensive outlook needs to be clearer. If you compare him with the success cases in the query above, his scoring acumen falls well short. Similar to the offensive end, though, there are schematic factors that may have kept Mara out of the passing lanes and suppressed his steal count.

Over the 420 minutes Aday Mara played across three separate FIBA events, his steal rate never dipped below 1%, which stoked my curiosity as to what could’ve been behind his precipitous decline at UCLA. Obviously, it’s easier to accrue steals versus similar-aged competition than in the NCAA, but beyond this, there was a stark contrast between Mara’s defensive deployment at UCLA and any other team he’d been on.

UCLA Coach Mick Cronin is known for his defensive aptitude, and in the past has described his defensive philosophy as being rooted in generating turnovers, preventing layups, and above all else, not fouling. The first and last tenants seem somewhat contradictory; however, Cronin-led teams’ statistical resume shows he’s been near the bottom of the country in foul rate and two-foul participation (the percentage of time that a starter with two fouls in the first half has been allowed to play) and an above-average turnover rate team for most of his tenure.

Cronin has cultivated this defensive identity by deploying an aggressive switching scheme with bigs typically playing at the level of the screen. Cronin has aligned his personnel with this defensive philosophy by sacrificing size in his big men in favor of length and mobility. Since 2008, Cronin has only had two players 6’11 or taller play over a 30% minutes share: Nysier Brooks and Aday Mara. This is because of how taxing his style of defense is on bigs specifically. Take the clip below, for example. Mara has to hedge two separate ballscreens, and in the process is forced to cover a great deal of ground before having to fight through a pin-in screen to close out to a shooter.

Cronin’s defensive style is evident in their playtype frequency as well; they are consistently near the top of the country in percent of possessions spent guarding isolations and committing multiple defenders to ballscreens.

Of course, there are many ways to build a good defense ,as Cronin has exhibited. But it is defense-inconducive to larger players like Mara. An aggressive defense regularly tasking bigs with guarding on the perimeter, stopping drives, and demanding they do so without fouling, is going to be difficult for any 7-footer to perform. At times, Mara proved to be no exception to this.

But this is where Mara’s transfer to Michigan should prove to be a boon. Michigan head coach Dusty May has primarily run a drop defense, and in Michigan’s first exhibition, this is how Mara was utilized. Obviously, it is too early to tell if this schematic shift on its own will be enough to boost Mara’s steal rate to an acceptable level. My prediction would be that Mara’s absurd block rate slightly declines as his minutes increase and he is tasked with a more static role in PNR coverage. But, playing more inside the arc, Mara will be able to get his hands on more interior passes, as he had in international settings.

Circling back to an earlier query I’d referenced to highlight Mara’s touch concerns, even though I anticipate Mara putting together a season this year which would elevate him outside of this group, this query is instructive in determining what is appropriate risk to take when drafting big.

The only player here to play a meaningful number of NBA minutes is Luke Kornet, who uncoincidentally has comfortably the best assist-to-turnover ratio of the group. Even with their playmaking duties being considerably lower than other positions, centers’ cognition cannot be dismissed. If anything, metrics like assist-to-turnover may be more useful gauges of feel for bigs because their roles are more standardized than other positions. And for Aday Mara, who was given more playmaking responsibility than most bigs (90th percentile in Offensive Load for players 6’10 or taller) and maintained an A:TO of 1.21 (95th percentile for players 6’10 or taller) the currently available data indicates he may be an outlier when it comes to big man processing power.

All of this is to say Mara’s feel for the game eases many of my concerns with his defensive translatability and finishing. Any study on jumbo-sized bigs like Aday Mara will be limited because of the shallower pool of comparable prospects. But, to date, Mara has cleared the largest hurdles for center prospects; His rim-protection, passing, and two-way rebounding are all in line with successful NBA centers of the past. Checking these three boxes alone greatly shrinks Mara’s range of possible outcomes, and even if his rim-finishing issues aren’t resolved, there are past cases of ineffective scorers at Mara’s size becoming NBA mainstays. Zydrunas Ilgauskas has played the most minutes this century of any player listed 7’3 or taller, and was above league average rim field goal percentage only once in his career! In fact, if I were to make a comparison for Mara it would be Big Z, a player impact metrics consistently rated near the top 150 players in the league, despite being a negative scoring influence on offense.

Ultimately, the floor seldom seems to fall out for prospects, and considering how valuable a super-sized big can be, there’s a case to be made that these players are worth taking based on scarcity alone. Many of the recent ‘busts’ at this size aren’t unambiguous failures relative to expectations. Even though they fell short of the previously outlined feel thresholds, Tacko Fall and Walter ‘Edy’ Tavares have plausible NBA cases today. Fall has been consistently productive internationally and in the G League, while Tavares has been in the top 20 of PER in the ACB since he arrived in the league eight years ago.

Aday Mara is not without his flaws, and the offensive production Mara provides will be heavily dependent on his offensive rebounding and turnover aversion. Understandably, this elevator pitch may not be the most appealing within the lottery range, and any analysis rooted in statistical precedent can be tenuous with how friendly impact metrics can be towards centers. However, simply put, players of Mara’s size should be given the benefit of the doubt considering how outsized returns can be, and how their developmental trajectories seem to be the most reliably constant relative to other position groups. A theme of NBA prospect development seems to be that bigs are given up on too early: the nomadic early careers of Ivica Zubac and Isaiah Hartenstein immediately come to mind. Attitudes towards bigs have changed since then, and if Aday Mara continues on this trajectory, he should not slip through the cracks like his predecessors.

The post NBA Prospect Preview: Aday Mara appeared first on Swish Theory.

The lack of fanfare is somewhat understandable, considering Gillespie’s nomadic college career so far, along with Tennessee welcoming a projected top-5 pick in Nate Ament to campus this season. However, playing in the shadow of a blue-chip recruit is a position Gillespie is well familiar with, after playing with 2025 lottery pick Derik Queen this past season. Similar to the 2024-25 season, I expect Gillespie to not only perform at the same level as his highly regarded counterpart but also to exceed Ament’s production at times, just as he did with Queen.

My confidence in Gillespie is based on his track record of steady and significant improvement, which has placed him on a developmental trajectory that has elevated him to becoming a bona fide NBA prospect and a player well worth first-round consideration come draft time in 2026. And with college basketball currently in a state of perpetual flux, it has never been more important to account for the various contextual factors, from scheme to personnel, which when ignored could obfuscate a prospect’s professional potential.

Making the Leap

What I found initially striking within Gillespie’s prospect profile was the dramatic leap he made from his sophomore year at Belmont to his junior year with Maryland. The transfer portal era in college basketball has been defined by a seemingly endless stream of player movement, catalyzed by ludicrous sums of money exchanging hands. Its downstream effects on player evaluation are abundantly evident. With the massive financial incentive to transfer ‘up’ in level, mid-major basketball has never been shallower, and the portal is littered with cases of non-power conference players (especially diminutive scoring guards) going a level too high for their games and being relegated to a reserve role. For every Ja’Kobi Gillespie there are seemingly five times as many players who fall short of expectations once they make the leap to a higher level of competition. In just the past season guards such as Aidan Mahaney, Myles Rice, and Malik Mack come to mind as players who failed to adjust to their new team.

And to be fully transparent, I was skeptical Gillespie’s game would translate to a conference in the Big Ten, which is known for its physicality and deliberate style of play. By transferring from Belmont, Gillespie was leaving one of the most progressive offensive schemes in college basketball, where head Coach Casey Alexander has made high-tempo and robust three-point attempt rates staple characteristics of his teams.  

Alexander’s penchant for constructing elite offenses created a finishing environment disparate from the kind of offenses Gillespie’s new coach, Kevin Willard, had directed over the course of his career. Willard, styling himself as more of a defensively oriented coach, was on the opposite end of the offensive spectrum to Alexander. Per Bart Torvik, Willard-coached teams had only been in the top-100 in adjusted tempo AND three-point attempt rate twice since 2011.

Less ideal offensive circumstances are especially notable in Gillespie’s case because a significant feature that separated him from other portal guards is his abnormal efficiency inside the arc. In the 2023-24 season, Gillespie finished 72.6% at the rim and posted a 63.4% effective field goal percentage, numbers virtually unheard of for any perimeter player. Without an overly dynamic handle or vertical athleticism (Gillespie only converted one of these rim attempts into a dunk), Ja’Kobi seemed acutely prone to experiencing a significant decline in his two-point efficiency. With a precarious outlook as a downhill threat, and having only posted a pedestrian 0.36 3PAr in 23-24, there didn’t seem to be avenues for Gillespie to weather the leap in competition and replicate the production he had enjoyed at Belmont.

The environmental factors at Maryland seemed tailored to confine Gillespie to a role where he’d be caught in between positions, too limited of a downhill threat to function as a lead ballhandler, and too small and limited (volume-wise, at least) of a jumpshooter to scale easily off the ball. What transpired over the next season, though, was one of the more radical transformations I’ve seen a player undergo, and Gillespie adapted to his new context with ease. 

Offensive Development and Transcending Circumstances

The 2024-25 iteration of the Maryland Terrapins endeared themselves to fans early in the season, gaining the nickname of the ‘Crab 5’ for their stellar starting unit, which was as much a byproduct of their lack of depth as it was the talent of this 5-man lineup. Due to Maryland’s weaker reserves, Gillespie was thrust into a new role of primary facilitator, and his pick-and-roll   (+passes) frequency more than tripled, rising from 131 possessions, which accounted for 29.4% of his possessions, to 454 possessions, which accounted for 60.3% (!!) of his team’s possessions. Despite his inexperience as the lead ballhandler and environmental conditions rife with opportunities to log turnovers, Gillespie displayed almost categorical improvement as a playmaker. In fact, the argument could be made that Gillespie’s improved passing acumen was THE driving force for Maryland’s offense.

From 2023-24 to 2024-25, Gillespie improved his assist-to-turnover ratio from 1.72 to 2.52. Gillespie’s turnover economy reaching this level was a massive surprise. A player leaving an offense with more ‘easy buttons’ in Belmont, where there was a bevy of shooters and plenty of open court passing opportunities to relieve pressure from ballhandlers (evidenced by their 80th percentile team AST%), should see their playmaking ability trend in the opposite direction. Maryland’s team 3PAr may have been near the bottom of the country (271st), but Gillespie’s relieving his teammates of playmaking duties ensured that the team’s TO% remained low (21st in the country) and that the threes they did attempt were high-quality shots. The dynamic created by Gillespie monopolizing playmaking responsibilities allowed Selton Miguel and Rodney Rice to have career years from three. This, paired with Gillespie modifying his own shot profile (increasing his 3PAr from 0.36 to 0.54) while increasing his efficiency, made Maryland one of the best three-point shooting teams in the country, finishing 26th in three-point percentage.

For an offense otherwise bereft of an identity, Maryland ascended into the upper echelon, primarily due to Gillespie’s contributions in these two areas. It cannot be understated how unlikely it is for a team this underwhelming in two of the four offensive factors to become a top-30 offense.

Since 2008, there have only been THREE top 30 offenses to pass and shoot from deep as infrequently as Maryland, and not compensate for this by dominating the offensive glass. Like Maryland, these teams connected on their threes at an impressive clip and applied pressure on opposing defenses with their pace. This isn’t a direct evaluation of Gillespie’s game, but playing fast and capitalizing on the ‘micro-advantages’ that develop in the open court, while avoiding the turnover risk typically associated with high-frequency transition teams, is probably the ideal game state. (Tyrese Haliburton and the style he’s injected into the Indiana Pacers is an example of this.)

Although I don’t believe Gillespie is solely responsible for cultivating this offensive environment (Derik Queen was amongst the best in the country at converting defensive rebounds into early offense via hit-aheads and grab-and-gos), the influence he had on Maryland’s style of play is undeniable. And the argument can easily be made that the style of play Gilliespie enabled was Maryland’s only avenue to generating viable offense. Although it is a small sample, in the 318 minutes Gillespie was off the court, Maryland’s offensive rating took a 20-point dip; this on/off differential was in the 99th percentile. 

Defensive Impact

As impressive as Ja’kobi’s offensive impact was, to evaluate his production on each side of the court discretely would be a mistake. Gillespie’s defensive activity not only helped shape Maryland’s defensive identity (which was the foundation of their success) but served as a perfect complement to their offense, which relied heavily on generating early-clock attempts. Gillespie’s 3.5% steal rate ranked 93rd percentile in the country per CBB Analytics, and this turnover generation was made all the more impressive by the fact that accruing steals was of secondary importance to Gillespie’s role within Maryland’s defensive scheme. Maryland’s frontcourt lacked overwhelming height and highly effective rim protectors; to counteract this personnel limitation, Kevin Willard tasked his backcourt with extending their pickup points and applying consistent pressure on opposing ballhandlers.

Gillespie routinely defended the length of the court, preventing opponents from initiating their offense early in the shot clock and alleviating pressure from his back line. Gillespie’s work rate as a perimeter defender helped Maryland finish in the 78th percentile in average defensive possession length per KenPom, meaning that they were amongst the best in the country in forcing opponents deep into the shot clock. To assume such a taxing role while remaining aggressive enough to hunt for steals, all the while avoiding lapses in discipline which could lead to cheap fouls, is outstanding. Despite the degree of difficulty in Ja’Kobi’s role as a point of attack defender, he was in the 97th percentile in steals per personal fouls committed. Combining physical traits such as exceptional lateral quickness, strong and accurate hands, and impressive contact balance, along with a penchant for exploiting ball handlers’ tendencies, leads to his success.

Take the plays below, for example. Maryland is in ‘Ice’ coverage, where Gillespie’s responsibility is to remain on the ‘high side’ of the ball screen and force the ball handler to the baseline. Even though it may not be the ‘correct’ approach, Gillespie understands he has teammates defending in the corner and one pass away, providing a larger margin for error than if the opponent were running an empty pick-and-roll, for example. Trusting his ability to absorb contact with the screener and recover into the play, Gillespie takes advantage of both ballhandlers’ need to process the play developing in front of them, and backtaps their handle loose.

Beating Expectations

By now, it’s probably clear how big a fan I am of Gillespie’s game and his translatability to the NBA. Still, I’d be remiss to not mention the uphill climb any player of his stature faces in cementing themselves as an NBA mainstay. A simple query of NBA players to come through the NCAA ≤ 6’2 and possess a free throw rate ≤ 0.25 to have played any minutes in the NBA yields fairly bleak returns. Of the 95 seasons played and 56 unique players to fall into this query, only 12 have played more than 2000 NBA minutes to date, with the highlighted names representing players who hit these thresholds in their pre-NCAA season.

Most smaller guards are acquired with offensive value in mind; forgoing rim-pressure as part of their offensive repertoire is a death knell to the majority of backcourt players. The list of players within the query to fall short of the 2000 minutes threshold is littered with some of college basketball’s favorite rim-averse gunners, from Andrew Goudelock to Kyle Guy, players who were unequivocally not NBA-caliber talents. So if this list, comprised primarily of G League mainstays, evinces that a player with Ja’Kobi Gillespie’s profile more than likely isn’t worth spending ANY amount of draft capital on, what reason is there to believe he is worth a first-round pick?

First, to address Gillespie’s limitations inside the arc, creating a query to see how previous NBA prospects fared in a similar team environment to Gillespie returned interesting results. Examining which players played on teams that finished ranked outside the top-250 in both team AST% and 3PAr, while maintaining similar two-point efficiency to Gillespie on a similar self-created rate (represented by ‘total assist% ≤ 0.40, and two-point True Shooting ≥ 55%) yielded 146 players. The average height of players captured in this query was 6’7, with there only being six players Gillespie’s height or shorter: Justin Robinson, Ray McCallum, Chasson Randle, Mike Williams, Myles Powell, Malcolm Delaney, and Jeff Dowtin.

As you can see, Gillespie’s shot profile, processing, and defensive production are all more palatable than the rest of the group. This prevented him from falling into a negative skill intersection which inhibited the accompanying players’ NBA chances. As suboptimal as Ja’Kobi’s rim pressure may seem, he finished above expectation considering his circumstances, and in all likelihood, the abandoned forays towards the rim were balanced by a lower turnover total. What makes the chances of a player Gillespie’s size sticking in the league so infinitesimally small is how little tolerance teams will have in accommodating lineups these players participate in. This is far from a novel insight, but in a way this exercise has demonstrated how unsuccessful we have been in ascertaining which flaws the league should be especially punitive in judging. As important as it is for these players to provide a scoring punch, contributing to the turnover margin seems to be paramount, from my research. The smaller ‘game manager’ guards who have drastically exceeded expectations, such as Fred Van Vleet and TJ McConnell, may be the most instructive cases of this. 

What the Future Holds

As Gillespie begins his final season with Tennessee, the impact that another, vastly different, team context will have on his production is something I’ll be fascinated to see. Rick Barnes offenses have been maligned in the past for being archaic; while I don’t think this is quite a fair judgment, there is some fairness in criticizing Barnes’ teams for being stylistically inflexible. Taking a look at Barnes’ Tennessee teams over the years reveals an offensive philosophy rooted in exercising control over his players’ decision-making and confining the team to operating within a scheme primarily consisting of set plays.

For all the external gripes with Barnes’ offense, I could see this having a positive effect on Ja’Kobi Gillespie’s development. My prediction would be that Barnes’ habit of deploying players in clearly defined roles will see Ja’Kobi complete his transformation into a full-time point guard and the ‘trigger man’ of this off-ball screen-centric offense. As consistently as Barnes has featured high-volume movement shooters as the focal point of Tennessee’s offenses (a role I see Nate Ament taking on this season), facilitating duties have typically been assigned to one guard. Whether it be Zakai Zeigler, Jordan Bone, or Kennedy Chandler in past years, the responsibility to orchestrate Tennessee’s heavily manicured offense has fallen on the shoulders of one player. While this may result in some early growing pains from Gillespie, as he’s never played in such a deliberate and halfcourt heavy offense, if he’s able to somewhat maintain his finishing efficacy in an environment even less conducive to a player of his stature, he’ll have cemented himself as a bonafide first round pick and perhaps a top 20 player in the 2026 draft class.  

The post Ja’Kobi Gillespie Is the System appeared first on Swish Theory.

This new approach has been interpreted by many as an abandonment of the high school athlete, it’s as though college programs are openly saying, “why recruit an 18-year-old unknown when there are reliable veterans available?” And while some teams may subscribe to this thinking, in reality, it’s a deeply flawed approach and ultimately the wrong takeaway from this era of college basketball. The two most recent national champions, for example, both featured relatively unheralded freshmen in Thomas Haugh from Florida and Alex Karaban at UConn, both of whom made significant contributions to their title efforts.

Both teams recognized the futility in basing their recruiting strategy on the number of stars a player had next to their name. With the level of roster churn in college basketball, finding freshmen who could fit their system and adapt to whatever shape the roster takes year over year was the winning formula in today’s age. With this in mind, I made it my goal to write about players who stood out not solely because of their tantalizing upside, but because of their proven ability to contribute to winning. By analyzing stats and film from the three major grassroots circuits, here are 6 players I believe have the biggest standouts of the grassroots season so far.

Class of 2026

Anyone familiar with my writing probably understands that a good deal of my evaluations heavily feature statistical analysis, which leads to higher quality work but probably doesn’t make for the most riveting reads. In the interest of engaging the reader, I present the table below. For context, 4 of 5 players below were one-and-done bigs, and one is a big man in this current class – based on these statistical profiles, which player would you prefer?

Now for the reveal: players B-E were all top 20 picks after their freshman years, and player A is 7’0″ Guinean center Arafan Diane.

Arafan Diane: A Modern Throwback

Rankings (As of 7/10/25)

• ESPN: 34
• ON3: 22
• 247: 15

Arafan Diane is comfortably the highest-rated player included in this article and has been one of the biggest risers in the 2026 class this summer. Diane first caught my attention playing for the Guinean team during the 2024 U17 World Cup; his combination of size, strength, and soft touch set him apart from other bigs at the event. Although Guinea were decisively beaten by Spain in the Round of 16, I’d designated Diane as a player to watch. For a big at that age, even demonstrating infrequent flashes of coordination is notable, and Diane displayed reliable touch around the basket and from the free-throw line, where he shot 73.8% on 42 attempts. Despite my optimism, I would not have predicted that this would be Diane’s worst outing over the next calendar year, and the World Cup would mark the beginning of Diane’s rapid ascension towards the top of the class.

Diane’s improvement across the board this year has been staggering. Arafan still doesn’t have the most expansive repertoire of post moves and he’s extremely reliant on getting to his right-hand, confining him to turning around over his outside shoulder on the right block and his inside shoulder on the left. But Diane’s ability to apply physicality and create finishing windows has grown immensely.

Take the clips below, for instance. About a year ago, if Diane didn’t receive an entry pass directly over the block, he’d have significant struggles backing his man down and elevating through contact. Diane was obviously still a BIG player at the time, but not necessarily the strongest.

Fast forward to roughly a year later. If Diane was denied a deep post-entry, he could make the catch in the short corner and back his man down into the basket. The patience with his footwork and balance on these attempts is a night-and-day difference.

I’d referenced the lack of counters currently available to Diane, but the few options Diane had shown an affinity towards have also gotten much sharper. On the right block, if Diane couldn’t get to a hook shot over his outside shoulder, he’d typically spin baseline. In the first possession of this clip, you can see how that move would typically lead to disaster, but by the end of Diane’s high school season he could spin baseline, process the help, and decelerate quickly enough to create a clean look at the rim.

In the second possession of that compilation, Iowa United ran ‘Flex‘ action, which was a staple of their playbook during both their prep and AAU seasons. Over the year, Diane grew comfortable making reads out of this play and generally recognizing help off his post-ups.

Maybe the most consequential development for Diane’s game has been his improved conditioning and the impact it has had on his mobility. Comparing the clip below exemplifies how much more dynamic Diane has become. From laboring in the to complete the press break in the first clip to confidently driving off the DHO keeper in the second clip.

Becoming better conditioned has provided Diane with a wealth of easy baskets from just running the floor. In the following play, Diane beats incoming SMU big man Jaden Toombs up the floor for an easy dunk, and Toombs is undoubtedly one of the best defenders in the country!

Continuing to work on his conditioning could put Diane in an incredibly rare class of big men. It may sound like hyperbole, but there simply have not been many players in the modern history of the NBA who possess Diane’s size and movement skills. This February at this year’s Basketball without Borders Camp, Diane measured in with a 9’4.5″ Standing Reach and weighed 313 pounds. Using Mark C’s Draft Combine App, I found all the players who had recorded similar numbers at the Combine and listed them below.

The fact that Diane is comfortably the youngest of these players and is still within striking distance athletically bodes well for his translation to the next level. But the department where Diane could stand to improve the most is definitely his lateral movement. Arafan’s limited backpedaling and change of direction are preventing him from being an impactful rim protector; correcting these issues and erasing reps like the plays below could be what separates him from the rest of the big men in the 2026 class.

Overall, though, I have little doubt Diane will walk into college as one of the best offensive bigs in the country. The aforementioned physical tools and touch give him such a strong foundation on this end. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Diane is shooting at a decent volume from the midrange or even from 3 by the time his freshman year comes around. Outside of his stellar free-throw shooting, Diane routinely hits these high-degree-of-difficulty touch shots…

…which is a common sign for latent shooting potential. However, even if the shooting doesn’t immediately materialize, the strides Diane has made in such a short time easily qualify him as one of the 10 best prospects in the 2026 class.

Colben Landrew: The Prototype

Rankings (As of 7/10/25)

• ESPN: 68
• 247: 62
• ON3: 71

When I think of national recruiting sites’ perception of Colben Landrew, the first and only word that comes to mind is ‘confusing.’ Before getting into the details of Colben Landrew’s game, if I were to tell you a player had posted these kinds of numbers…

…had just been named the player of the year in the highest classification in Georgia, all while standing 6’6 in shoes with a 6’11 wingspan, you would also probably find it hard to believe that consensus opinion amongst industry experts is that there are at least 60 players better than the player I had just outlined. But therein lies the rub with Colben Landrew, who, in my opinion,n is without a shadow of a doubt the most underrated player in the class of 2026.

The reasoning behind titling Landrew’s section ‘The Prototype’ is that, as it stands, I cannot think of a single team at any level who turns down a wing with Colben Landrew’s skillset. Per Cerebro Sports, Landrew has shot 39% from three (200 attempts) and 77% from the line (122 attempts) over the past two years. A sterling shooting resume for any high school player, never mind one of Landrew’s size.

But what’s especially enticing about Landrew’s game goes well beyond being a wing with shooting touch and defensive chops; Landrew’s game is much more in step with what is increasingly being demanded of wings, namely that they create their own shot.

Similar to the dynamic mentioned with Arafan Diane, Landrew’s high school (Wheeler) and AAU team (Game Elite) are not too dissimilar. In both settings, ’27 guard Kevin Savage, a fantastic player in his own right, runs the show, and Landrew is deployed more frequently as a forward than a guard. Instead of running a high volume of PNRs, the plays typically called for Landrew are ‘Pistol’ and variants of it, such as ‘Pistol Miami‘, both of which can be seen below.

Or Landrew will operate out of ‘Horns’ alignments where he’s adept both driving to the middle of the floor and making reads, or being the trigger man for sets from the elbow.

And while Landrew has been effective out of these playtypes and as a complementary offensive player in general, I think this utilization has somewhat masked, or at least muted, how high-level of a creator he is.

Of the 826 possessions Synergy has logged for Landrew, only 6% of them consist of PNR Possessions. Considering how gifted Landrew is as a ballhandler and driver, this is not a trend I expect to continue wherever his next stop may be.

What gives me confidence that Colben Landrew will become a featured ballhandler at the next level is how effective he already is creating without a screen. The lack of PNR reps in Landrew’s career to date has forced him to create against set defenses often, and even under these difficult circumstances, Landrew has routinely risen to the challenge. Although Landrew doesn’t have the most electric burst, he’s constantly changing speeds, is always the first to initiate contact on drives in order to keep his defender off-balance, and has the vision to find his teammates when he collapses the defense.

Unlike the majority of players his size, Landrew thrives navigating tight spaces, his ability to stop on a dime and create driving angles out of nothing is truly an outlier skill within the class.

Circling back to Landrew’s stat profile from the beginning of the section, his free-throw and dunk rates have surged this year in large part because of the advancements he’s made athletically and as a ballhandler. The aforementioned ability to decelerate in concert with the threat of Landrew’s pull-up jumper and his overwhelming strength as a ballhandler should see his foul-drawing translate in virtually any setting.

This skillset makes Landrew uniquely qualified to take on a much greater diet of ballscreen actions, and judging by the limited sample we do have available, he will handle this responsibility well.

Terrence Hayes Jr.: Utility Guard

Continuing with the theme of profiling players where the perception doesn’t match the production, there may not be a more underappreciated ’26 in the country than the 6’2 Gary, Indiana, native, Terrence Hayes Jr.

Rankings (as of 7/10/25)

• ESPN: N/A
• 247: N/A
• ON3: N/A

The fact that the buzz around Terrence Hayes Jr.’s recruitment hasn’t at all reflected his level of play this summer isn’t necessarily the biggest surprise. Hayes’ game is unique, and doesn’t exactly resemble what many evaluators associate with elite guard play. For Indiana Elite, Hayes’ backcourt partner Luke Ertel handles a lot of the traditional point guard duties, consensus 5-star wing Anthony Thompson demands his own touches (for good reason), and Hayes is asked to fill in the gaps.

For the majority of scouts and coaches who watched Indiana Elite, I’m assuming they saw a smaller player playing off the ball in a complementary role and immediately wrote him off. Conventional thought dictates that in order to play basketball at a high level, a guard needs to be proficient in the PNR, and any player incapable of running a high volume of ballscreens at the high-school level doesn’t deserve serious consideration. That line of reasoning is not only antiquated, but in Terrence Hayes’ case, extremely wrong! What makes Hayes a special player and the kind of guard who should be the MOST sought after is exactly what many probably see as his greatest weakness. That Hayes drastically impacts the game WITHOUT needing a heavy diet of ballscreens is exactly what makes him special

For starters, Terrance Hayes (#10 in the clips below) is an ELITE rebounder for his position; as I write this, he is averaging 2.4 offensive rebounds per game. Hayes’ timing, willingness to play through contact, and exceptional leaping separate him from the majority of guards on the glass.

Hayes’ activity on the glass helps mitigate any limitations he may have as a spacing threat at the moment. But when Hayes is placed on the ball, he utilizes a dynamic first step to get downhill — he’s especially effective rejecting ballscreens and consistently kills ICE coverages.

Even with Hayes’ inconsistencies as a shooter, he has no issues creating in the halfcourt when his drives are walled off. Shooting 45.6% (21/46) on non-rim 2s, Hayes has reliable scoring counters when he can’t get all the way to the rim.

Another grassroots scout described Hayes’ approach on the defensive end as ‘he plays with a mean streak’, and I don’t think there’s a more apt description for Hayes’ style. Despite having a thinner frame, Hayes will frequently switch onto larger guards or frontcourt players and oftentimes dissuades them from attempting to exploit the ‘mismatch’ with his quick hands.

With Hayes’ athleticism and situational awareness, he’s able to make plays from all areas of the court and in a variety of roles. Off-ball, Hayes’ presence turns driving lanes into danger areas for opponents.

The intersection of downhill explosiveness and ballhawking ability on defense allows Hayes to make the most of the havoc he creates on defense. There are only a few players who can keep up with Hayes in the open court and the steals he accrues are consistently converted into points.

All in all, while he is not without his flaws, Terrence Hayes Jr. embodies what should be considered above all else when it comes to evaluating guard talent. Hayes contributes to the possession battle on both ends of the court, and to a degree where I struggle to see him not being a significant contributor at whatever level of college basketball he decides to play.

Class of 2027

Jalen Davis: Changing of the Guard

Rankings (as of 7/10/25)

• ESPN: Unranked
• 247: 34
• ON3: 44

When I first saw Jalen Davis play a little over a year ago, and went to talk to others about his game, someone had told me he was ‘laconic’. And I was extremely jealous because there really wasn’t a better way to sum up his game, on the court Jalen Davis is all about getting to the point.

Through his first two years of grassroots basketball, Jalen Davis has been ruthlessly efficient, and the numbers reflect his playstyle.

To contextualize how impressive Davis’ scoring has been, below are the only players across the three major shoe circuits to score over 20 ppg. Davis is tied for 3rd in scoring, and on comfortably the highest efficiency.

But, closer examination of each player’s playtype distribution would show Davis is scoring in a much different fashion than his peers.

What’s behind these numbers makes Jalen Davis such a dynamic offensive threat, and a player whose game is uniquely tailored for the next level.

The foundation of Davis’ offense is his jumpshot. Possessing pristine mechanics to match the stellar shooting indicators, Davis is 92.6% (101/109) from the line in AAU so far. Additionally, Jalen’s process on the catch is fat-free: there’s almost no unnecessary movement or clock wasted pounding the ball.

Davis’ team frequently calls ‘RAM PNP’, where Davis receives a down-screen before setting a ballscreen which he may ghost depending on the coverage. In the plays below, Davis’ defender lingers on the ballhandler (or miscommunicates the switch) and Davis pops for the 3.

Eventually though, defenses adjust, and when it comes to high-caliber shooters, their default response will be to run shooters off the three-point line. What makes Davis such an exciting offensive player is how consistent his decision making is in these situations. Where high school players typically fall apart, Davis thrives. Despite being just a high school junior, Davis is already reading closeouts at a college level.

Overall, Davis’ halfcourt offensive refinement is well beyond his years. Beyond the efficiency, Davis is deployed in a variety of actions and his comfort toggling between playing on- and off-ball is a trait shared with the best offensive players at the next level. Whether Davis is running ‘Zoom‘ action…

Or asked to ‘Replace the Roll‘

Davis’ description is beyond that of just ‘primary ballhandler’; he’s forced to problem-solve in every area of the court and answers the call to do so consistently.

Jalen Davis’ feel for the game is rare without mentioning his defensive impact. Almost more impressive than the number of steals he acquires is how controlled Davis’ aggression is. Boasting a Stock (steals + blocks) to Foul ratio of 4.7 Stocks to 1 Foul is incredible. Even accounting for the amount of zone Davis’ team, Beauchamp Elite, runs this is a level of mistake-free defensive production I have yet to see from another player Davis’ age. Plays like the one below exemplify how decisive Davis can be when he sees an opportunity to take the ball from an opponent.

To put a bow on it, the past two summers Jalen Davis has put together is unequivocally one of the best two-way resumes in the country. Anyone with this shooting ability or defensive instincts alone would make for an impressive prospect. Pairing the two together places Davis firmly amongst the names to know nationally in the 2027 class.

Isaiah Hill: Rim Protector+

6’11 big Isaiah Hill has been among the most dominant rim protectors regardless of class, and possesses shot-blocking instincts and discipline well beyond his age. Hill currently leads all EYBL age groups in total blocks, and no matter where Hill is positioned he has the range to defend the rim from various areas of the court.

A major differentiating factor between Hill and his peers at the position is the coverage versatility he’s already shown at such a young age. Hill is fluid enough on the perimeter to play at the level in ballscreen coverages, disrupting the timing and comfort of opposing ballhandlers while preventing the offense from generating downhill momentum.

At this stage Hill seems to actually relish the opportunity to play on the perimeter defensively. Take the plays below, for example. Hill trusts himself to recover to the ballhandler, not overextending which would allow a mismatch to form.

Patience is a common theme of Isaiah Hill’s defense. It’s rare not only compared to his contemporaries, but relative to all highly regarded big-men of the past few high school classes.

As you can see, Hill is not only the most prolific shotblocker in this group of highly recruited bigs, but also has the third best Block/Foul ratio of the group. Being the least mistake prone rim protector while accumulating the most blocks is an extremely rare combination.

Hill’s comfort on the perimeter is noticeable on the offensive end as well. He’s comfortable stringing together multiple dribbles on drives to the rim when the opportunity presents itself.

There are subtler indicators of Hill’s coordination for the position, like the play below, where Hill seamlessly transitions from securing a pocket pass to finishing on a roll to the rim.

And perhaps most intriguing in Hill’s offensive game is his willingness to shoot from three. Hill currently boasts a robust 0.38 three-point rate, and while the efficiency isn’t particularly stellar he has projectable shot mechanics.

As the AAU season comes to a close, I can’t help but think Isaiah Hill was one of the biggest snubs from the USA U16 Americas team. A center with his size and skill is exceedingly rare, and when you account for him being one of the youngest players in his class (will not turn 16 until August), it becomes abundantly clear that few players share the long term potential of Isaiah Hill.

Carson Crawford: Keeping it Simple

Of all the players covered in this article, none have undergone a bigger improvement over the past year than 6’7 Orange Park wing Carson Crawford. A quick look at Crawford’s stats will verify as much:

What’s made Crawford’s leap so impressive isn’t any particular isolated skill improvement, as you can see Crawford hasn’t exactly exploded as a three-point shooter. It is that Crawford has become an expert in getting opportunistic buckets. Crawford seldom has his number called, as per Synergy over 75% of Crawford’s offensive possessions consist of Transition, Cut, or Putback buckets.

The sequence below is an apt representation Crawford’s role and how he has, in many ways, become the lynchpin of a Florida Rebels team with the second-best point differential in EYBL’s 16u age group. Crawford gets the helpside block on the defensive end, runs the floor, and finishes the dumpoff pass on the other end.

Unlike most dynamic wings his age, Crawford is perfectly content doing the dirty work on both ends. Currently sitting second in all EYBL age divisions in double-doubles with ten, Crawford is relentless on the glass and frequently finishes his offensive rebounds with putbacks above the rim.

But again, Crawford is a selfless player and doesn’t hunt offensive rebounds solely with the intent of scoring. Crawford subscribes to the Houston Cougar’s school of offensive rebounding — when he cannot secure the rebound for himself Crawford will tip out the ball just to keep the possession alive.

As with any wing though, what will ultimately determine Crawford’s offensive ceiling is whether or not he will develop into a reliable spacer from the 3-point line. At the moment, Crawford doesn’t have a significant three-point rate, but his consistent touch from the line (over 70% for his career) along with the comfort from the midrange…

…bodes well for him eventually developing into a consistent shooter from deep. Even without being a volume shooter, Crawford has been one of the most productive players in his age group, and I do not see this changing no matter how long it takes for his three-point shooting to materialize.

Conclusion

With this being the first installment of my grassroots series, I want to again reiterate that this isn’t a ranking or a pro projection, but rather I wanted to spotlight players who should be highly sought after because of how they contribute to winning. The combined team record of the players covered in this piece is 67-17, as, regardless of the holes in each player’s respective game, they’ve shown an aptitude for contributing to team success. And because of this, no matter their current ranking, each of these players is currently underappreciated.

The post Swish Theory Summer Standouts: Names to know from the grassroots season so far appeared first on Swish Theory.

In the previous article I wrote analyzing Tre Johnson, I alluded to the changing perspective of front offices and fans alike regarding the draft. The 2024 cycle was an emphatic indication of the sea change in teams’ approach to the event. With players from Reed Sheppard to Zach Edey being selected with high picks, it became apparent that teams were prioritizing cerebral players with analytically sound profiles over those with traits more traditionally associated with high upside.

What drove me to write about Kon was how representative his journey was of this shifting dynamic. Widely recognized as a subpar athlete by NBA standards, due to the optics of Knueppel’s game, I doubt he would have ever been considered worthy of a top-5 pick even as recently as a decade ago. However, because of his stellar efficiency and deserved reputation as an intelligent player, the Hornets’ selection of Knueppel was seen as a no-brainer.

My intent with writing this piece was to figure out one thing: has the pendulum swung too far? At what point is it acceptable to go against conventional draft logic and select a player whose deficiencies would have been considered disqualifying in previous eras? By investigating both contextual and individual statistics, in tandem with tape dating back 2 years, I found myself in firm disagreement with the direction the Hornets ultimately went in.

The Beginning

Standing slightly over 6’6 in shoes with a 6’6.25″ wingspan, Kon Knueppel may have left this draft with the highest approval rating of any non-Cooper Flagg prospect. Knueppel’s playstyle eschewed norms typically associated with star level production, he relied on technique and guile in lieu of dynamic physical traits. His fundamentally sound game, paired with an inscrutable demeanor, and an overwhelming amount of team success quickly earned Knueppel fans. And Kon would finish with one of the most impressive underclassman seasons from a perimeter player in recent memory, inserting himself into the group below along with fellow one-and-done Jase Richardson.

What makes Kon such a compelling case study isn’t just his ascension from fringe top-40 recruit at the beginning of his final AAU campaign, to top-5 draft pick 2 years later, but the rapid and tangible development he made in that span.

To gain a complete understanding of Kon’s game we must begin with his time spent on the grassroots circuit. Knueppel’s scoring and scoring efficiency have remained constants over the course of his career, having led his EYBL age group in scoring for 3 consecutive years and never once dipped under 60% True Shooting. However, outside of the high-volume flamethrowing from deep, Knueppel’s utilization at Duke held a faint resemblance to his time playing AAU.

During Kon’s time playing his AAU team, Phenom University, he served as the focal point of a motion offense. PhenomU would run concepts broadly similar to Duke, but with drastically different objectives. PhenomU frequently schemed looks for Knueppel to post-up in the middle of the floor, where his combination of size, strength, and touch were enough to overwhelm opponents at the high-school level. Actions like ‘Cross Punch’..

Outside of these schemed looks Knueppel was the frequent recipient of opportunistic buckets made possible by the Motion Offense and the miscommunication it brought about in opposing defenses.

And although these principles aren’t incompatible with quality offense at the collegiate or professional level, they did leave Knueppel unrefined in certain areas which became significantly more relevant during his time at Duke. One example would be Kon’s relative inefficiency attacking closeouts, where he was comfortable settling for short range jumpers and would seldom applied pressure on the rim.

Starting at Duke

Kon’s shift in usage once arriving at Duke was abrupt and apparent, the aforementioned post-ups and cuts were largely replaced with PNR ballhandling reps, as evinced below.

And for someone who came into the season a vocal proponent of Kon, frankly, the beginning of his Duke career was largely underwhelming. Duke almost exclusively schemed two plays for Knueppel, the first of which being ‘Zipper Stagger PNR‘, which exposed his inexperience operating out of ballscreens,

and the second play which comprised the majority of Knueppel’s organized offense was ‘Pin Ricky Flare‘, where again Knueppel struggled to generate quality looks if he wasn’t provided the requisite space to attempt a 3.

There definitely wasn’t a singular culprit behind Knueppel’s ineffectiveness as a driver, but the most obvious contributing factor was the misalignment between Duke’s offensive approach and Knueppel’s habits inside the arc. As previously mentioned, when Kon was ran off the 3-point line in highschool he expressed no urgency in getting to the rim, and was perfectly content with taking longer 2PA. Duke was the first setting where this characteristic of Knueppel’s game was met with resistance. In Jon Scheyer’s short time at the helm, an early emphasis he has made known is his desire for his teams to maintain a modern shot profile. In every subsequent year of Scheyer’s tenure, Duke has reduced their volume of midrange attempts.

The clash between the playstyle Scheyer had implemented within his team, and Knueppel’s personal style of play lead to ugly moments early on. With Knueppel’s ballhandling skills being fairly underdeveloped for his new, more perimeter oriented role, Kon attempted to rely on his physicality on create space and find finishing windows on drives. Knueppel’s forays towards the rim often lacked pace, and oftentimes Kon would over-penetrate and place himself in compromising positions inside the paint.

At roughly the halfway mark of the season, Knueppel’s statistical profile was far from the stellar marks he would finish the season with.

The Transformation

The defining change in Kon’s game this past season was undoubtedly his ability and effectiveness getting to the rim. Not only did his rim-rate increase by 8% from his final season of AAU to this past season, the complexion of these rim attempts also radically changed. Hand-tracking Knueppel’s rim-finishes reveals a player progressing from a forward to an out and out guard.

Knueppel having his playtype distribution significantly altered, while being forced to largely abandon his most reliable interior counters, AND STILL maintaining the efficiency he’d displayed at previous levels is borderline miraculous. And the catalyst for this improvement were the gains Knueppel made as a ballhandler.

While I still wouldn’t view Knueppel as an elite ballhandler by any means, the strides he made in this area, in conjunction with his physicality, made him a potent driver by season’s end.

For large swaths of the season, Knueppel’s inability to handle ball pressure or digs on his drives consistently prevented him from creating quality paint touches.

And I have a theory as to what was behind Knueppel’s leap as a ballhandler and driver. Kon seems to have married the technical gains he made, specifically developing better ball-control and an improvement altering ball-speeds, with the strong footwork foundation he already possessed from all the years spent playing out of the post. Post footwork translating to other facets of the game is an axiom espoused by coaches everywhere, and Knueppel seems to be the most recent testament to this. As the season progressed Knueppel was more capable of keeping his dribble alive inside the arc, making him a more potent scorer and playmaker.

Towards the end of the season, Knueppel started to thrive in the same actions that he’d previously been out of his depth in. Below is a succession of ‘Zipper Stagger PNR‘ plays conducted sublimely by Kon. Even when he isn’t able to finish the play with a basket it is abundantly clear the process is better.

When faced with slightly more exotic coverages Knueppel showed to be up to the task. Compare the clips compiled below, in the initial play versus Kansas. Knueppel is hedged as he runs the ballscreen and immeditely swings the ball at the first sign of ball pressure. The subsequent plays Knueppel keeps his dribble alive, turns the corner, and either draws a foul at the rim or finds an open teammate.

Knueppel’s enhanced foul-drawing compared to previous seasons was evident,

but what I found most impressive about this was how the in-season free-throw rate progression was equally significant.

What this shows is Knueppel recognized the respect he had as a shooter and parlayed the hard closeouts he was receiving into rim-attacks.

As delved further and further into Kon’s career, his self-awareness and work ethic became increasingly apparent. To acclimate this quickly when confronted with change is impressive from any player, never mind a freshman being thrust into the greatest pressure cooker program in college basketball.

A point raised by the always insightful Mike Gribanov (@mikegrib8 on X) was how notable it was for a team to achieve the level of success 2024-25 Duke did while primarily featuring underclassmen. Especially considering how veteran-laden the current college basketball landscape is, I wanted to establish a frame of reference for exactly how rare it was for a player to produce at the level Kon did this past season without the benefit of having experienced teammates. Using KenPom’s ‘Experience Rankings’, which weighs the age of their roster by minutes played, along with some other offensive efficiency and self creation metrics yielded the list below.

Unsurprisingly these thresholds produced a list of offensively slanted perimeter players, but at first glance what caught my eye was how size seemed to have a polarizing effect on this group’s NBA translation. The majority of players who returned overly positive EV from the query seemed to be clustered on the shorter end of the height distribution. However, height having a negative correlation with an all-in-one metric like Estimated Wins goes against all I know about these catch all stats, so I looked elsewhere. And what emerged as the obvious contributing factor to this relationship was the share of a player’s shots which were assisted.

Here lie my Koncerns

To see the strength of the relationship between this group of players’ NBA impact and their pre-NBA self-creation burdens I ran a simple linear regression.

While the  r² here is moderately strong, again there are only so many conclusions to be drawn from what was already a small and fairly curated sample. Where the value lies in this cursory analysis is in illuminating how misleading scoring efficiency can be. The list above is littered with players who couldn’t shoulder a higher creation burden and were too deficient in other areas to warrant serious consideration for playing time. Herein lies the challenge in projecting Kon Knueppel, will he be able to become a load-bearing player for an elite offense and/or round out his game enough defensively to avoid being placed in basketball purgatory?

The Case for Helio-Kon

A case frequently made in support of Kon’s primary upside was his potential to develop into a high volume foul-drawer. We’ve already addressed the strides he’s made in this department, so could this trend continue in the league? In short, I am skeptical Knueppel is next in line of the Morey-ball disciples. Of course the absence of dunks in Kon’s resume has been discussed ad-nauseam (this past season Knueppel actually doubled the number of dunks he’d made over the course of his entire AAU career, with 2), its how often Kon has his shot-blocked at the rim that is my greatest cause for concern. Knueppel had 7% of his FGA blocked at Duke, per Synergy, which isn’t a particularly disqualifying number on its own, but puts him in a precarious position when compared to his now peers in the NBA.

Again, this is not an exhaustive sample we’re drawing from, but there’s no recent precedent for a player with Knueppel’s lack of vertical explosion becoming a formidable rim-pressure guard. In fact I think Knueppel, and the majority of the Duke players this past season, saw their driving efficacy greatly augmented by the presence of Khaman Maluach. Individually, Duke did not roster any players known for their prowess getting downhill, and Maluach was chiefly responsible for providing rim-pressure for the team. Clips like the ones below are examples of the attention Maluach demanded on the interior. In each clipped possession there’s a freeze frame on Maluach’s defender showing the defense’s approach, they were almost never willing to send help on Knueppel’s drives should they risk giving up an easy putback or dumpoff to Maluach.

Duke lead the nation this past season in Wide Open threes, and while their connective passing and willingness to forgo good shots for great ones definitely deserves credit, the attention Maluach demanded as a roller greatly simplified reads for Duke ballhandlers.

Again my friend and tan incredible draft mind in his own right @NileHoops beat me to the presses in writing about the inflation in perception many Duke prospects were granted due to Maluach’s gravity, and I would strongly recommend reading his draft notes here on the matter: https://medium.com/@Nile/nile-presents-2025-nba-draft-master-notes-part-2-of-3-626ef75aefbb.

Knueppel’s statistical fluctuations corroborate this relationship. Per Hoop -Explorer Knueppel’s AST% and rim-rate declined substantially in minutes without Maluach versus the minutes he shared with the superstar big.

This effect reverberated throughout the Duke squad, with the team’s mid-range frequency skyrocketing while their PNR frequency plummeted. Recall earlier when Jon Scheyer’s mid-range aversion was mentioned, without Maluach on the court Duke was forced into taking shots they were explicitly advised against.

Debunking the notion that Knueppel will develop into a prolific driver and free-throw grifter at the next level doesn’t necessarily preclude offensive primacy. After all, many of the players presented early as potential analogues found their way by becoming elite pull-up shooters. Knueppel’s shooting profile definitely makes this the likeliest outcome, but there’s still evidence his stellar touch indicators may belie how long a process it will be for Knueppel to reach these heights.

While Knueppel shot 12/30 on pull-up 3s in his final year of AAU, 10 of these makes came in transition or semi-transition, where he had a cleaner platform to self-organize for these attempts.

In the half-court Knueppel’s issues regaining balance on the move and creating space in close quarters were more evident. Even at lower levels Knueppel struggled getting his shot off cleanly under duress, the aforementioned 7% blocked FGA rate at Duke was identical in AAU.

And of course this isn’t to say Knueppel will be easily neutralized as a shooter at the next level, these are somewhat granular issues I fully believe will be addressed and ameliorated in the long run. But my thinking is the tandem of weaker change-of-direction ability and a drastically slower pace (Duke was 266th in Adjusted Tempo) was behind Knueppel’s precipitous fall from a 42% (30/72) off-the-dribble 3P shooter during AAU, to only making 1/18 3PA off the bounce in college. And the acclimatization period Knueppel would need to round his shooting into form could muddle his long-term offensive projection.

The Defense

As limiting as Knueppel’s change-of-direction is offensively, I think it could be truly debilitating on defense. For as much as Duke’s offensive scheme placed Knueppel in an uncomfortable situation early, the defensive scheme greatly compensated for his flaws. Duke’s conservative switching scheme paired with their ++ positional size (1st in the country in average height and 10th in effective height) masked Knueppel’s deficiencies. The team’s penchant for dragging out possessions with their constant switching, along with the deterrence afforded by their backline size, left a minimal amount of ground for Knueppel to cover in any given possession. I think plays like the clips below are responsible for some overstating Knueppel’s defensive ability, in these possessions Kon is guarding under circumstances where Duke’s already effectively ‘won’ the possession by merit of these players either attacking Knueppel in isolation or driving into a congested paint.

The areas where Knueppel’s difficulties changing speed and direction manifested most consistently were guarding capable pull-up shooters. Knueppel’s inability to mirror these smaller players forced him to give them a cushion, without the length to compensate for the distance he provided Knueppel was prone to ceding acres of space on these attempts.

Maybe even more glaring than Knueppel’s issues guarding pull-up shooters was his total inability to navigate screens. Kon almost never remained attached when tasked with working over screens, and when a teammate wasn’t in position to immediately switch onto Knueppel’s assignment an immense pressure was placed on help defenders to correct for the breakdown. Screen navigation for Kon is another struggle which has persisted since high school.

Predictably Knueppel’s issues changing direction were reflected in his agility testing. Although Kon’s jumps impressed relative to expectations, his 3/4 court sprint and lane agility only added to what was already a bleak defensive projection.

Final Takeaways

My intention with writing this piece is not to pan the Hornets for selecting Kon, but in the wake of Summer League I think now is an appropriate time to adjust expectations before a few inconsequential games dilute any evaluation. As it stands currently, there’s an overwhelming amount of data suggesting that even projecting Kon as a neutral defender may be unrealistic. The most likely outcome seems to be that Kon will be left in limbo defensively, he’ll unable to guard backcourt players because of his poor footspeed, and with no supplementary rim-protection or rebounding skills to speak of Kon will bleed possessions as a frontcourt defender. In search of players at Kon’s size who were also lacking in athletic traits yielded a mixed bag. There’s a handful of positive defenders here, even amongst the highlighted players who hit these thresholds in their pre-draft season. But outside of Cameron Johnson and Khris Middleton, who only hit this threshold in their freshman year (and Middleton was 0.3 DRBD% away from falling out entirely), there’s no other players who would be considered top 5 in their respective draft.

The list of players with Kon’s offensive resume to justify such high draft capital is even slimmer.

While it may seem encouraging that Desmond Bane is included in this group because Kon was frequently compared to him throughout the cycle, Bane’s dunks only bottomed out when he was thrust into a primary role. Bane saw his PNR volume almost quadruple from his Junior to Senior year, and this shit in usage coincided with the lowest number of dunks in his college career.

As heavily as I rely on these statistical queries to inform my opinion, I think its necessary to include all players’ seasons as a reminder of the developmental dichotomy. It seems as often as players undergo these outlier developmental arcs there are as many, if not more, players whose weaknesses crystallize much quicker than we’re willing to acknowledge. In Kon’s case, there’s little reason to believe an athletic transformation is on the horizon. And if he’s going to be a defender who needs specific lineup configurations to stay on the floor will his offense warrant those accommodations? The in-season improvement previously outlined gives me more confidence in Kon eventually ‘guard-ifying’ his shot profile and becoming a more capable creator off the bounce. But the idea that the self-sustainability of Kon’s offense can be reasonably doubted is enough to preclude from being a top 5 pick.

The post Summer League Primer: A Comprehensive Kon Knueppel Scouting Report appeared first on Swish Theory.

The larger lesson I’ve come away with from this Finals isn’t a novel insight by any means; it was an emphatic reinforcement of what makes exercises like rankings (which I admittedly find great joy in) a futile exercise. In the modern NBA, fit is everything, a fairly banal observation, I know, but in an era where punitive salary cap clauses place a premium on continuity, differentiating between players who can or cannot augment in-house personnel is paramount. Currently, the NBA is approaching a saturation point of talent, where there truly aren’t many players incapable of contributing in any setting. And as the skill level reaches a crescendo, drowning out the noise and identifying the players tailor-made for your current setting is key. And in this class, I’m not sure if there is a player more representative of this idea than Tre Johnson.

In the 2025 draft class, there may not be a more known commodity than Tre Johnson. In 2022 Johnson debuted at 3rd overall in 247’s initial rankings for the 2024 High School class and never dropped below 6th for 247. In RSCI (Recruiting Services Consensus Index), Johnson finished 5th overall. As stat tracking in the amateur hoops space has become more prevalent over the past few years, players are entering college with increasingly robust statistical profiles. This, paired with more accessible game film, makes this current crop of one-and-done prospects maybe the most thoroughly scouted group of players to enter the NBA. Take the evaluation of Tre Johnson below, from 247’s Adam Finklestein.

Written over eighteen months ago, if you were to remove the date, this scouting report could easily be mistaken for a write-up on Tre’s game from his lone season at Texas. If you were to analyze Tre’s game on a more micro-level, Finkelstein’s analysis could be used as support for the validity of ‘prospect determinism’, an idea dictating that players, even as early as high school, are more fully formed than we are willing to acknowledge. Coming into the season, I had made two fairly innocuous posts observing a perceived weakness (Half-Court finishing), and strength (Isolation scoring) in Johnson’s game.

Lo and behold, Johnson remained a subpar finisher in the half-court (46.5% with a 17% rim-frequency) and saw no issues translating as an Isolation scorer. Per Synergy, Johnson was 11th in the country in ISO PPP (.827) of anyone with 100 or more possessions, and the second most efficient freshman of anyone with this high of volume in the past decade (trailing only Dennis Smith Jr). Even with his ineffectiveness at the rim, Johnson’s individual scoring prowess put him in rare air amongst freshmen to have entered the league.

Keep in mind the query above was not conducted on a pool of only drafted players, but on every season of every player to enter the league since 2010. 12 of the 14 players in the query were, or are projected to be, top 10 picks, all were high pedigree prospects. However, even with Johnson’s impeccable resume as a scorer, plenty of evidence calls his lofty draft status into question. The issue of Tre Johnson’s defense is well known by now, and it has been widely recognized as an acceptable risk to take considering the caliber of offensive player Johnson profiles to be. Defenses lapses shown below have been met with a degree of hand-waving.

Texas made it a point to keep Johnson from the action defensively, typically assigning him to smaller, lower usage, perimeter players to suppress his fouling and keep him on the floor. And for as frequently as Johnson’s impressive anthropometric profile is cited as a reason for optimism in his defensive projection long-term, I was only slightly less underwhelmed by his individual defense when he was involved in possessions.

A fundamental belief of mine is that players’ offensive and defensive profiles shouldn’t be assessed independently; often, issues that manifest on one end are related to a player’s behavior on the other. In Tre Johnson’s case, the absence of rim pressure and defensive activity amount to one of the worst cases of applied physicality we’ve seen from any well-regarded prospect in recent memory. In the query below I included all players which met these thresholds in any of their college seasons, no matter the minutes share they played, and included the 14 with the most accumulated ‘Estimated Wins’ to this point of their career (disclaimer these numbers are from roughly the midpoint on the 2024-25 season so may not be exact for active players). The average Estimated Win Total for Top 10 picks since 2008 is 32.4; this group comes in well short of this mark at an average of 18.6 Total Win Shares.

Adjusting parameters in the query in order to cast a wider net and to explicitly search for players whose defensive struggles can’t be attributed to size alone, yielded an even more concerning list. On the left are players within the query with the highest Estimated Win Total. Understanding that a cumulative metric like Estimated Wins could potentially omit recent success cases, on the right are all the players within the query who have been drafted within the past 5 years. The players highlighted below are those who met the query in their pre-NBA season. Virtually all of the players who were selected with high picks, like Tre, were underclassmen whose physical limitations were dismissed as a byproduct of age. And while it’s early enough for these players to shift the perception of their careers, I believe it’s fair to say they have not yet returned value to their drafting team commensurate with the draft capital spent on them.

So, with evidence mounting indicating that, in all likelihood, Tre will be facing an uphill battle on the road to justifying a top 10 pick, what reason is there for optimism? What context would be most amenable to Tre’s skillset, and under what circumstances could a team transform Tre Johnson into an indispensable building block of their roster despite all the evidence to the contrary?

The Two Houstons

The seeds of this piece were planted the weekend of April 4th, after possibly the best stretch of basketball (or at least my personal favorite) so far this year. On that Friday, the recently crowned champion Oklahoma City Thunder were defeated by the Houston Rockets 125-111, and on the next day, a star-studded Duke squad was toppled in a shocking upset by the Houston Cougars 70-67. Both Houston squads came into their respective contests heavily doubted; the Cougars were 5-point underdogs while the Rockets’ spread was set at +6.5 points.

In the Rockets’ case, their victory has probably already been lost to time as an April regular-season win, even over the eventual champions, hardly qualifies as more than a footnote of the NBA season. But the narrative surrounding the Houston Cougars I found much more interesting and in a way was the true catalyst for this piece. For as much respect as I have for the Houston Cougars basketball program I, like many others, was confused as to how a team with no highly regarded NBA talent could have bested a team with three players who could very well be drafted inside of the top 10. Most (well-adjusted) people probably attributed Duke’s late-game collapse to their lack of experience. Per KenPom, Duke was 268th in minutes continuity this season. After a few early-season struggles versus staunch competition, Duke had laid waste to practically every opponent before Houston and as a result they just didn’t have the calluses which can only be formed in tightly contested matchups. This rationale, although flawed, probably does apply, but it still left me searching for a more definitive answer. How were two ostensibly overmatched teams able to overcome a perceived gap in talent and beat two championship-caliber squads? My attempt to find a satisfactory answer to this question has probably transformed the way I think about the game more than any previous exercise.

Anyone lucky enough to watch both games probably recognized the parallels between the two winning teams. Both squads weaponized their physicality via their relentless defense and commitment to the offensive glass to carve out extra possessions.

However, the similarities between these two squads are not confined to their defense and presence on the offensive glass. Further examination shows two almost mirrored stylistic profiles.

The players of both teams also had their individual stat profile curated similarly, with their teams opting for a more egalitarian approach offensively as shown by the tight usage spread between their players.

Even though the significance of these parallels may not be clear at the moment, I believe that because of the Houston Rockets current roster construction, they have positioned themselves to benefit from a market inefficiency which has been exploited by the Houston Cougars for years. And the environment they are cultivating is the exact context where a player like Tre Johnson could be optimized.

The Blueprint

Before delving into the specifics of the relationship between Tre Johnson’s skillset and each of the Houston based teams, I think it is necessary to discuss how the Houston Cougars became such a resounding success, what elements of the Cougars program they should look to replicate, and why the Rockets should consider the Cougar model a roadmap for their own success.

The success Houston has experienced under Kelvin Sampson has been nothing short of unprecedented. Prior to Sampson taking the reins at the onset of the 2014-15 season, the Cougars had been to the NCAA tournament three times in 25 years and were unable to win a tournament game in any of their appearances. When Sampson arrived in Houston, the program was entering its first season in the American Athletic Conference, a league composed of an eclectic group of Conference USA castoffs and Big East schools taking temporary shelter within the conference. Amid the chaos of the ad-hoc league, the Cougars quickly established themselves at the top of the food chain and never looked back.

What is most interesting about Houston’s meteoric rise into the upper echelon of college basketball, is how they managed to attain and sustain their success. Simply put, Houston may be the greatest endorsement for the importance of establishing an identity in basketball, and a cursory glance at their statistical profile would confirm as much.

As we’d mentioned at the onset of the section, Houston’s elite offensive rebounding is no surprise and a consistently low TO% is a staple of any high-performing offense. The success in these two categories making for quality offense shouldn’t come as any surprise. After all, these are pillars of Dean Oliver’s 4 Factors of Basketball Success. BUT what is especially interesting to me is how poorly the Cougars fare in Oliver’s other 2 Factors, Free Throw Rate and Shooting. For being a consistently elite offense for nearly a decade, the Cougars have been comparatively underwhelming with regards to their scoring efficiency. To establish a frame of reference for exactly how rare this confluence of factors was, I conducted a quick query of exactly how often good offenses played this slow with a shot profile as inconducive to success as the Cougars seemingly were.

Since 2008, 53 teams met the query above, with only the 9 pictured meeting these thresholds more than once. The Houston Cougars attained these marks 6 (!!) times. So, how does a team whose offense frequently unfold like the clip below, where the paint isn’t touched ONCE throughout the entire possession, consistently perform to the level Houston does?

What Houston has done to find success at the highest level is implicitly acknowledge the limitations their overwhelming strengths (offensive rebounding) impose on their offense, and they’ve addressed these limitations by strictly and increasingly adhering to the ‘Hands and Gloves’ philosophy.

Houston’s Hands and Gloves

Hands and Gloves is a term coined by the always insightful @nilehoops to describe the symbiotic relationship between players whose skillsets are more based in their physical advantages and players whose strengths are typically utilized in more offensively demanding roles. At the risk of further butchering the definition, here is the quote from Nile’s article articulating the concept.

In the case of the Houston Cougars, they take this concept to the extreme. Despite often ranking in the bottom half of the country in 3PA rate, the Cougars have rostered a bevy of high-volume long-range gunners. Many of which were analytical darlings despite their paltry efficiency scoring inside the arc.

Now the picture is starting to become clearer: in the Cougars’ case, their commitment to maintaining a standard of physicality and rebounding efficacy on the court at all times reduced the potency of their downhill scoring. I agree wholeheartedly with their (assumed) assertion and think the opportunity cost of drives is significantly underdiscussed in the sport. For a team like Houston, where possessions are in short supply, they can ill-afford to risk accumulating turnovers on meandering drives into a congested paint. In addition to the rim aversion present in the majority of guards’ profiles, the lack of playmaking also stands out. Despite almost all the players above being smaller guards (Quentin Grimes and Jherrod Stiggers being the tallest at 6’5), there isn’t a single player with a positive AST%:USG% ratio, again emphasizing how narrowly defined their roles are. The responsibility of ameliorating spacing issues and maintaining the turnover margin falls squarely on these players’ shoulders, with little else outside of this being asked for them offensively. What makes the players pictured above especially unique in the ‘Hands and Gloves’ framework is not just the duty they are tasked with, but the degree of difficulty under which they are asked to execute.

After taking note of these trends within Houston’s teambuilding, I wanted to see if the relationship between a team’s environmental factors was more universal. Specifically, I wanted to see if teams lacking in schemed advantages (as represented by AST%) and multiple spacing options (3Pr) were more prone to placing a heavy burden on the shotmaking talent they did have on their roster. The query below is what I’ve termed a ‘Scoring Stress Test’.

As Mr. Oliver’s 4 Factors would dictate, what these teams sacrificed in their shot quality, they were forced to compensate for in other areas, specifically the TO Margin and Offensive Rebounding. The theory I had posited earlier also seems to be confirmed to an extent, as this query houses some of the best off-the-dribble shotmaking talent of the Bart Torvik era. Below are each team’s leaders in shot attempts for the season in the previous query. Each player is one of the more prolific shotmakers in the country in their respective season, and I do not think it’s coincidental that the two largest players have seen their shotmaking ability translate seamlessly to the NBA.

Now that we’ve established the necessity of high-volume pull-up shooters to teams who find success without traditional markers of an efficient offense, it’s time to discuss this idea’s implications for the Houston Rockets.

Houston Rockets: Closing the Gap

At the time of writing this, the Houston Rockets have just completed a trade for Kevin Durant, sending the Phoenix Suns Jalen Green and the 10th pick in this year’s draft. This trade has been universally praised and for good reason. Kevin Durant is still one of the most efficient scorers in the world, and while Jalen Green is still a promising young player, the value and fit were too good to turn down. With the transaction, the Rockets stand to make a leap not only because of who was traded, but the kind of players that were involved in the deal.

Circling back to the similarities present in each of the Houston teams’ statistical profiles, I want to focus specifically on the sections outlined below.

It is my belief that by trading Jalen Green and acquiring Kevin Durant, the Rockets will make a major competitive leap due to their improvement in these 4 statistical categories. More specifically, the improvement in these statistics will result in the Rockets’ profile bearing an even closer resemblance to the 2024-25 Houston Cougars.

Along with their suffocating defense, the defining trait of the Houston Cougars may be their pace. Consistently ranking near the bottom of the nation, the Cougars would not be able to control the pace to the degree they do without the interplay between their offensive and defensive philosophies. In studies on whether offense or defense has more influence on a team’s style of play, the overwhelming conclusion reached has been that offense has a greater impact on the pace of play. The most evident way Houston goes about suppressing pace is through their offensive rebounding. The two frames below are a perfect contrast in the effect offensive rebounding has on pace and may shed some light on the resurgence of double big lineups.

In both frames, we have the Alabama Crimson Tide, #1 in the country in Adjusted Tempo and the antithesis of Houston’s playstyle. In the first frame, the Crimson Tide are playing Illinois, a similarly modern team that deploys multiple floor spacers along with a stretch big. Illinois runs a ‘Middle PNR’ in 5-out spacing with the ballhandler being Kylan Boswell, who historically speaking, is an extremely ineffective downhill driver. As soon as Boswell steps inside the free-throw line…

…the possession is over. Zero pressure has been placed on the fairly diminutive Bama backcourt to contribute on the glass and they are granted a free release into transition, which culminates in Labaron Philon Free Throws.

Compare this to Houston’s matchup with Alabama earlier in the season, where they are running a similar ballscreen action for an equally limited driver in Emanuel Sharp. Because of their physical frontcourt personnel, Alabama is forced to commit their entire lineup to crashing the glass.

The threat Houston presents on the offensive glass flips the dynamic Alabama saw in the Illinois game. Now, HOUSTON is able to set up their halfcourt defense unencumbered. This forces Alabama to play off kilter and Mark Sears logs a turnover.

Offensive rebounding’s effect on transition play is a fairly well-known concept, and this is an element the Houston Rockets have in spades. The difference in these teams’ ability to establish a pace of play actually lies in their shot profile.

Previously, I’d mentioned the tradeoff the Cougars willingly made between their rim pressure, as represented by their free throw rate and 2P%, and their offensive rebounding and turnover economy. However, there is another, subtler, edge the Cougars gain from removing ‘no-hope’ drives, as you saw from Kylan Boswell in the first clip. By playing a more static style and concentrating on off-the-dribble jumpers and post-ups, the Cougars seldom have their shot blocked. This style of play also rarely puts the defense into rotation, resulting in few drive and kick opportunities and leading to their low C&S (Catch-and-Shoot) frequency over the years. The lack of ‘easy’ jump shots places an acute pressure on their perimeter players to be multifaceted shooters, hence the disproportionate number of off-the-bounce shotmakers on the Kelvin Sampson Cougars.

The relevance of the ‘Average Defensive Poss. Length Percentile’ column in the graphic above is intertwined with the Cougars’ seemingly suboptimal shot diet. In the Cougars’ preferred game state, the margin for error is very thin; along with the turnover variance that comes with drives, blocked shots are a massive variable that cannot be accepted given the constraints of their deliberate style. The devastating effect blocked shots can have on your defense isn’t a phenomenon only present in the NCAA, as Owen Phillips of the F5 pointed out earlier this year. In the past NBA regular season, only Live Ball Turnovers were more detrimental to defenses.

Ultimately, the foundation for the Rockets should be their offensive rebounding and their defense. But because of their proclivity for low-quality rim attempts, there was no top defense more consistently put in disadvantageous situations than Houston.

For context, the r² between Defensive Possession Length and Defensive Rating is -0.47, which by basketball standards is a fairly strong correlation, and the relationship between the two variables is equally intuitive. The more often a defense can prevent early advantages, the lower the offense’s shot quality should be. This is a large part of why we saw higher and higher pick-up points in the NBA this past season and an increased emphasis on turnover generation. The days of thinking of offense and defense discretely are long gone, and the fact that the Rockets mustered a top-5 defense IN SPITE OF their offense actively sabotaging them is highly impressive. And although this was probably not the impetus of the trade, the Rockets may have removed the greatest inhibiting factor to their defense, challenging the Thunder for top unit in the league.

For all the potential Jalen Green has shown as a dynamic and versatile scorer, his personal scoring hierarchy was incompatible with the shape this Rockets roster was taking. Although a score-first guard certainly CAN thrive in the Rockets’ system, it would have to be similar to how the Houston Cougars’ backcourt options have found success: erasing turnovers and relying on prolific pull-up shooting. So far in his career, though, Green has not shown any significant growth in his ability to take care of the ball, as evidenced by his playmaking profile from Databallr.

In Lehman’s terms, Green’s ineffectiveness as a volume scorer has not been offset by sound decision-making as a passer. On top of this, since entering the league Green has finished 1st, 1st, and 4th in Blocked FGAs at the rim. Again, this is in no way an indictment on Jalen Green’s future, but in the interest of maximizing fit for both team AND player, this separation is certainly best for both parties.

Finding the Fit for Tre Johnson

First, for any readers wondering where the previously advertised scouting report is, I’d like to formally apologize for the digression. What first drew me to the idea of writing about Tre through this lens was how specific and pronounced his gifts are. Of course, the shooting is the main draw. I have repeatedly and emphatically stated Tre’s lone season at Texas very well could be the best shooting season from a freshman in the past 15 years. But history would dictate that no prospect with Tre’s negative intersection of applied physicality and defensive instincts could possibly return top-5 pick value. So what is the sell? In short, I believe Tre Johnson could be the ultimate ‘Glove’, and by selecting Johnson a team could take their first step in recreating the revolutionary blueprint laid out by Kelvin Sampson and the Houston Cougars.

The case for Tre Johnson being drafted inside the top 10 is two-pronged. Naturally, it all begins with the shooting, as anyone reading this probably noticed, the archetype most frequently grouped with Johnson in the piece’s initial queries was movement shooter. In an attempt to gauge exactly how much margin for error Johnson’s pairing of feel and touch would give him I conducted the query below, with Ben Taylor’s ‘Offensive Load’ stat used to paint a more complete picture of players’ offensive burden.

Again, Johnson’s profile compares favorably to elite shooters of past drafts, but in Johnson’s case, there’s reason to believe there’s a reservoir of untapped potential compared to past players in a similar mold. Comparing Johnson’s three-point rate and volume to the other players above with the lowest 3Pr in their pre-draft year, Luke Kennard and Tyler Herro, shows the potential trajectory Johnson’s shot distribution could take in the league.

Like Johnson, Kennard and Herro’s college teams struggled to scheme easy opportunities for players. Kennard’s Duke squad was 280th in Assist%, and Herro’s Kentucky team were 194th. When Johnson is dropped into a roster with more connective playmaking talent, he should easily be able to convert some of his contested mid-range attempts into threes.

The Nembhard Corollary

In my opinion there hasn’t been a more fascinating player in the past 5 draft classes than Andrew Nembhard. Nembhard was undoubtedly an elite college point guard, but as a prospect, his statistical profile was fairly non-descript. And compared to other players who are inevitably mentioned as testaments to 2nd round value, its difficult to find the evidence Nembhard was capable of producing to the level he has in the league. What I eventually decided was that the basis of Nembhard’s unexpected success is his exceptional positional size, and in Tre’s case, I believe the same principle applies. When compared to the players in the previous query, Tre ranks first in every measurement and athletic test despite being the youngest of the group.

This should be the foundation of any optimist’s case for Tre Johnson. A suboptimal Texas context, with no significant passing talent to speak of, masked Johnson’s true shooting potential. And when Tre is surrounded by more cerebral, defensively minded, glass-cleaning frontcourt players who can assume some facilitating responsibilities, his potential will be fully actualized.

Currently there’s plenty of evidence that Tre could quickly become a context-changing shooter. Dating back to 2022, Tre has shot 51.8% (29/56) on 3PA coming off screens. Even though Tre is not the most well-rounded athlete, movement shooting is where his athleticism is most functional, and because of the degree of difficulty in his attempts it’s easy to see him placing immense pressure on the defense in this way.

As the season progressed and Johnson became the focal point of opposing defenses (to an absurd degree at times), a common counter was to utilize Johnson as a screener. This is one of my favorite schematic wrinkles, especially in a context where Tre is sharing the court with other non-spacers, utilizing his scoring gravity to trigger mismatches for interior-based scorers should prove effective.

Reorienting Tre’s usage to more of a movement shooter will require more ‘0.5’ decision making, which Tre doesn’t have much experience with at the time. Johnson is much more of a reactive decision maker. Although these aren’t especially challenging reads, I expect this to be a focus early on.

As his processing becomes better aligned with this usage, it will be key for Tre to trim fat from his shot diet as well. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt when accounting for Texas’ personnel, to maximize his potency as a shooter, Tre will need to take these spot-ups instinctively.

In the end, these are quirks in Tre’s game which I anticipate will be ironed out in short order. There’s no real precedent for this precocious a shooting talent failing to translate as a scorer, and frankly, I do not think the shooting on its own is Tre’s ‘superpower’ as a prospect. In my opinion Tre’s penchant for taking care of the ball at such a high usage is truly special amongst scoring prospects.

Above is another ‘Stress Test’ query, but on a player level. On the surface these players do not seem to have much in common, and I’d understand someone’s skepticism in seeing a group featuring one player who is currently playing in China (Tremont Waters) and another who has been above league average TS% 3 times over the course of a 14 year career (Alec Burks) and any desirable company for a prospect. I would argue that this group has the distinction of some of the most resilient scorers in the Bart Torvik era. All of these players demonstrated an ability to manufacture offense independent of their context, and for the players who failed to find NBA success there were typically extenuating circumstances at play. In Tremont Waters’ case his height and inability to shoot early on prevented him from sticking in the league, but even this past season he spearheaded the #1 offense in China. Alec Burks is a more nuanced case, in my opinion Burks came into the league just a few years too late for his game to translate. As downhill guard without exceptional vertical athleticism or the perimeter shooting to keep him afloat, Burks struggled mightily acclimating to the popularization of 3-point shooting that swept the league.

While I don’t foresee Tre experiencing an outlier developmental arc like Donovan Mitchell or SGA due to the previously alluded to physical deficiencies, I am bullish he will become one of the more successful alums on this list for two reasons. First of all, Tre did not have the benefit of being part of a high-level offensive rebounding team, placing an outsized pressure on him to create without logging turnovers. And secondly, I believe Tre’s scoring portability and unique playmaking strengths are tailor-made for the direction the league is headed.

There are 5 games of Tre’s season I found particularly instructive of how his creation situates him to find success at the next level, Texas’ contests with the Tennessee Volunteers and Texas A&M. These teams were two of the best defenses in the country, but interestingly made up 4 of Texas’ 7 best relative performances this season.

Both these teams had stylistic parallels in their aggressive, swarming defense. Tennessee with their frenetic switching, hedging ballscreen coverages, and aggressive gap help. Texas A&M also switched but frequently opted to extend their pressure past half-court to slow down opposing offenses. Both rank near the bottom in the country in opponent 3Pr, willing to cede late clock 3s in order to cut off the paint entirely. This philosophy should sound fairly familiar: aggressive help, comfort giving up 3s, and relentless ball pressure were the defining traits of both NBA finalists! And it was versus these coverages that Tre’s calm under pressure, shrewd interior passing, and dynamic shooting truly shined.

The relevance of Tre’s size amongst shooting-oriented prospects was on full display versus these teams. Johnson was able to make teams play for late and/or lazy switches with his high and dynamic release.

Despite the congested paint, Johnson consistently made high-value passes without turning the ball over.

Johnson’s ability to pass over and around the defense while avoiding turnovers forced Tennessee to tone down their aggression in ballscreen coverages as well. In the first clip for instance, from Texas’ first matchup versus Tennessee, where the Volunteers maintained their hard-hedging ballscreen coverage. Johnson’s ability to keep his dribble alive and see over the lifted bigs allowed him to manipulate and beat the backline defenders in rotation

This occurred to the point where, when the teams rematched in the SEC tournament, Tennessee softened their ballscreen coverage greatly and reduced the nail-help to prevent the defense from becoming overextended. Johnson still managed to find a way.

This is an extremely small sample, of course, and even though the scheme has similar tenets to NBA defenses, these certainly aren’t NBA defenders. But these kind of plays and performances, while always captured in the box score, are what make Johnson the ideal ‘glove’ player in the NBA. With offensive rebounding becoming increasingly prevalent in the league’s meta…

Precise interior playmaking will become a necessity for perimeter players. And Johnson proved himself to be extremely adept with these naturally high-risk passes all season.

Conclusion

It doesn’t take a veteran scout to recognize the flaws in Tre’s game, and typically, any player who requires so many caveats and accommodations should probably not receive the level of investment Tre Johnson inevitably will. But what Tre is representative of, in my mind, is a departure from teambuilding dogma. A player who possesses outlier talent in the areas Tre does can be essential to forming an identity like the Houston Cougars and Rockets have sculpted over the years. What this exercise has taught me is there is a universality to basketball, and any team whose success is rooted in generating turnovers, rebounding, and maximizing the possession battle will require maximal turnover economy and close-quarters scoring from their backcourt. And a guard like Tre Johnson, who has met this criteria at such an early age, would be a defensible choice for any team keeping this roster building strategy in mind. In all likelihood I do not ever see Tre being the best, or even second-best player on a title-winning team, but he does make the acquisition and integration of perennially undervalued interior players a much simpler endeavor. And that may be where the edge lies in drafting Tre Johnson.

The post Finding the Fit: Tre Johnson, a Tale of Two Houstons, and Winning Ugly appeared first on Swish Theory.

VJ Edgecombe

Valdez (VJ) Edgecombe has been a projected top 5 pick wire to wire in this class. Despite a rocky start to the season, Edgecombe’s status as a blue chip recruit seemed well deserved after a freshman season that placed him in exclusive company.

As much as Bart Torvik queries have become a fraught subject amongst the draft community, when taking an Occam’s Razor approach it is apparent there’s not really a precedent for a player with Edgecombe’s intersection of feel, athleticism, and production becoming an abject failure in the league (barring unforeseen circumstances taking place in the case of Zhaire Smith).

So if Edgecombe has the pedigree and production, what consternation is there with his current standing near the top of the draft? To start, one may point to VJ’s suboptimal finishing at the rim. While Edgecombe ended the season at a solid 60% at the rim, his rim efficiency was largely inflated by his dynamic vertical athleticism and transition frequency. Just under 48% of Edgecombe’s rim-attempts came in transition, while in the halfcourt Edgecombe finished only 49% at the rim and a disconcerting 44% on half-court layups. However, this is not a novel insight; most publications and scouts have noted VJ’s half-court limitations for some time, with his unrefined ballhandling typically being pointed to as the culprit of his unimpressive rim-finishing. Per @henrynbadraft, Edgecombe’s relative weakness at the rim has been present since his time on the grassroots circuit. In the query below of top-50 RSCI players’ AAU statistics over the past 3 years, along with Edgecombe, these were the only players to have <53% on two-point attempts (2PA), <0.6 2PA/TSA (true shot attempt), and <0.1 FTA/TSA.

Of the 5 players here (excluding Edgecombe) to play over a 50% minutes share, their average rim-rate was 20.9% as a freshman. With the exception of VJ, these players were either three-point specialists or jumpshot-oriented creators. With VJ not falling into either bucket he was placed in a precarious position, how does one deploy a blue-chip recruit without a clearly defined offensive skillset? Early in the season, the fit could best be described as ‘trying to fit a square peg into a round hole’. Baylor runs a notoriously ballscreen-heavy offense, finishing this season in the 81st percentile in ‘Pick-and-Roll’ frequency, and over the last 5 years Baylor has never finished lower than the 77th percentile in this playtype.

Operating core ballscreen actions in the middle third of the floor, Edgecombe greatly struggled generating deep, quality paint touches. When asked to create from a standstill against a set defense as frequently as Edgecombe was, his high center of gravity caused issues changing direction off a live dribble, withstanding contact on drives, and altering stride length, all of which are critical components of any downhill driving game. The convergence of Edgecombe’s physical and skill limitations as a primary ballhandler is evident from the clips below.

When you pair this schematic emphasis on running ballscreens with one of the slowest paces in the country (Baylor finished 320/364 teams in Adjusted Tempo) you are left with a team uniquely suited to exacerbating Edgecombe’s weaknesses and suppressing his strengths. I believe this combination is the primary cause of Baylor’s offense being BETTER with Edgecombe on the bench. Per Hoop-Explorer, Baylor’s offense was 7.6 points better per 100 possessions. While the 479 possessions Edgecombe wasn’t on the floor isn’t the most robust sample, the underlying numbers fall in line with what the film suggests. Baylor’s shot quality suffered with Edgecombe running 24% of the team’s PNR actions per Synergy. Not only was Baylor less capable of generating threes and free-throw attempts, the QUALITY of three-point attempts was lower with Edgecombe on the floor, with the team shooting almost 2 less corner threes per 100 possessions.

Even if Edgecombe’s outlook as a downhill creator is replete with red flags, there are still other avenues Edgecombe could take to develop into a star-level offensive player. After all, despite getting off to a rough start shooting this season, Edgecombe’s shooting priors are near stellar. Coming into the year, Edgecombe had shot 39.1% on 274 threes and 79.9% on 134 free-throw attempts. These numbers indicate that Edgecombe developing into a potent off-the-dribble is well within the realm of possibility. And when looking at historical precedent, significant pull-up shooting development may be the most integral component to Edgecombe returning top-5 value. Below are all the players drafted in the lottery since 2010 who were: 6’5 or shorter, with 5 or fewer unassisted two-point makes per 100 possessions, and 30% or more of their two’s assisted (per Bart Torvik)

Virtually all of these players who returned positive expected value based on their draft slot developed into highly effective shooters off the dribble. And where it currently stands, Edgecombe is behind the curve in this respect. Compared to the players in the previous query, Edgecombe finished his pre-NBA season with the lowest volume AND tied for the 2nd worst efficiency on these pull-up twos.

Edgecombe’s lack of comfort shooting off the dribble is apparent on film, and another facet of his game limited by his handle. VJ cannot self-organize off multiple dribbles and take pull-up jumpers on balance currently, and the line between midrange attempts and floaters is frequently blurred when Edgecombe takes these shots.

Again, VJ’s issues shooting off the dribble date back to his pre-NCAA career and are rooted in his biomechanical issues. Edgecombe being a ‘high-hipped’ athlete who struggles decelerating is preventing him from leveraging his impressive straight-line speed to create space off the dribble. VJ’s proclivity for over-striding on drives limits how effectively he can generate power when he transitions into a pull-up jumper.

My current hypothesis is Edgecombe’s difficulty controlling his stride length while driving is what’s responsible for the discrepancy between VJ’s dynamism leaping off 2 feet, where he’s arguably the most explosive player in this draft class, versus 1 foot, where he’s struggled greatly relative to expectations. Baylor’s coaching staff made schematic changes for Edgecombe to improve his on-ball efficacy, from using guard-to-guard Ghost Screens to clear driving lanes…

…to using actions such as ’77 Shallow’ in order to simultaneously beat hedging ballscreen coverages and remove nail-help to aid Edgecombe’s drives.

However, neither adjustment bolstered Edgecombe’s efficiency to the desired extent. So this begs the question, if there’s reason for concern with regards to Edgecombe’s effectiveness as a pull-up shooter AND attacking the basket, is there any reason to believe Edgecombe’s profile warrants his lofty draft projection? As previously mentioned, Edgecombe’s deployment in an extremely ballscreen heavy offense was far from ideal, however his playtype distribution does not paint the full picture of how inconducive Baylor’s offense was for Edgecombe specifically.

The 3-man lineup of VJ Edgecombe, Norchad Omier, and Josh Ojianwuna makes up 22.5% of VJ Edgecombe’s total possessions played this season, however this lineup was on the floor for 26.9% of PNR possessions ran by Edgecombe this season. In Offensive Rating, this 3-man lineup was 22nd out of 25 Baylor lineups that played over 350 possessions, with this 3-man unit’s only saving grace being their relative strength on the offensive glass.

This lineup’s spacing issues only amplified Edgecombe’s aforementioned struggles as a primary ballhandler. Take the clips below, for example. This group of clips displays Baylor running ‘RAM PNP’, a staple of their ballscreen offense, where a player receives an off-ball screen before setting the middle ballscreen and ‘popping’ to the 3-point line. In the first clip, Baylor has the 2 bigs involved in the action, with Norchad Omier first receiving the off-ball screen before setting a ballscreen for Edgecombe. Notice how compacted the spacing is inside the arc, with Omier’s defender completely disregarding the popping Omier.

However, in the following clips, a ‘small’ sets the middle ballscreen for Edgecombe. Even in the first possessions with the action taking place against the same opponent in Tennessee, the improvement in shot quality is apparent.

The double-big lineups’ impact on tape was corroborated by VJ’s PNR data, as well.

Ultimately, this is a minuscule sample of possessions Edgecombe played with the double big lineup, and I do not want to make it seem as though these suboptimal lineups are totally responsible for VJ’s issues as a PNR ballhandler. However, I do think this data is key to realizing that Edgecombe’s outlook as a creator isn’t entirely doomed. Of players with ≥ 150 PNR + Passes possessions, Edgecombe was ranked in the 40th percentile in PPP, but in lineups with only one big Edgecombe’s 0.944 PPP was in the 66th percentile. Over the course of the season Baylor substituted these 3-man ballscreen actions with ‘Empty’ PNRs to ‘clear up’ the picture for Edgecombe on drives and place less strain on his handle. In these less complex ballscreen actions, Edgecombe’s processing (which well outpaces the functionality of his handle at this point) was able to truly shine.

My case for optimism in Edgecombe’s creation ability is relative to the position taken by his greatest detractors. The likelihood of VJ becoming a high-level PNR operator is slim-to-none in my opinion, but this doesn’t preclude the possibility of him becoming a highly valuable offensive player. The use case for VJ Edgecombe offensively just requires a degree of creativity.

For as many questions as I’ve raised regarding the functionality of VJ’s athleticism, there have only been a few players his size to reach certain athletic benchmarks. Below is a query I’ve run on players since 2010, where ‘Team Stock%’ is the share of a team’s steals+blocks a player logged. I decided to use this instead of steal and block rate to account for some noise introduced by team stylistic tendencies.

The only other players to appear alongside Edgecombe are players whose role I’ve termed ‘Utility Guards’, those with the size of perimeter players who can fulfill responsibilities typically associated with frontcourt players. This sort of role is where I see Edgecombe being best utilized. As VJ transitions to the NBA and his on-ball burden lessens, I would hope that Edgecombe is integrated as a stylistic wrinkle versus a featured piece. There may not be a team better at deploying their guards in such a manner than the Boston Celtics. With the acquisition of Jrue Holiday, the Celtics could place teams in conflict without deliberately involving Holiday in actions. By simply stationing Holiday in the Dunker Spot, the Celtics were afforded the luxury of having a player who could function as an outlet for their jumbo creators on drives and consistently win the rebounding battle versus like-sized perimeter players.

In the original ‘Utility Guard’ query I provided, pre-NBA 3-point volume and efficiency were listed. The relevancy of these stats outside of the obvious is the prevalence of the most consistent counter used to neutralize this archetype. I am currently writing this article as the Eastern Conference Finals takes place, and much has been made of Josh Hart’s ineffectiveness in the series, with the Knicks coaching staff going as far as removing Hart from the starting lineup. What has plagued Hart and many of these Swiss army knife players (at least offensively) is the lack of consistent spacing they provide. Opponents have experienced success defending these players with Centers and ignoring them on the perimeter. What makes the prospect of Edgecombe in this role especially tantalizing is the confidence I have in his ability as a spot-up shooter.

Granted, a significant portion of these attempts are from the high-school line, and Edgecombe has shot a paltry 24.4% (19/79) on off-the-dribble 3PA in the same timeframe. But at the same stage of their careers, Edgecombe is significantly further along as a spacer than players of a similar archetype, while also possessing the explosiveness to take advantage of opportunities as a screener like Gary Payton II in the clip below…

Or exploit cross-matches versus bigs in space, as he does to Henri Veesaar in the play below.

And as previously mentioned, Baylor’s PNR-heavy style being centered around smaller guards who couldn’t create advantages eradicated opportunistic scoring from Edgecombe’s shot diet. The few chances Edgecombe has had to attack from the weakside or get downhill versus a tilted floor, he delivered.

Obviously, there’s only so much accommodating a team would want to subject themselves to when it comes to a player drafted as high as VJ will be. However, a player capable of providing lineup and stylistic flexibility without compromising spacing or rebounding is scarcely made available at a rookie deal price point. This archetype’s dependence on high-leverage creators is undeniable, but this era of the NBA reflects the appeal of a prospect like VJ Edgecombe. Sacrificing the size traditionally associated with certain roles in favor of skill can pay massive dividends.

Miles Byrd

Any reservations to be had with Miles Byrd are fairly straightforward; a glance at a query of players with Byrd’s combination of size and scoring inefficiency yields a list almost bereft of long-tenured NBA contributors.

It wouldn’t be entirely off-base to say the only reason the majority of this list was even able to enter the draft pool was due to exceptional high school pedigrees. The obvious throughline between success cases of this query is their high-level defensive aptitude. There is definitely reason to believe Byrd’s defensive capabilities are enough to buoy his NBA prospects, as of the players in the above query, Byrd has the highest Block and Steal rate. To my surprise, however, Byrd’s impact on San Diego State’s defensive efficiency was muted relative to his statistical production on this end of the floor. Per Hoop-Explorer, San Diego State’s defense was only 2.5 points per 100 possessions better with Byrd On Court vs Off. Perhaps most unexpectedly though, SDSU’s Defensive Turnover Rate remained unchanged regardless of whether Byrd was playing or not!

Watching the tape, it is fairly easy to draw conclusions as to what could be behind the discrepancy between Byrd’s stellar event creation numbers, and the On-Off Splits. San Diego State runs an aggressive switching scheme, which incentivizes players to sacrifice ‘sound’ positioning in favor of forcing opponents into congested areas of the floor where they are more prone to committing turnovers. Byrd’s tape is littered with possessions where he is overhelping, or even throwing himself out of position by jumping passing lanes and attempting to create havoc.

Referencing SDSU’s defensive resume, there are two statistics that are key to elucidating Byrd’s directive schematically.

San Diego State was in the Bottom 10 in Opponent 3-point Rate, while leading the nation in Block Rate. It seems Head Coach Brian Dutcher was comfortable with trading off 3-point attempts as long as they were able to pack the paint and prevent their deep-lying shell from being compromised. This philosophy has been a defining trait of the Dutcher era, with SDSU ranking in the top 200 in opponent 3-point rate once in his 7 years at the helm, and outside the top 300 three times, including this year. SDSU’s Block% is relevant to their scheme and Byrd’s defensive evaluation because it empowered Byrd to take risks on the perimeter. If Byrd made an ill-advised gamble and provided the opponent a numerical advantage to attack, they still had to contend with a formidable frontcourt led by Magoon Gwath who finished 4th in the country in Block%.

Synthesizing this information initially led me to take a skeptical approach to Byrd’s defensive translatability. And prompted a less charitable interpretation of instances where Byrd’s point-of-attack defense faltered…

…or Byrd’s lack of strength seemed to be insulated by SDSU’s constant switching.

And while these were valid concerns at the time, taking a more holistic approach to Miles Byrd’s defensive profile incited me to revise my approach. But before delving deeper into the defensive side of things, I believe Byrd’s offense deserves further attention.

The Case for Miles Byrd’s Offense

Of the 68 teams in the NCAA Tournament field, San Diego State was 61st in Adjusted Offensive Rating, surpassing only the four 16 seeds in the field, Bryant, Troy, and Robert Morris in offensive efficiency. Historically speaking, San Diego State under Bryan Dutcher has never been a system conducive to high-octane offenses. A look at SDSU’s offensive statistical profile over the years portrays a team that plays a deliberate style without generating high-quality, schemed looks.

Too often, there’s a false equivalency drawn between slow offense and bad offense. That’s far from the case in my opinion, one only need to look as far as the NCAA and NBA champions in the 2023-24 season, the UConn Huskies and Boston Celtics. Both teams played a laborious style, but with intent. UConn’s meticulously schemed motion offense was incredibly efficient, creating clean looks for their bevy of shooters. Boston’s dominant run through this past season was defined by their relentless matchup hunting and isolation game. San Diego State, though, according to their own coach, is willing to play a much more laissez-faire approach to offense. On the Basketball Immersion Podcast, Dutcher discussed his philosophy on his offense in relation to his defense as “We spend a lot of time on defense. You’re good at what you work at…we might spend 50-60% of practice on defense…Offensively, we play with great freedom. We play with freedom within framework, we have things we try to accomplish but we like high IQ guys that can break out of that at any moment and just make plays.”

Although in many areas of the game flexibility is an admirable trait, in this instance, SDSU’s willingness to grant players freedom offensive autonomy has resulted in a consistently undesirable shot profile. Below is SDSU’s shot profile data under Brian Dutcher, with Near Proximity field goal attempts being defined as layups, dunks, and tip-ins.

Even with the offensive context being subpar, anyone who has read this far is probably looking for a better explanation for Miles Byrd’s offensive shortcomings than ‘the spacing and system were terrible.’ After all, this could be applied to a litany of former prospects. Despite a team’s structural issues, a player shouldn’t be entirely absolved of the product right? In Byrd’s case, though, despite the uninspiring raw efficiency, he finished in the 87th percentile in Offensive On-Off, per cbbanalytics. San Diego State was 8.9 points per 100 possessions better with Byrd on the court, due to his contribution in a few areas.

First, Miles Byrd is a stellar example of the importance of interior passing. Ranking in the 92nd percentile in Rim-Assists/40 minutes and the 96th percentile in the percent of total assists at the rim, on a per-touch basis Byrd was extremely efficient as a playmaker. Without running a high volume of PNR, Byrd routinely displayed a diverse passing vocabulary in the few opportunities he had attacking a tilted defense.

Even though I would consider Byrd’s handle a weakness at the moment, his penchant for playmaking manifested in his schemed possessions as well. The glut of actions drawn up for Byrd were ‘Spanoulis’ or ‘Zoom Chicago’, but he did operate and was effective in a limited sample as a PNR ballhandler, finishing in the 84th percentile in PNR PPP.

What Byrd’s projection on this end will be reduced to, though, will be how consistent a spacer he will become. Ending the season shooting only 30.3% from 3 on a robust 11.7 3PA/100, I am more optimistic Byrd will develop into an effective spacer than the raw numbers indicate. A significant portion of the optimism lies in Byrd’s stellar three-point volume and career 82.8% FT%, while also being rooted in the circumstances brought on by SDSU’s offense. On Guarded 3PA Byrd shot 37.2% (32/86), which was significantly better than the 23.1% (12/52) Byrd shot on Unguarded 3PA. My hypothesis as to how this could have been possible is that half of Byrd’s 3PA were classified as ‘Long Threes’ which per cbbdata are 3PA from 25+ feet. Already lacking in physical strength, oftentimes Byrd was placed in the position of HAVING to take long 3PA when his teammates were incapable of penetrating and breaking the defensive shell on the initial action.

What may be the strongest evidence for optimism in Byrd’s offensive profile is how extensive a creation burden he was tasked with. Over the course of researching relevant data for this piece, I’d realized Byrd’s self-created shot volume stood out amongst similarly sized players from previous drafts. This past season, only 22.9% of Miles Byrd’s two-point attempts were assisted and he produced 7.42 Unassisted 2PA per 100, a shot distribution more in line with guards trusted with generating half-court offense. To gauge how Byrd’s creation compared to similarly sized players, I conducted a (slightly overfitted) query…

….which yielded this list of 72 players since 2010

50th percentile EPM in the NBA this year (regular season) is -1.71 and slightly over half of this list’s 3 Year Peak EPM surpasses this number. Considering the draft capital (or lack thereof) spent on these players, a majority of them outperformed the expected value attributed to their draft slotting. Notably in the mix here are some of the most impressive recent ‘margin wins’ in Naji Marshall, Herb Jones, and Aaron Wiggins. And while there are some significant disappointments (like a Jarrett Culver or Johnny Davis), even some widely considered ‘busts’ such as Evan Turner managed to contribute in the league for a significant period of time. Two shared traits with players unable to stick in the league were:

1. Lacking a complementary offensive skillset (perimeter shooting, connective passing, and other play-finishing traits)
2. An inability to contribute defensively.

As previously outlined, I’m of the mind that San Diego State’s offensive ecosystem deprived Byrd of opportunities to display the former, and in the next section I plan on quelling concerns of the latter issue.

Tying it all together

For all the aforementioned reasons, Miles Byrd and VJ Edgecombe’s profiles are not without their flaws. There are probably plenty of issues with their skill sets that I haven’t mentioned that would make teams wary of drafting them. What these two have in common, and what has been particularly enamoring, is the seamlessness with which they fit into the modern game. Particularly defensively, Edgecombe and Byrd embody traits that I believe are necessary to play in today’s style.

After this season, Miles Byrd found himself in rare company with his defensive production. The list of non-bigs who managed to contribute to elite defense to the degree Byrd did, while maintaining a baseline level of feel, is exceedingly small.

Taking account of the right-most column, zone-heavy teams seem disproportionately represented amongst this group of players, making Byrd’s inclusion even more compelling. Per Synergy, San Diego State only logged 2 (!!) possessions of zone defense this entire season. Circling back to the initial concerns raised about SDSU’s defense and how relevant Byrd’s responsibilities within the scheme would be to what he’ll be asked to do at the next level, I believe SDSU’s scheme is one of the college defenses most analogous to the NBA systems currently in vogue.

Earlier, I had mentioned SDSU’s willingness to switch in conjunction with their tendency to show help early and often as a potential crutch for Miles Byrd, an obstacle in properly evaluating his defense. Originally, I’d thought if I were unable to assess Byrd’s ability to perform in ONE isolated defensive role, whether it be screen navigation, POA defense, or weakside rim-protection, then I’d be unable to determine which defensive role best suited him. The direction defenses in the NBA are heading, though, proves this is an antiquated way of evaluating defensive talent. In the same way competency in dribbling, passing, and shooting has become requisite for incoming NBA players, we have now arrived in an era where personnel need to demonstrate a degree of proficiency in each facet of defense to contribute to elite ’16 game’ basketball.

Of course, no team has exemplified this philosophy more than the prohibitive favorites for this year’s championship, the Oklahoma City Thunder. By compiling a roster full of players who are not only physically capable of executing a variety of defensive roles, but can simultaneously diagnose complex rotations, the Thunder have architected a defense with a singular identity amongst the NBA elite. Similar to San Diego State, the Thunder have no issues helping off of shooters, switching early and often, varying ballscreen coverages, and breaking with conventional defensive principles like helping off the ball-side corner.

While the other participant in this year’s NBA Finals doesn’t play as frenetic a defensive scheme, the Indiana Pacers mirror Oklahoma City in their utilization of early pick-up points in order to extend their pressure and convert a perceived weakness, their size, into a strength.

This kind of defense, which is becoming more and more commonplace, is where both Edgecombe and Byrd should thrive. Both have routinely shown their chops in each ‘phase’ of defense. Role notwithstanding, both were exemplary as point-of-attack defenders.

As previously discussed, SDSU’s scheme gave Byrd carte blanche to trust his instincts and range as a help defender, to consistently great results. Byrd’s activity was pervasive in every area, changing the geometry of the court by altering drive angles as a nail-defender…

…and keeping his team’s defense out of rotation with his sticky screen navigation.

Edgecombe’s deployment wasn’t nearly as fluid as Byrd’s, as Baylor played significantly more zone defense than SDSU (Baylor finished in the 91st percentile in zone frequency), making their defensive identity this season much more conservative. Coming into this season as the 234th-ranked team in average height per KenPom, Baylor didn’t have the luxury of rangy defenders to execute longer, more exotic rotations, so their prerogative was to stay out of rotation entirely and maintain shell integrity. This confined Edgecombe to playing a much more static role than Byrd. Even with a more parochial role, Edgecombe’s hand speed and lateral quickness mirroring players on the perimeter shone.

The instances of cognitive athleticism Byrd and Edgecombe show in the clips above are what make them especially suited for modern defenses. Oklahoma City has become the blueprint by acquiring players with traditionally valued athletic traits, decision making, and reaction times to dial their defensive aggression to the point where they are dictating terms of play to the offense. Recently, a major shift in NFL defenses was made when teams realized offenses struggled playing against 2-high safety alignments, where big-play opportunities were limited and offenses would have to slowly matriculate the ball down the field. I do not find the recent schematic changes made by the OKC Thunder all that different. The Thunder defense, by swarming to the ball and congesting driving lanes, have turned the long-held ‘drive and kick’ logic on its head. Similar to San Diego State, OKC concedes a high volume of 3PA defensively, especially relative to contemporary elite defenses. However, this is by design, by selling out on drives and forcing the ball to travel east-west versus north-south, both teams force longer possessions. In Oklahoma City’s case, the number of defensive playmakers they roster makes each drive by the opponent a tenuous proposition. When a team rosters so many chaos agents on defense, there’s the opportunity cost assumed with each successive drive, that the chance of the driver committing a turnover increases.

The emphasis on turnover generation in convergence with the break from traditional defensive philosophies resulted in NBA defense being ‘up’ this year, with drive volume, secondary assists (an assist made without the passer dribbling before the assist), and offensive rating all declining. While I understand this is a somewhat strained assumption, especially on such a small sample, I truly believe the sustained intensity and creativity we’re seeing in defenses is responsible for this phenomenon.

In SDSU’s case, Miles Byrd was disruptive enough on his own to mimic this effect on opposing offenses. By covering large swaths of ground and making multiple efforts after the initial rotation, Byrd was largely responsible for preventing flow to build within an offense.

By now I am probably starting to sound like a broken record with the continued use of terms like ‘ground-coverage’ and ‘event creation’, but it truly can’t be overstated how essential this is becoming as we transition into what has been aptly termed ‘The Weakest Link Era’ (a phrase coined by the inimitable Owen Phillips). So far, I’ve outlined the kind of player required to play this work-intensive style of defense, but the fact of the matter is that to play this way throughout the regular season and playoffs, you need MORE of this kind of player.

NBA basketball has never been more physically demanding, so it follows that to play a style hinged on range and effort, you’ll need a rotating cast of players to complement your core group. In Oklahoma City’s case, their depth is not only complementary, but ameliorates the weaknesses of many players in their rotation. So many members of the Thunder either currently possess or were at an earlier point designated as half-court deficient players; however, their greatest strength defensively allows them to play in the game states most conducive to efficient offense.

This applies to Miles Byrd and VJ Edgecombe because, irrespective of their offensive limitations, their penchant for creating turnovers will greatly augment the offense of a team, especially one already rostering players with similar defensive talents. The effect both Byrd and Edgecombe had on their respective teams’ transition numbers is instructive as to their value-add offensively.

In Byrd’s case, these transition numbers are especially notable: this is how a player shooting 38% from the field becomes the most impactful player to his team’s offense. San Diego State’s rim rate went from 122nd in the country with Byrd on the court to 293rd with him off. Without Byrd providing a spark in transition, the Aztecs were incapable of generating quality rim attempts in the half-court.

Conclusion

As it currently stands, the NBA is in a transitionary period. Slowly but surely, fans, analysts, and teams alike are acknowledging this era is a far departure from the star-centric league most of us grew to know and love. Now, as depth and flexibility become the focus, and while salary cap restrictions are more punitive than ever, it is paramount that teams get the most out of whatever draft capital they possess to maintain a standard of competitiveness. Otherwise, teams will routinely subject themselves to the whims of the ever-temperamental lottery gods (my condolences go out to fans of the Wizards, Jazz, and Pelicans alike). As I’ve mentioned repeatedly, Miles Byrd and VJ Edgecombe are far from perfect prospects, for as much as I’ve lauded their defensive acumen, even in this area their physical strength could become a significant obstacle which prevents them from being All-Defense caliber performers.

In Edgecombe’s case in particular, I would be surprised if he ended up returning top-4 value, and personally have him ranked 7th at the time of writing. I see VJ developing in a way where he could disappoint relative to expectations on his rookie contract. However, the style both players allow you to play, and the confidence I have in the depth they will provide, anchors my belief that both players have productive NBA careers ahead of them.

The post Contextualizing Production: VJ Edgecombe and Miles Byrd appeared first on Swish Theory.

Following this line of thought, I decided to gauge the roster complexion of the league’s contenders, defining ‘contenders’ as any playoff participant. Amongst the 16 playoff qualifiers this past season, the average draft capital spent on the top 7 players in their rotation was the 20th pick. However, each team had an average of roughly 3.5 lottery picks in their rotation. Considering about half of each team’s rotation was composed of lottery picks, this discrepancy demanded further investigation. Further examination of roster make-ups would show 14/16 playoff teams featured a second round pick in their rotation and 7/16 had a former UDFA (Undrafted Free Agent) receiving significant playing time.

‘Winning at the margins’ is a commonly understood pillar, and borderline platitude, of teambuilding; lottery picks on 2nd and 3rd contracts, which are undoubtedly present on these rosters, present such a burden to teams’ salary-caps they are forced to roster and play inexpensive players. While cap conservation is certainly a major factor in constructing these teams, it is only a partial explanation. There are teams with untenable salary-cap figures, littered with the extensions of former lottery picks, who weren’t able to make the playoffs. As for the players who weren’t heavily invested into with draft capital, we can infer they were also available to these non-playoff teams. And if these players were available, are currently able to contribute to a playoff team, what prevented these lesser teams from acquiring them?

This may seem like a circuitous line of thinking, but I believe the issues facing these moribund teams to be interconnected. Not only were they unable to identify lottery picks worth defining the context of their roster, they were unable to acquire talent on the periphery who could easily acclimate, and produce, in their specific context. Reed Sheppard and Jonathan Mogbo are two prospects who on the surface have little in common, but in both of them I see unique solutions to the previously described predicament. While Mogbo and Sheppard find themselves on opposite ends of the draft spectrum, with Sheppard being projected to be taken within the top 5 picks and Mogbo a consensus second rounder, I believe they’re both undervalued compared to their respective positions. Both players possess portable skillsets, easily transferrable into any setting and this, in my estimation, supersedes the need to meet any archetypal qualifications.

Reed Sheppard

In many ways Kentucky guard Reed Sheppard has become an avatar for the public perception of the 2024 draft class. Standing at 6’1.75 (without shoes) with a +6’3.25 wingspan, Sheppard’s substandard positional size (per DraftExpress, average point guard measurements are 6’2.25 and a 6’6.75 wingspan), and modest scoring output (averaged 12.5 points per game) are a far cry from typical expectations of a projected top-5 pick. Even Sheppard’s jaw dropping efficiency from this past season has been met with skepticism in the public draft-sphere, with many questioning the feasibility of drastically increasing his shooting volume. Along with only shooting a hair over 8 threes per-hundred-possessions, scattered throughout his tape are instances of Sheppard stymying advantages with his reluctance to score, as seen in the compilation below.

Even the methods by which Sheppard goes about playmaking have been met with scrutiny. So often the hallmarks of a high level guard prospect are a player who consistently creates decisive advantages, and can utilize an array of passing deliveries to capitalize on them. Sheppard decidedly doesn’t abide by this convention, and in fact, rarely throws passes off a live dribble. Sheppard’s rote style of playmaking, shown below, has understandably sparked criticism of whether Sheppard will be able to fit passes into NBA windows.

And this is to say nothing of whether Sheppard will be able to reliably create advantages in the first place. At the moment Sheppard is without an especially advanced handle, routinely struggling going to his left hand and contending with gap help on drives.

So with all these uncertainties calling into question Sheppard’s legitimacy as a top 5 pick, what reason is there to believe he’s actually UNDER-rated as a prospect?

Contextualizing Production

Being fully transparent, many of the previously mentioned concerns were my own. Advantage creation and positional size are two heavily considered factors in the guard evaluation rubric, and Sheppard’s failure to meet this criteria made it easy to dismiss his case for a top-5 pick as a byproduct of an especially weak draft class. However, as Sheppard’s lone collegiate season progressed and the production didn’t waver I was forced to reassess my stance. Reconciling my beliefs of what a top-flight guard SHOULD play like with the tendencies Sheppard continued to display on tape proved difficult, so in search of clarity, I took a look at the numbers.

In order to establish a frame of reference for Sheppard’s statistical profile, I compiled stats I believed were pertinent to a guard’s pre-draft profile. The sample consisted of 41 guards listed 6’3 or smaller who were either: first round picks, or played 18 minutes/game, only guards without Barttorvik.com profiles being omitted from the sample (sorry Mike Conley). The categories tracked consisted of: PNR (Pick-and-Rolls) run per-game, PNR/game (including passes), Half-court rim attempts/game, Drives/game, Free Throw rate, Steal rate, Block rate, and Off-the-dribble 3’s attempted/game. In virtually every category Sheppard’s positioning was polarized, revealing some interesting trends.

For example, take the scatter plot below comparing PNR scoring rate (share of a player’s PNR reps that ends in a shot attempt by the ballhandler) and total PNR reps received by a player per-game.

As PNRs/game increase the less scoring oriented these reps become. This is to be expected, generally players receiving a high volume of PNRs are thought to be a team’s primary facilitator. In spite of this, here we find what is the first of a series of trends bucked by Reed Sheppard. Sheppard had the 4th lowest PNR scoring rate of the entire sample, and was comfortably lower than anyone who’d seen similar PNR volume to him. The average scoring rate amongst players who’d averaged 8 PNR/game or less was 53%. Sheppard, who’d averaged 6.1 PNR/game, had a scoring rate of 39%. Sheppard found himself in the company of Andrew Nembhard and Tyrese Haliburton once again when I’d ranked these 41 guards by Drives and Half-court Rim attempts per game.

Again these are two stats where the correlation seems obvious on its face: the more a player drives to the basket, the more rim attempts they should have. But what commonalities are there in players who do both sparingly? For the 7 players who reside near the bottom of both rankings above, size seems like an obvious culprit. But this explanation didn’t hold up to scrutiny, especially after seeing the players ordered by free throw rate.

Along with Sheppard, Haliburton, and Nembhard, Cason Wallace and TJ McConnell were the only players to fall in the bottom 13 in all 3 categories. And with Sheppard and the Pacers trio being in the bottom 10 of each stat, prompting the question of what’s behind the similarity in these player’s statistical profile? I believe the answer in this case is what I can best describe as ‘Advantage Perception‘.

Typically when advantage creation is discussed what comes to mind are clips like the following, where Ja Morant collapses the defense after rejecting the ballscreen and makes the kickout to Desmond Bane for a wide open 3.

Where advantage perception diverges from advantage creation is the skill doesn’t necessarily require the player to spend much time on-ball, and is as much about navigating offensive pitfalls as it is manufacturing something out of nothing. It is in this area where Reed Sheppard excels, evident in his stellar 2.25 Assist-to-Turnover ratio, but also in his tape. Sheppard was persistent in keeping defenses on their backfoot with pinpoint outlet passes which sparked transition opportunities.

This kind of subtle playmaking is a staple of all 3 previously mentioned Pacers guards, and one of the defining features of an offense which ranked 2nd in the NBA in both pace and offensive rating over the regular season. All 3 of these Pacers guards embody the basketball adage of ‘the ball moves faster passing than dribbling’, and create many easy opportunities with simple hit-ahead passes like the play below.

Sheppard’s effect on the Kentucky offense’s pace is apparent going by the numbers as well. Per Hoop-Explorer, with Sheppard on the court Kentucky ranked in the 99th and 98th percentile in transition frequency and efficiency. In non-Sheppard minutes they still played in transition a healthy amount ranking in the 96th percentile, however their efficiency plummeted into the 17th percentile, an astronomical fall.

This ability to perceive advantages extends to Sheppard’s ability off-ball as well, Sheppard’s adept in relocating off-ball and is well suited to complimenting other creators. The clip below is emblematic of Sheppard’s knack for maximizing his role off-ball. DJ Wagner runs a spread PNR where Sheppard lifts from the corner to remove the tagger, a basic enough task for an off-guard. However, Sheppard recognizes the defense loading up the paint and sinks into the corner, into Wagner’s line of vision, where he attacks the closeout and draws a foul on the shot attempt.

Ultimately all these are microskills, which in a way reaffirms the notion of Sheppard having a high floor but not the high-end creator outcomes associated with a top 5 pick. With low PNR volume, minimal downhill presence, and what seems to be a risk-averse offensive approach, what separates Sheppard from the ‘game-manager’ guards like TJ McConnell (and to a lesser degree Andrew Nembhard)? What avenues are there for creation?

Contextualizing Production: The Kentucky Factor

Similarly to how I’d noticed a trend in the names Sheppard was grouped with when it came to rim pressure stats, over time I’d come to realize near the bottom of both off-the-dribble 3’s and PNR/game was a strong Kentucky contingent. Of the 8 Kentucky guards in the sample 6 were in the bottom 10 of OTD 3’s taken per game and none were in the top half, with Rob Dillingham placing the highest at 21st.

And for PNR/game, 5 Kentucky guards were in the bottom 13, with De’Aaron Fox pacing the group in 17th place out of 41.

Kentucky players being amongst the lowest in PNR reps makes a good deal of sense with how prolific a recruiter John Calipari was during his tenure as Head Coach. With a glut of ballhandling talent, naturally their offense would take a more egalitarian approach. But the absence of any Kentucky players near the top of the OTD 3-point shooting list warranted further investigation, especially considering how integral this shot became to many of these players at the next level.

What I found as I looked into Kentucky’s shot diet over the Calipari years was these kind of shots seem to be explicitly discouraged within the Kentucky offense. Over the past 15 years, per Synergy, Kentucky was in the 42nd percentile of off-the-dribble shots, and this figure is including off the dribble 2’s! And this past season Kentucky was in the 37th percentile of OTD shots taken, despite being in the 93rd percentile in efficiency, and 177th in the country in 3-point rate. The implications this has on Reed Sheppard’s projection cannot be understated, because it’s these shots where Sheppard’s avenue for creation lie.

The reason I’m more confident in Sheppard’s shooting development, even compared to past Kentucky prospects, is the growth in confidence and comfort in these shots he demonstrated over the course of the season. Compare the two PNR frames below, the first from an early season game versus Saint Joseph’s and the latter from a late season conference game at Mississippi State.

Take note of the level of the ballscreen, with Tre Mitchell setting the screen with a foot inside the arc. Versus the frame below where the screener, Ugonna Onyenso, is a few feet outside of the paint.

As the season progressed and Sheppard saw more usage as a PNR ballhandler, Kentucky adjusted their scheme accordingly to fully weaponize Sheppard’s shooting ability. Sheppard acclimated to the uptick in volume well, with each passing month of the season the percentage of Sheppard’s 3s taken inside the first 20 seconds of the shot-clock increased. And this progression was apparent on tape.

Look at the following plays, both instances of Kentucky running ‘Horns’ with Sheppard as the ballhandler. In the initial clip Kentucky is playing an early season game vs Texas A&M Commerce, Sheppard’s defender goes under the ballscreen while the big, who is in a shallow drop coverage, helps. Even with the cushion Sheppard turns down the shot and swings the ball to Justin Edwards. In the clip immediately after this though, UNC Wilmington late switches the Horns action and Sheppard reactively takes the 3.

As Sheppard’s shooting reputation grew in conference play he saw more aggressive coverages and this created closeouts which lead to clearer driving lanes for his teammates.

Sheppard gradually expanded his versatility shooting off the dribble as well. In the comparison clip below, versus Florida Kentucky runs 77 (a double ball screen action), with the x4 (Tre Mitchell’s defender) switching onto Sheppard. You can see Sheppard briefly attempt to get into a stepback 3 before abandoning the idea and swinging the ball. Compare this with the following play where Sheppard does a much better job setting up and selling the drive before hitting the stepback 3.

Projecting this shooting versatility with the improvements Sheppard made as a PNR operator, as he improved his pace and timing making reads out of the core actions Kentucky ran for him.

This development can be seen comparing the two clips above. The first clip from early in the season Kentucky is running 77, Sheppard rejects the first screen, sees the low man cheating over from Antonio Reeves in the corner, but the gap help forces him to make the skip pass early and slightly off target. The lack of patience here causes the pass to be slightly off target and shrinks the window for Reeves to get the 3 off unencumbered.

Versus the 2nd clip, Sheppard is running a spread PNR, but waits for the big Zvonimir Ivisic to twist the screen to create more separation from the POA defender. This simple decision allows Sheppard to place slightly more pressure on the defense (drop coverage), Justin Edwards lifts to the wing in reaction to his defender tagging the roller, and Sheppard finds him with a better timed and more accurate left-handed skip pass.

Sheppard’s reliable decision making and OTD shooting over time can unlock his potential as a driver. As fraught as comparisons can be, I believe Sheppard’s progression could be similar to a player he’d previously linked with in this article, Tyrese Haliburton. Haliburton, similarly to Sheppard, was not treated as a potent OTD 3-point shooter upon arriving in the league. Take the frame below for example rookie Haliburton is running the PNR vs the Nuggets and look at the level of the ballscreen and the depth of Nikola Jokic’s drop…

…compared to the screen being set and the respective coverage Haliburton saw in this past playoffs.

The additional spacing in concert with this shooting gravity can unlock Sheppard’s driving potential in a similar way to Haliburton as well. Indiana frequently utilized Haliburton in these ‘Stack’ actions, especially when another dynamic shooter in Buddy Hield was on the roster. The force multiplier shooters of Hield and Haliburton’s caliber expands creases for ballhandlers to penetrate and create.

Along with actions like ‘Stack’ maximizing Sheppard’s shooting talent, there are actions to accommodate for Sheppard’s lack of an advanced handle. Many teams use ‘Get’ actions in early offense to lower the burden on ballhandlers by allowing them to initiate against a shifting defense versus a set defense. Comparing the following two plays is instructive because not only does it place Sheppard next to a player he’d been previously grouped with in TJ McConnell, you can the limitations of the latter compared to Sheppard.

In both clips ‘Strong Motion Get’ is ran, however when McConnell receives the pitchback his defender, Dennis Schroeder, is well inside the arc rendering Indiana incapable of creating an advantage. McConnell’s limited shooting range will often see teams shift into a zone defense to counter his rim pressure. However comparing this to second clip of Sheppard running the same action, the POA defender not only has to go over the screen, Mississippi State’s big has to hedge-and-recover to deny Sheppard a shooting window. This, along with Kentucky preventing nail help by stationing a respected shooter in Antonio Reeves at the wing, provides Sheppard a crease to drive and create separation for a snatch-dribble jumper.

This is of course not to say Sheppard will mirror Haliburton or McConnell’s developmental trajectory completely. However I do think its valuable to reference how both players, undeniably undervalued as prospects, improved upon their strengths and had their weaknesses accounted for.

Sheppard’s defensive projection isn’t nearly as clear, but similar to previous statistical comparisons to his peers his profile is unique.

Sheppard, of the 41 guards who’s steal and block rates were logged, had the highest steal rate and second highest block rate. Candidly though I believe these numbers slightly misrepresent Sheppard’s defensive impact this past season. Possession by possession Sheppard revealed many defensive flaws, as his suboptimal size and length gave him extremely thin margins navigating screens, and he was inconsistent at the point of attack and off-ball. Despite all these deficiencies, Kentucky’s defense was 11.4 points worse with Sheppard off the floor. This speaks to the value of creating, and consistently capitalizing, on turnovers. Sheppard’s size will more than likely keep him from being among the elite perimeter defenders in the league. Even if he’s hidden on non-shooters, the propensity for defensive playmaking should allow him to tread water on this end compared to other offensively slanted small guards in the league.

Jonathan Mogbo

While I believe the misevaluation of Reed Sheppard lies in what KIND of perimeter creator he is, viewing 6’7 combo-big Jonathan Mogbo through the lens of conventional big-man archetypes is responsible for repressing his draft stock. Just as I’d done with Sheppard, I’d wanted to establish a statistical frame of reference for Mogbo by compiling and comparing him to his peers. Instead of using a strict size threshold I used a looser set of parameters on size and selected players based on role, looking for players who had played both the 4 and 5 positions. This group consisted of 45 players and the categories taken were Offensive and Defensive Rebounding%, Assist%, Turnover Rate%, Block%, Steal%, Dunks/game, Halfcourt layups/game, and Halfcourt layup shooting efficiency, all from the player’s pre-NBA season.

Across the board Mogbo was an outlier. The chart below is the Offensive and Defensive Rebounding% of each of the player combined into one bar. Contradicting expectations given Mogbo’s size, he actually tops this group of bigs when these categories are aggregated.

The exceptionalism of Mogbo’s paint production isn’t limited to just crashing the glass, though, as portrayed by the scatter plot below which depicts Halfcourt layups + dunks on the X-axis and the conversion rate on Halfcourt layups on the Y-axis (as a proxy for touch around the basket).

Zach Edey may seem to be a confusing addition, considering the remaining players distinguished are more aligned with Mogbo’s presumed role in the league as an undersized combo-big, but the choice was intentional as to put into perspective the interior presence Mogbo has been. The only players who accumulated more HC layups and dunks/game AND were more efficient on HC layups than Mogbo were Edey, Jock Landale, and Marvin Bagley. Below is a comparison between a stylistic stat (Free Throw Rate) and efficiency stats (3-point shooting and Adjusted Offensive Rating) of the 4 players’ respective teams.

Numbers represent team ranks.

Mogbo’s San Francisco team lands at the bottom of all of these stats, which aligns with the observations I’ve made of San Francisco’s perimeter players being incapable of reliably creating space or advantages for easy opportunities. With Mogbo off the court San Francisco took 6% less shots at the rim, a precipitous drop off, and despite taking less shots at the rim they were drastically LESS efficient as well. In non-Mogbo minutes San Francisco went from 80th percentile efficiency in High-Low efficiency (PPP) to the 51st percentile, and from the 60th percentile in Post-up efficiency to the 40th percentile.

So what relevance does this have to the article’s premise? Why does Mogbo being particularly effective near the basket differentiate his outlook from other undersized bigs? What separates Mogbo from previous undersized big men is the convergence of his interior presence and passing ability. Mogbo ranked 2nd out of the sample of bigs in Assist%, and had the most dunks/game of any big above a 15% assist rate.

While Mogbo won’t be deployed often as an on-ball creator, an exceptional Assist% compared to his peers represents a level of feel which enables him to capitalize on cleaner looks provided by improved spacing and advantage creators. Simple avenues for scoring present themselves like the clip below, where the Memphis Grizzlies run Horns Flare and Brandon Clarke recognizes the opportunity to cut baseline as his defender aggressively helps off him in the strong side corner.

Another crucial factor to take note of in the previous clip is the personnel. Notice Clarke gets this open dunk with Xavier Tillman on the floor, another non-spacing frontcourt player.

This leads into my next major point with Jonathan Mogbo and his overstated difficulty of fitting into lineups. The confluence of off-ball awareness, ballhandling ability, and dynamic athleticism makes Mogbo a prime example of how often the relationship between spacing and modern frontcourt players is misunderstood.

In traditional 2-3 and 5-out alignments, frontcourt players, no matter their ability to shoot from distance, are placed in the corner. This frequently gives opposing teams the upper-hand in game-planning, allowing them to either hide their weakest defensive player on this negative-spacer. Teams may also place their primary rim protector on this player to keep them stationed close to the basket, like in the clip below where Rudy Gobert is assigned to ‘guard’ Peyton Watson in the corner. Gobert is allowed to rotate hard to protect the basket with minimal concern of Watson’s shooting hurting the Timberwolves, and in fact a Watson 3 is considered an ideal outcome for the possession.

Even when the shooter is more respected than Watson in a 5-out alignment, the ‘automatics’ (schemed defensive rotations), allow teams to have their cake and eat it too. Teams can not only help off these average frontcourt shooters; if they are forced to over-help it is with the understanding that their teammate will help and allow them to recover.

The following play is a perfect example of this playing out. After some strained early offense, the Magic flow into an inverted empty corner pick-and-pop between Paolo Banchero and Jalen Suggs, which isn’t successful unto itself but does coincide with a miscommunicated switch between Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell. This break in communication starts a domino effect, forcing Evan Mobley to quickly help on the open man in the corner, opening a crease for Banchero to drive as the ball is swung to him.

HOWEVER, Banchero gets downhill Jarret Allen helps off his man, Wendell Carter Jr., in the weakside corner. This sequence of events triggers an easy kickout to Carter Jr. in the corner, but this is what the defense wants! Simultaneously to Carter receiving the pass, the Cavaliers execute their weakside ‘sink-and-fill’ rotation, with Mitchell sinking into the corner, Garland rotates one pass over to Mitchell’s vacated man, and the Cavaliers defensive shell is able to resume its shape as the remaining players rotate behind Garland. This results in a late shot-clock contested 3.

These automatics play out countless times every game, with mediocre spacers serving as a release valve for opposing defenses. Below is another example of a common weakside defensive rotation taking place but against an offense situated into a 2-3 alignment. In this play the Houston Rockets are switching, and when Frev VanVleet is switched onto Rudy Gobert, Jabari Smith provides early help on Gobert under the basket, leaving Naz Reid open in the corner. This prompts a cross-court skip pass, triggering a perfect ‘X-out’ rotation, with Jalen Green and Smith exchanging assignments on the weakside.

Over the course of the NBA season teams developed a unique offensive wrinkle to throw a wrench into these defensive automatics. The term for this schematic wrinkle is called a ‘4.5-out alignment’ has been documented, discussed and coined by the great Bowser2Bowser (@bowser2bowser on X/Twitter). 4.5 spacing is an alignment uniquely suited to Jonathan Mogbo’s skill, but first I want to layout the basics of this alignment. 5-out spacing, pictured below, has 2 players in the slot, 2 in the corners, and one player at the top of the key.

4.5 out spacing simply takes one of the frontcourt players, typically a non-spacer, and places them into the short corner area (in between the 3-point line and the lane line). The following frame is of the Atlanta Hawks in a 4.5 out alignment with Onyeka Okongwu as the lone big placed in the ‘.5’ role.

4.5 out, and its value can be seen below, in a clip taken from the same Magic-Cavaliers playoff game as the previous clip. Once again the Magic begin in a 5-out alignment until Wendell Carter Jr. relocates to the dunker-spot as Paolo Banchero and Franz Wagner run an empty corner PNR. With the Magic finding no success in the initial action, Franz drives and manages to connect with Wendell Carter on a lob.

Now the last few seconds of this play are where the edge is gained from the Magic utilizing 4.5 out spacing on this play. Notice Donovan Mitchell instinctively going to sink into the corner to help on what he assumes will be Wendell Carter Jr parked in the corner. This is a long time defensive axiom being broken in real time!

Jonathan Mogbo’s previously mentioned excellence as a finisher makes him a great fit for this role, with the vertical spacing component being crucial to a non-spacing big’s fit into a 4.5 out role. On top of Mogbo’s quick leaping ability, his ability as a passer unlocks another dimension in 4.5 out alignments. At San Francisco, Mogbo had primarily been used as a short roll passer or the trigger man in High-Low actions.

But I believe Mogbo’s ability to not only pass, but pass off a live dribble…

…lends itself extremely well to expanding this role past simply catching lobs. Similarly to how Amen Thompson has been effective as a 4.5 out ‘big’, being able to connect plays and make a variety of passing reads enables him to play with other bigs.

The following play for instance, Houston runs a RAM (an off-ball screen set for a player before they set a ballscreen) PNR with Jock Landale as the screen setter/roller and Thompson sets an exit screen for Fred Vanvleet before settling into his role as the 4.5 out big. The passing window to Landale’s roll to the basket is well covered so Jalen Green makes the pass to Thompson in the short corner. The paint presence of Landale forces the weakside defender, Gordon Hayward, to crash down as Thompson makes the interior pass.

Thompson cleans up Landale’s miss, but you can see the attention the concentration of size between Thompson and Landale demands. And how 4.5 out lineups can be a counter to teams like Oklahoma City who are comfortable playing smaller. Not only is the interior feed a viable decision for Thompson, because of how hard Hayward is forced to rotate to help, the skip pass to his vacated assignment (Dillon Brooks) is also an option for Thompson.

Paired with an explosive off-the-dribble scoring threat Mogbo’s passing skills can be blended into lineups with another big as well. Like here, where the Mavericks run a spread PNR after their initial double-drag action is snuffed out. Kyrie Irving draws two defenders to the ball opening up the opportunity for PJ Washington to throw a lob on the short roll. Naz Reid uses his excellent recovery skills to break up the pass, but this play puts into perspective how well suited Mogbo is for these asymmetrical alignments. Not only is he fully capable of throwing the lob in the short roll, he can play the Daniel Gafford role as the vertical spacer in the short corner.

Another non-traditional alignment that’s risen in popularity around the league and has bearing on Mogbo’s pro projection is the ‘5-Slot’ alignment. Like 4.5-out alignments, 5-slot helps mitigate the spacing concerns of non-shooting big men while appropriately utilizing the gravity of the big’s paint finishing. As the alignment’s title dictates, the center is simply placed in the slot. With this placement not only does the 5 pull the x5 (player defending the center) away from the basket, it places the center in a position to utilize their ballskills to be a downhill creator. Like in the play below, where Clint Capela gets the ball in a 5-slot alignment and calls his own number on a DHO keeper to get the driving dunk.

Not only does Mogbo possess the handling skills to apply pressure on the rim from these sorts of alignments, he can use his aforementioned passing vision to find teammates when collapses the defense on these drives.

Moments where Mogbo found himself in these asymmetrical alignments were few and far between though, and the typical formatting for San Francisco’s offense found Mogbo playing out of a Horns alignment with conventional Princeton offense principles. The nature of the San Francisco offense made it especially easy for opposing defenses to load up the paint, clog rim running lanes and load up on post-up possessions.

Possessions like the clip above were mainstays in San Francisco’s tape with big’s positioning allowing opponents to place all 5 defenders inside the arc. Even with San Francisco having perimeter players who shot well from 3 this past season, shot versatility from these players was severely lacking, and this greatly simplified closeouts for opposing defenders.

Defensively, Mogbo is uniquely equipped to serve as a switch big when he’s deployed as an undersized center, due to his gargantuan wingspan. In spite of Mogbo standing around 6’8 in shoes, his standing reach of 9’0.5 is only an inch shorter than Jarrett Allen, half an inch shorter than Naz Reid and Wendell Carter Jr., and actually half an inch LONGER than Bam Adebayo. While I don’t see Mogbo’s rim protection being sustainable for long stretches, as it pertains to lineup flexibility his lateral movement enables him to stick with smaller players on the perimeter and impact shots with his length.

Here Mogbo switches onto the ballhandler in the first ballscreen, scram (off-ball) switches back onto his initial assignment when the ball is swung, and switches onto the eventual shooter to contest the shot. Mogbo had one of the lowest block rates of the group of bigs I’d catalogued from earlier, but also had the highest steal rate amongst the group. This speaks to his activity off-ball, where he uses his length to get into passing lanes and force deflections.

Conclusion

Associating Jonathan Mogbo and Reed Sheppard probably seems like a bizarre decision but they are both representative of what has been my greatest shift in philosophy over the course of the cycle. After starting out with a tepid assessment of both prospects, I realized many of my concerns were rooted in archetypal bias. So much of my evaluation of Mogbo and Sheppard was spent trying to explain away production, solely due to their NBA role being murkier than most players in their position. When in reality these player’s were extremely productive DESPITE their respective college programs not catering to their distinct skillsets. Evaluating these two forced me to internalize that uniquely productive players will find unique ways to contribute. In the case of Mogbo and Sheppard, their specific avenues to NBA production: Mogbo as a Swiss Army knife big-man, and Sheppard as an off-the-dribble shooter and rapid-fire decision maker, are additive to virtually any lineup configuration. These attributes fulfill the core tenet of my teambuilding philosophy, the most valuable players are consistent performers who don’t require significant personnel accommodations to realize their potential. This rationale places Reed Sheppard atop my board as the #1 overall player and Jonathan Mogbo firmly in the lottery at #7.

The post Breaking Convention: Reed Sheppard, Jonathan Mogbo, and Identifying Stable Production appeared first on Swish Theory.

Braylon Mullins: More than a Shooter

There may not be a player in the country who has seen their public perception improve more throughout the grassroots season than 6’5 G/W Braylon Mullins. Playing for Indiana Elite on the 3SSB (Adidas) circuit, Mullins emerged from relative obscurity over the past few weeks, having spent the last high school season playing for Indiana public school Greenfield Central in lieu of a prep school with a nationally recognized brand.

At first glance, Mullins seems to embody the role of a traditional movement shooter. Taking over 8 threes per game, these attempts make up over 60% of Mullins’ shot diet. And with Mullins converting from three at a scorching 44.6% clip, it seems as though he’s simply executing the role of a shooting specialist at a high level. However, examining the tape will show Mullins, in many ways, is the offensive engine of an undefeated Indiana Elite team which currently boasts an average margin of victory of 19.5 points per game!

Mullins’ broader skillset is what separates him from other impressive shooters in his class, but he very well could be the best long distance sniper in the 2025 class as well. As previously mentioned, Mullins has been extremely efficient on a robust volume of 3’s per game, but his mechanics and versatility are especially notable for a young player. Mullins has total comfort shooting off various play-types, from more conventional movement sets like this Rip Stagger Screen-the-screener set ran below…

to off multiple dribbles in transition…

Or in the half-court, like this Hawk action (a UCLA cut followed by a side PNR) where Mullins takes advantage of any cushion provided to him by quickly transitioning into his shot.

As teams became aware of Mullins’ reputation as a shooter, his seemingly limitless range and hair-trigger release forced opponents to ramp up their aggressiveness on close-outs to run him off the line at any costs. This is where Mullins was able to shine, and his finely tuned process off the catch was put on full display.

Compare these two BLOB (Baseline Out of Bounds) plays. In the first clip Indiana Elite runs a Screen-the-Screener set with Mullins setting a cross screen for Malachi Moreno and receiving an exit screen which he makes the corner 3 off of.

In a similar BLOB play where Mullins sees a much more aggressive trailing defender, he confidently attacks the closeout and his clean footwork allows him to get into his floater attempt on balance and score.

Even plays where Mullins isn’t a primary feature of the action, the speed he’s able to process off-ball and the pace he plays with coming off screens allows him to make the most of his gravity as a shooter. Take the play below for example, Mullins skips the ball to an open teammate in the corner and receives a Hammer screen for, presumably, a corner 3 afterwards. However, instead of settling into the corner Mullins recognizes his defender’s back is turned to him and cuts to the basket, making himself available for a pass from his driving teammate. From here makes an interior touch pass to Malachi Moreno. Even with the pass being bobbled, Mullins shows advanced situational awareness for a high-school player here.

These kind of quick decisions are littered throughout Mullins’ tape, and while these reads aren’t necessarily the most advanced, Mullins’ consistent execution (marked by a sterling 1.21 Assist/Turnover ratio) is the hallmark of an elite, complementary, offensive player.

Ultimately, seeing Mullins’ success on the defensive end is where he completely shed the ‘just a shooter’ label in my eyes. Officially, Mullins has only been credited with 6 steals over 13 games on Synergy. However, much like on the offensive end, Mullins’ situational awareness and high activity level allow him to be an impactful player on this end.

In this clip for instance, Upward Stars runs an empty corner PNR where the guard rejecting the screen triggers a backline rotation. Mullins perfectly times his rotation, sinking into the corner as the corner kickout is made, and his off-hand deflection secures the turnover for Indiana Elite. Mullins’ hand speed and accuracy as a defender help compensate for a slighter frame as well. Plays like the clip below, where Mullins is briefly thrown out of position as his assignment curls the pindown screen, but he capitalizes on the ballhandler being slightly late on the pass with another off-hand deflection.

Mullins has strung together numerous impressive two-way performances so far this spring, but the subtleties of his game on both ends make me confident he’ll continue to rise in stature throughout the summer. Rarely are elite shooting talents able to contribute in as many areas of the game as Mullins, and it is these skills which make him a recruiting priority for the nation’s elite college programs.

Dewayne Brown: Modern Classics

There may not be a position across all sports undergoing more of a drastic transformation than the modern big-man. From traditional back to the basket centers, to stretch 5’s, and now bigs in certain instances being expected to initiate offense from the perimeter, the requirements to be considered a ‘modern big’ seem to constantly be a moving target. What makes Florida Rebels center and Tennessee commit Dewayne Brown such a standout prospect, and in my opinion the most underrated big man in the ’25 class, is how capable he is fulfilling all these roles at this stage of his career.

Brown’s bread and butter currently is his low-post game. Being one of the more physically developed bigs in the class (listed at 6’9 and 250 pounds), Brown has a developed sense of how to create space in the post not only with his size but refined footwork. Brown’s clean footwork and patience in the post allow him to consistently create finishing windows which he can capitalize on as an ambidextrous finisher.

A skill Brown may be best in all of EYBL in is establishing post position as early as possible, however for as talented a team as the Florida Rebels are, they can struggle making entry passes to Brown in the post. This dynamic often forces Brown to create post-up opportunities for himself like the play above, where Brown crashes down from the top of the key to setup a catch on the low-block. Despite the denial on the entry forcing Brown into a suboptimal catch point, his up fake on the drive helps him avoid the rotating topside defender and get an easy finish.

For how inconsistent his team is in creating post touches for Brown, the fact he’s currently sitting 6th in total post possessions across EYBL play, 4th in PPP, all while drawing fouls at the highest clip of any player with 40+ post-ups, speaks to his skill as an interior player. Even when Brown is forced to operate outside of the post, in sets more aligned with ‘modern’ big man play like the clip below, he finds ways to finish. Here Brown keeps out of a DHO and navigates the help with a pro-hop to get the finish.

Along with his footwork, Brown’s hands are his greatest weapon. Areas where explosive leaping ability is widely considered a prerequisite to thrive, like offensive rebounding and rim protection, Brown is able to excel in because of his vacuum hands and timing.

Whether he’s defending opposing bigs like Cameron Boozer on the perimeter…

Or finding himself cross-matched onto wings like Sebastian Williams-Adams…

Brown’s hand accuracy and timing enable him to serve as a positive defensive anchor.

As far as his rebounding ability, for my money there’s not a more consistent presence on the offensive glass at this level than Dewayne Brown. I don’t think there’s a play that better encapsulates his strengths as a rebounder along with the previously mentioned interior footwork than the following clip. Brown’s late hands allow him to snatch the board over Cameron Boozer before Boozer is able to properly judge the trajectory of the missed shot. And when the ball finds Brown he Barkley’s on his drive to create a deeper paint touch, and Euro-steps into the finish over Boozer. From beginning to end this play is a wild display of coordination and agility from a player Brown’s size.

What Brown’s game lacks in above the rim finishes and highlight blocks he makes up for with a poise well beyond what’s typically seen from a young big. The diversity of Brown’s skillset is what makes him exceptional and a prime candidate to outperform his ranking at the next level.

Courtland Muldrew: Seizing Opportunity

The 4th and final EYBL Session took place in Kansas City and flew somewhat under the radar as a number of headlining talent opted to attend USA Basketball’s tryouts for the u18 Americup team. For 6’3 Team Thad guard Courtland Muldrew this scheduling conflict represented an opportunity to step into a higher usage role than he’d previously seen, as his teammate 5-star guard Jasper Johnson attended the USAB minicamp. In Johnson’s stead, Muldrew proved to be one of the best advantage creators on the circuit, despite significantly scaling up in usage.

Muldrew routinely generated deep paint touches without a screen, and parlayed these paint touches into finishes or free throw attempts at an outstanding clip. Over the course of 5 games in Kansas City, Muldrew drew 41 free throws attempts, none of which came in late game must-foul situations. Muldrew’s ability to live in the paint was made possible by an ideal set of driving tools, from a lightning quick first step to contact balance reminiscent of an elite runningback, seldom was any point-of-attack defender able to stay in front of Muldrew.

Here you can see Dwayne Aristode, one of the premier perimeter defenders in the country, unable to stay in front of Muldrew as he drives to his left. And perhaps as impressive as Muldrew’s ability to repeatedly create downhill separation from defenders, is his array of finishing footwork. Muldrew is equally capable of driving and finishing with either hand, and here uses goofy-leg (jumping with the same foot as the hand attempting the layup) to disrupt the timing of the help defender.

The catalyst of Muldrew’s rim pressure is his explosive first step, as his handle is more rudimentary than most primary ballhandlers at the moment. However, Muldrew’s able to remain effective inside the arc due to his intersection of touch and an understanding of how to play off 2 feet. Synergy is somewhat limited categorizing shot types (runners and floaters) but in the four games I was able to watch and manually log Muldrew’s shot attempts, he went 3/7 on floaters, a very respectable number for a player with Muldrew’s volume of drives.

This possession is a perfect example of the interplay between the two skills of Muldrew, he drives off the catch and jumpstops to ensure his floater attempt is taken on balance. This penchant for playing off two feet lets Muldrew access a variety of counters on drive, such as the play below where he gains leverage on Dwayne Aristode after rejecting the screen, and uses the momentum from Aristode’s recovery to create space for a midrange stepback.

What’s so compelling about Muldrew’s driving ability is unlike many downhill guards at the high-school level, whose reliance on getting in the paint often comes at the cost of developing as a perimeter scorer, Muldrew has shown reason for optimism on this front. While Muldrew’s only shot 34% from three on 4.6 attempts/game (12 games), he’s been steady from the line coming in at 89% on 65 attempts. Equally encouraging as Muldrew’s touch indicators is how he’s already shown an understanding of how to enhance his drives with the shooting threat he currently possess. Compare the two plays below for example, in the first clip Muldrew takes and makes a three when the defender provides a cushion to account for the driving threat.

In the subsequent play, Team Thad runs Motion Strong for Muldrew, a set typically ran for shooters. The pace Muldrew plays with coming off the staggers gets his defender to bite on the up-fake, and this provides Muldrew the opportunity to attack the front of the rim.

Courtland Muldrew may not be a conventional point-guard at the moment, but possesses a combination of advantage creation and 3 level scoring tools matched by only a few other guards in his class. And in the previous session when Muldrew was given more decision making responsibilities he showed progression over the course of the weekend. Adding more quality reps running ballscreen actions to his resume, like the play below where Muldrew runs a side PNR and holds the tagging defender with his eyes to pry open a cleaner finishing window for the rolling big.

Chris Cenac: Standout Amongst Standouts

Before he’d even put up a shot, 6’10 big man Chris Cenac demanded my attention from the very first game of his I’d decided to turn on. Cenac’s decision to play for the NXTPRO, the newest shoe circuit sponsored by Puma, made his games more difficult to watch so my first encounter with Cenac was when his Young Game Changers (YGC) team was pitted against JL3 in an early season event. JL3 is far from lacking athletes, but Cenac’s length and fluidity at his size was immediately eye-popping.

Take the following sequence for example, Cenac is pulled away from the basket, with his man settled at the top of the key. When a drive from the strongside wing collapses the defense, Cenac helps-the-helper by sinking into the weakside corner, and keeps eyes on the ballhandler so he’s able to steal the kickout pass. A player Cenac’s size being able to make this rotation is abnormal on its own, the fact Cenac is then able to push the break, and has the wherewithal to find a teammate as his drive is walled off is spectacular.

Cenac would continue to impress as a ballhandler in the open court, even flashing as a live dribble passer.

As is often the case with young bigs with burgeoning perimeter skillsets, Cenac’s process on-ball could be questionable at times, but how consistently Cenac was able to get into his jumper proved his handle was functional at his size. Across 4 handtracked games Cenac was a promising 9/21 on jumpshots (42.8%) including going 3/9 (33.3%) from three. As always, free throw shooting factors heavily into any shooting projection for me, and Cenac was a respectable 17/25 (72%) from the line across this sample of games.

The shooting splits along with plays like this, where Cenac comfortably steps into a 1 dribble pull-up three over a respected rim protector in Xavion Stanton…

Or here where Cenac gets to his spot above the free-throw line and hits a pull-up jumper, is indicative of there being more substance than style to Cenac’s shooting projection.

Anytime a player Cenac’s size shows an aptitude for shooting it tends to become their primary draw as a prospect, but this is a case of defensive versatility being as enticing. As previously mentioned Cenac is a rare mover at his size, capable of playing defensive roles besides primary rim protector because he can guard in space. But he also has the length and discipline as a rim protector to use his size without fouling. In the possession below, YGC’s defense is in a scramble situation after JL3 secures an offensive rebound, Hudson Greer drives into open space and makes the dump-off pass, which should lead to an easy finish for the springy 6’9 forward Nigel Walls. Cenac’s fluid enough to flip his hips and explosive enough to elevate with both arms extended to block Wall’s attempt.

Up until this point I’ve kept the scope of my projections limited to how players may contribute at the collegiate level, however the manner in which Chris Cenac made his imprint on games forced me to acknowledge that he may only be a single season contributor in the NCAA.

King Grace: Guarding His Yard

In Under Armour’s first session, Texas Impact 4:13 G/W King Grace won overall MVP, and considering his statline (24 ppg on 43% from 3 and 54% from the field) a natural assumption to make would be it was Grace’s scoring output which landed him on this list. And while I do plan on discussing some of his offensive merits, what caught my eye was Grace’s doggedness as a defender.

King Grace is listed at 6’4 185 pounds, but with outstanding length and strength for the position he proved to be a suffocating Point-of-Attack defender. Grace would use his physicality to disrupt ballhandlers like the play below, where he avoids the screen and immediately crowds Josiah Sanders’ handle to force him into a backcourt violation.

Averaging 1.6 steals/game through the first two sessions, Grace possesses an exceedingly rare trait for a high-school perimeter defender. Grace’s motor, length, and timing saw him dictating certain possessions. Instead of simply capitalizing on the opponent’s errors or sacrificing his positioning to hunt turnovers, Grace forced opponents into mistakes. Like in the following play, Wisconsin Playground run 77 Flare, Grace going under the 1st screen prompts his teammate guarding the 2nd screen to show at the level before recovering back to his original assignment. The ballhandler sees this sequence play out and makes presumably the correct read by passing to his teammate coming off the flarescreen, but Grace diagnoses the play, and intercepts the pass for an easy transition dunk.

Grace thrives playing this cat-and-mouse game with ballhandlers, and maximizes opportunities in different roles. Here you see him mirror his man to prevent the drive, provides gap help on the secondary drive, but keeps his off-hand in the passing lane as he recovers. This clip is a wonderful distillation of how Grace’s physical tools and defensive anticipation manifest to create havoc and in this case generate a turnover.

Grace’s offensive skillset can best be described as low maintenance. While his handle as it currently stands may not be creative enough to consistently initiate offense, Grace was hyper-efficient in primarily Princeton type sets Texas Impact would run for him. A competent spot-up shooter, Grace’s decisiveness in these actions compensated for his lack of shot versatility. Compare the two possessions below for instance, in the first clip Grace runs off a double stagger and when he’s denied the entry, Texas Impact flows into Bilboa, where a double stagger is set and the offensive player in the corner rejects the first screen, triggering Grace to come off the pindown and take the 3.

In the next clip Texas Impact runs a similar concept out of a 5-out alignment called Point Over, where Grace is setting a pindown, but instead of a second screen the big is operating as the trigger man out of a DHO. As Grace comes off the hand-off the opposing big lifts to take away the 3, and Grace simply drives and finds his big on the roll.

Grace’s tape lacks some of the flash of other wings in his class, but the areas he excels in are typically the most conducive to a smooth transition to the next level.

The post Ahmed’s Starting 5 appeared first on Swish Theory.

Jamarion Batemon: Flamethrower

One of the first players on the Adidas 3 Stripe Select (3SSB) to catch my eye was 6’3 Combo Guard and 3 star recruit, Jamarion Batemon, playing for Power 5 out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Batemon, for my money, is one of the preeminent shooters in the 2025 High School class. Over the first two sessions Batemon shot a combined 42/84 from 3 for a scorching 50% and an equally impressive 10 attempts per game. And while watching games, the degree of difficulty and variety of play-types Batemon was being used in was perhaps the most striking aspect of his performance. Batemon’s team, Power 5, used him primarily as an off-ball player in movement sets. One of the most consistent features of their offense was running Batemon off movement using elevator screens and double staggers like the play below. Batemon draws a foul on the make because of the minimal shot prep he requires to get his shot off.

Batemon isn’t limited to shooting off the catch either, as what makes him such an impressive shooter for his age is he’ll seize any amount of cushion provided to get into a 3pt attempt no matter the variables presented by the game situation. Whether it be in ballscreen actions like the play below…

…or in transition…

…Jamarion Batemon is a threat to shoot from deep virtually any time he crosses half-court. This has allowed him to be a focal point of a Power 5 team which has exceeded expectations so far this season. His proficiency as a shooter was no more apparent than in their matchup with, in my opinion, one of the best teams on not only the Adidas Circuit but one of the best AAU teams in the country in Team Loaded Virginia. Batemon put on a masterful shooting display where he finished with 32 total points and went 9/19 from 3, almost unheard of volume for a high school player.

While Batemon’s potency as a shooter is not in doubt there are areas of his game he’ll need to develop to fully exploit this skill at the next level, namely his comfort as a ballhandler. Batemon didn’t see much PNR usage and due to the threat he presents as a shooter typically saw aggressive coverages in ballscreen action which dissuaded him from attempting to create. However, my favorite aspect of high school basketball is the rate some of these players are able to adapt, and Batemon was no exception. His timing and accuracy as a passer in the PNR improved from Session 1 to 2, and while it often didn’t translate in assists, Batemon’s decisiveness helped keep the offense on schedule.

As Batemon gained experience seeing these coverages he began to develop counters and even leveraged the respect he’d garnered as a scorer to get downhill.

Batemon’s passing growth wasn’t limited to on-ball usage, he was also able to parlay the respect his shooting was given to extend advantages for his teammates. Take the play below for instance, Batemon comes off an Exit screen in a SLOB play, and immediately hits the screener when he draws a second defender. The defense is immediately put into rotation and the initial screener finds an open shooter in the right slot. This doesn’t result in an assist, or even a basket, but Power 5 generates a good look and a potential hockey assist for Batemon, predicated on his shooting gravity.

Ultimately Batemon will need to make significant strides as a ballhandler and defender as he rises through the ranks, but the significant short term growth, in tandem with his strong foundation as a shooter, saw Jamarion Batemon as my biggest riser through the first few weeks of the season.

Josiah Sanders: Driving Offense

My second standout is slightly more off the beaten path compared to many of the other prospects who will be discussed, but 6’4 Point Guard Josiah Sanders was one of the most impressive lead guards and offensive engines I was able to watch during Under Armour’s first and only session to date. Sanders is an unheralded recruit hailing from Denver Colorado, and runs with the Utah Mountain Stars at the moment. Sanders was able to average 26.3 PPG, 8.0 RPG, and 7.3 APG in a 4 game sample in session 1, and as the numbers would indicate his impact on the game was comprehensive, and notably unique.

What first caught my attention with Sanders was the poise and craft he displayed as a PNR operator. While Sanders is a left handed player he is functionally ambidextrous, capable of driving in either direction and making quick, accurate, passes with both hands. Compare the two clips below, Sanders is running similar side PNRs and the moment he senses the helpside defenders cheating over, he whips in skip passes to his teammate in the corner.

Sanders’ vision as a passer is definitely noteworthy, but what separates him from other capable ‘game manager’ type passers at his position is the consistent aggression and acumen he possesses attacking the basket. Despite being 16, relatively young for his class, Sanders’ contact balance and pace as a driver allowed him to place pressure on the defense and create windows to play-make for his teammates. Through the 4 games Sanders played he averaged 10 free-throws per game and a 0.49 free-throw-rate. Sanders effectively toggled through different speeds on drives and his unique cadence kept point-of-attack defenders off balance to where he was able to create contact with second level defenders.

Small details so rare in young guards are present in Sanders’ game, and made evident in the clip above. He isn’t able to create separation from his defender initially, retreats to allow the screener to twist the angle of the screen, and when Sanders drives he initiates contact with the defender to improve his driving angle and as a result draws a foul on his off-hand finish for an And-1 opportunity. Sanders’ penchant for accessing the middle of the floor paired with his patience make him a dynamic playmaker at this stage.

The most glaring flaw currently in Sanders’ game, from what I was able to see, was his versatility as a shooter. Essential for ball dominant guards is an ability to shoot off the dribble and from distance. Sanders finished Session 1 only 3/12 from 3, but there is plenty of reason for optimism. First of all, Sanders’ ball dominance allowed for significantly less opportunities to shoot off the catch, and while attempts weren’t going in he looked comfortable and fluid taking pull-up 3s.

And while some may take issue with this kind of qualitative assessment, Sanders was also an efficient 85.7% from the line (24/28). Watching Sanders I don’t believe there’s a greater discrepancy between ability and notoriety for a prospect in the 2025 class, and teams are starting to take notice, as Sanders received his first Power 6 offer from Tennessee almost immediately after the conclusion of Session 1.

Kai Rogers: Checking Boxes

The first frontcourt player in my ‘Starting 5’, Kai Rogers is also the first player on the list I would consider a national recruit. Already boasting numerous Power 6 offers, the 6’9 Center for Under Armour’s Wisconsin Playground Club was exceptional in the first Session, managing to make his presence felt on both ends. Rogers averaged 3.3 blocks and 1.3 steals over the course of 4 games. While he is an impressive athlete with plus length, Rogers isn’t the quickest leaper, instead winning with an advanced sense of timing and rare dexterity for a young big.

Take the play below for instance, Rogers was primarily deployed in as a drop coverage big in ballscreen actions and here he funnels the ballhandler towards the help when he rejects the screen. Once the ballhandler makes the pass to the roller at the free-throw line, the topside tagger is put in conflict when his initial assignment relocates to the top of the key. This conflict pries open a driving lane for the big to drive, but Kai Rogers immediately engulfs the drive and blocks the shot while its still in the big’s hands, and Rogers makes this play on the ball with his off-hand!

Rogers definitely isn’t perfect protecting the paint and his range as a rim protector is somewhat limited by his footspeed, however he is fully capable of making corrective rotations like the play above and deterring potential rim attempts with his ball tracking ability. Perhaps the greatest attribute Rogers possesses as a shot blocker is his ability to avoid foul trouble despite the rim protection burden placed on him as Wisconsin PlayGround’s only big man consistently featured in the rotation. Rogers never fouled out of a game and averaged a mere 3 fouls per game in Session 1.

For all the potential Rogers displayed on the defensive end, he was almost equally effective on the other end of the floor. Rogers’ fluidity in the low-post along with his physicality allowed him to impose his will on opposing big-men. Adept in scoring with both hands, Rogers’ only warts were possessions where he was over-ambitious, which is to be expected of a young post player trying to expand his game en-route to winning games. But while results were inconsistent, there were moments of self creation from Rogers which are incredibly rare to see from frontcourt players his size.

Rogers’ ability to either function as a lob threat or score on the interior with his back to the basket often forced defenses’ hands, leading to a stellar 0.67 free-throw-rate, but his consistent appearances at the line revealed his greatest offensive shortcoming at the moment as Rogers was only 47% from the line on 19 attempts. Poor free throw shooting doesn’t at all take away from Roger’s projection at the next level, in my opinion, and I am fully expecting Rogers to widely be considered one of 2025’s best big men by summer’s end.

Sebastian Williams-Adams: Point-Center

6’7 JL3 Forward Sebastian Williams-Adams was one of the most impactful players in EYBL play through the first two sessions and his play at these events can best be described as all-encompassing. Williams-Adams played one of the most unique roles I saw across all circuits in how amorphous his responsibilities seemed to be. Williams-Adams was typically used as JL3’s primary rim protector, and despite not being the tallest player in JL3’s frontcourt he was able to consistently utilize his exceptional strength and dynamic leaping to alter shots around the rim while simultaneously holding up against heftier post players. Whereas on offense, Williams-Adams had the second highest share of initiating responsibilities after their more traditional PG Christian Jones. Due to his explosive first step, Williams-Adams was able to consistently collapse the defense and find teammates. The sequence below exemplifies the two-way impact Williams-Adams presented. On the defensive end, JL3 has their first line of defense penetrated by the opposing PG when he sees the JL3 big man cheating up at the level and rejects the screen. The PG drives into the paint unencumbered, but Williams-Adams baits him into a layup attempt by slightly feigning a contest, and instead jumps after the guard and emphatically blocks the shot.

In the ensuing possession, Williams-Adams finds the ball in the corner after the initial PNR is stifled, drives the baseline and as he forces the defense into rotation finds Nigel Walls with an interior pass which leads to Walls being fouled on the shot attempt.

Williams-Adams was relentless in applying pressure on the front of the rim, as while EYBL was inconsistent with their statkeeping and free-throw stats aren’t readily available, Williams-Adams was a regular at the line over the course of the first two sessions. Even without a consistent jumper to attract hard closeouts, Williams-Adams was able to generate paint touches in stampede actions.

And when his primary defender sagged off to prevent clear driving opportunities out of stampedes, Williams-Adams had enough handle creativity and acceleration to manufacture space. Like in the play below, Williams-Adams uses a snatch dribble to draw Caleb Wilson out just to explode past him and draw the foul.

Williams-Adams has a ways to go as a shooter and will need to flesh out this part of his game as he’s forced to play more as a conventional wing, but the combination of physical dominance and two-way creation he’s currently able to exercise eases concerns of how he’ll translate to the next level.

Will Riley: Scalable Offensive Star

6’7 Canadian G/W Will Riley is the rare instance of a wing sized player deserving the moniker of ‘point-forward’. Riley’s ability to soak up usage both as a primary ballhandler and a complementary offensive piece was truly a joy to watch. Riley was equally proficient creating out of ballscreen actions as he was finishing plays as a shooter. His proficiency on-ball was a byproduct of his exceptional touch, advanced screen craft, and depth of off-the-dribble counters.

The interplay between some of these skills can be seen in the play below. Riley sees the POA defender cheating towards the screen and Riley uses double cross to get a step driving towards the basket and the use of the cross-body gather prior to throwing the baseline cutter hold the backline defenders attention just long enough to prevent them from making a play on the ball.

Riley saw almost an equal amount of his usage come in more typical off-ball actions for a wing. Such as the play below, UPlay runs a ‘Peja’ action for Riley, where he sets a RIP screen before receiving a handoff intended to get him an open 3 which he hits.

Riley’s sense of how to leverage this shooting ability when he’s used in UPlay’s 5-out concepts separates him from other shooting slanted wings his age however, he recognizes the threat his shooting presents and its ability to dictate terms with the defender. Despite Riley’s lack of physical strength he has extremely impressive stamina, and weaponizes it off-ball by using a series of feints and cuts like th play below. Riley adjusts to his defender overplaying the hand-off and retreats into open space, after the catch the second his defender relaxes Riley re-drives to the basket and hits a floater over the smaller defender. The fact Riley, at 6’7, has a floater thoroughly integrated into his scoring arsenal shows how high his skill level is for the age group.

And when teams have attempted to take away Riley’s windows to score in hand-off actions he has been more than willing to move off the ball.

These nuances in Riley’s game will make him an easy fit next to other talented players at the next level, and as the physical element of his game progresses and he’s able to more consistently draw fouls, Riley may find himself playing the primary role even when stationed next to other high-level offensive players.

The post Starting 5: Early Standouts of the Grassroots Season appeared first on Swish Theory.

Player B.

If asked to pick between the two players without added context I’m sure many (myself included) would choose Player A. The gap in three-point shooting efficiency combined with the wide disparity in dunks paint Player B as a much more athletic, play-finishing wing. Considering the similarity in age, this may indicate more potential in Player A than Player B, despite Player B’s self-creation proxies (percentage of unassisted shots) being more impressive. For the reveal…Player A is Ben McLemore (the 7th pick in the 2013 draft), and Player B is Tyler Herro (the 13th pick in the 2019 draft).

Both 2013 and 2019 were considered relatively weaker draft classes at the time, and both Herro and McLemore had high draft capital invested in them mainly due to their shooting ability. So if shooting production is so easily forecasted why did these two players yield such wildly different results, and why are past drafts littered with highly touted shooters who either flamed out early into their NBA careers, or simply didn’t return anywhere near the value expected from their draft placement? What separates the Ben McLemores, Jimmer Fredettes, and Nik Stauskases of the world from the luminary shooters who came to define this era of basketball? Is there something that inherently makes shooting more inconsistently translatable than we’ve acknowledged or are aware of?

In an attempt to answer these questions I want to examine the shooting profiles of three 2024 draft prospects whose primary sell has been their shooting. The three players I’ve decided to dive into for this exercise are Ja’Kobe Walter, Melvin Ajinca, and Rob Dillingham.

Mechanic Specifically

In the past I have relied on my traditional understand of shooting mechanics to judge and grade shooting ability in different players. As the years pass and I see more and more players develop into anywhere from passable to potent shooters with unconventional shot mechanics, I realized while there is value in having some core shooting principles in your evaluations, flexibility is necessary. Confining the definition of a ‘good’ shot to an antiquated understanding of follow-throughs, foot placements and guide hand positioning will more than likely exclude high-level shooters from your rigid rubric. This realization drove me to developing a much more fluid grading system when it comes to differentiating shooters, based on these three tenets:

• Speed
• Versatility
• Volume

Shot Speed

Shooting speed is an essential component, and while it isn’t tracked in any widely available database, I am of the belief that shot speed is a great indicator of muscle memory which is closely tied to how immediately a player’s shot may translate and how far I feel comfortable projecting the potency of a player’s shot. This idea was brought about during the process of researching this piece. I had gone back to look into past prospects’ tape and see if there was a through-line in their shots which could have indicated they’d become the level of shooter they eventually developed into in the NBA. Take the clip below, for example:

The complete absence of load time physically or indecision in the process of shooting provides insight into the hardwiring of the shooter. For those who don’t recognize the shot mechanics due to the video quality (best I could find of 2012 WAC tape) the shooter here is Damian Lillard! While Dame’s shooting proficiency is an unrealistic bar to measure shooters by, there is value in recognizing how his ability to get into his shot, no matter how tight the window, was relevant to his development into a nuclear shooter.

Volume & Versatility

While all three of these core shooting principles are interrelated, it is necessary to discuss shooting volume and versatility in the same breath because one precipitates the other. It is impossible to attain sustainable shooting volume without an expansive shooting repertoire. Researching this piece I noticed a common theme amongst a lot of shooting prospect ‘misses’: an overreliance on shots from a specific play-type, whether it be shots off the dribble or catch-and-shoot attempts.

A player I had considered including in this piece was Zeke Mayo, a junior guard playing for South Dakota State. Initially enticed by his high shooting volume (11.5 3’s attempted per 100 possessions) on a diet of largely self created 3-point attempts (only 28% assisted threes), I dug into Mayo’s tape expecting to find a high-level shot creator forced into a lot of suboptimal attempts due to the lack of creation ability surrounding him. And while this was in large part the case, I also noticed an interesting trend. While Mayo was forced to take a significant amount of threes off the dribble because he was the only SDSU player capable of consistently creating their own shot, when he was provided opportunities to shoot open spot-ups they all too often looked like the plays below.

These plays, which individually may seem benign, standard cases of a player turning down a shot in search of a better look for himself or his teammates, is actually symptom of a larger issue in Mayo’s process as a shooter. After delving deeper into Mayo’s tape I eventually came to the conclusion that his low assist rate on threes was actually a function, not a bug, of his value system as a shooter. Mayo was undeniably more comfortable taking threes off the dribble, and almost always required a rhythm dribble to take an attempt. Any hard closeout which disrupted Mayo’s routine would cause him to pass up the shot attempt. This tendency not only represents a limitation in shot versatility, but also suppressed his volume. While this wart in Mayo’s shooting habits would be much easier to look over for most draft candidates, for a prospect whose shooting ability is central to their value, any minor flaw can be accounted for and exploited at the NBA level, hindering their viability as a spacer.

The best analogy I could use to describe the effect a player has when they possess all these qualities as a shooter is the Patellar-Reflex Test, or the Knee-Jerk Reflex Test as a layman like myself had known it as. This terminology probably sounds foreign but bear with me, we’ve all probably undergone this reflex test at some point over the course of a routine doctors visit. The doctor takes a rubber mallet to your kneecap, and as long as you deliver the expected reaction by kicking out your leg the physician carries on with the rest of the check-up. For anyone not following, the test is clipped below.

While any swing of the mallet will cause the knee to move, the more force applied the greater the reaction will be. In this analogy think of the shooter as being the doctor with the rubber mallet and the defense being the patient’s knee. The greater the volume, versatility, and speed of the shooter, the more pressure they will be able to apply to the defense and the more pronounced of a reaction they will be able to elicit from the defense.

For a demonstration of this idea playing out in a game lets compare two shooting specialists, Caleb Houstan and Buddy Hield. Both rank in the 78th and 74th percentile in three point shooting Points Per Possession (PPP), per Synergy. However, a closer look at the tape will show a drastic difference in the kind of reaction they elicit from the defenses they face. The two clips below for example, both plays feature Houstan and Hield running ghost screens intended to create seams for their ballhandlers to drive to the basket and create.

However, notice only Hield is able to get the on-ball defender, in this case Bam Adebayo, to open his stance and provide Tyrese Haliburton with a driving lane. Haliburton not only has a lane to drive to his strong hand, but enough space to take a pull-up 3.

Even the best shooting specialists in the league have seen their value fluctuate almost season by season depending on swings in efficiency. Duncan Robinson parlayed one hot shooting season into a substantial contract, was unable to maintain his efficiency as a shooter, and was almost immediately deemed ‘one of the worst contracts in the league’. Only after expanding his game off the dribble was he able to regain status as a valuable offensive weapon. Davis Bertans boasted one of the most stellar shooting resumes in the NBA before a prolonged shooting slump rendered his contract a massive albatross. These examples are crucial show why having a clear understanding of a player’s shooting is essential. By examining the three players central to this piece I hope to shed some light on A.) whether their shot possesses the factors necessary to remain effective as they transition to the NBA, and B.) what qualities in the rest of their offensive game separate them as shooters.

Ja’Kobe Walter vs Melvin Ajinca

At first glance Ja’Kobe Walter and Melvin Ajinca do not seem to have many similarities outside of being two 19-year-old prospects who will most likely be entering the 2024 draft. Walter is a sinewy 6’5 guard/wing, former 5-star recruit, who is currently playing for Baylor. Melvin Ajinca is a 6’7 lefty wing playing in the LNB ProA league (the highest division in France) for Saint-Quentin. Both players are touted for their shooting ability first and foremost and will be expected to serve as high-level floor-spacers for their respective NBA teams upon being drafted. However, their divergent routes to prospect-dom help shed light on how able they will be to able to meet this expectation.

Melvin Ajinca

Melvin Ajinca first came onto draft radars after an extremely impressive showing in the FIBA U19 World Cup this past summer, where he lead the French team to the championship game while shooting a blistering 71.6 (!!) true shooting percentage. While the majority of Ajinca’s scoring was of the play-finishing variety, consisting of hitting spot-up threes and getting out in transition, there were some flashes of high level self-creation. Take the play below, for example: France clears out the left side of the floor for what appears to be an empty-corner pick and roll for Ajinca. He quickly rejects the screen and counters the defender closing off the baseline by fluidly transitioning into a stepback three.

Displays of shooting off the bounce such as this, combined with Ajinca’s indifference towards contests and his willingness pulling from range well beyond that of his peers…

…quickly vaulted him into early draft conversations and captured my attention as a potentially outlier shooting prospect.

From here I attempted to gain a deeper perspective of Ajinca’s career prior to and since the U19 tournament, watching games from his time with Saint-Quentin in the French LNB Pro B league to now where they’ve earned promotion to the Pro A ranks. Ajinca, as with many young European prospects, has been confined to filling the specific role of an off-ball spacer, and actually his seven-game stint with the U19 team had been the most freedom he’d been afforded on-ball up to that point of his career. In 41 games logged in Synergy, Ajinca had been used in Isolation or as a P&R ballhandler 39 times; over the course of seven games in the U19 World Cup he’d seen 14 possessions in the same play-types.

Ajinca’s previous usage aligns with how we conventionally think of shooters being deployed. Ajinca saw the majority of his shots in the halfcourt come from deliberate set plays, such as the possession below where Saint-Quentin runs Horns Flare Spain, where Ajinca cuts from the right corner to serve as the second screener in the Spain action. Evident in this action is Ajinca’s lightning quick release, allowing him to catch and shoot in one motion.

If Ajinca wasn’t being used in Spain he was being run off double staggers…

Or a simple pindown with some window dressing, such as this Rip (backscreen) Screen-the-Screener action.

I would say these three actions are generally representative of how Ajinca has been utilized for Saint-Quentin, and, while I was initially captivated by how efficient Ajinca was in getting into his shot due to his quick mechanics and efficient energy transfer, as I watched more tape a trend started to become apparent. If you noticed a similarity in all of these clips, the plays are meticulously diagrammed, with Ajinca placed as a feature, not the focus of the action. While the speed component of Ajinca’s shot is certainly NBA caliber, to consistently place pressure on defenses these kind of plays are not best suited to answering the questions of volume and versatility essential to any high level NBA shooter.

Realizing this can sound kind of counterintuitive, if a player shoots with good efficiency and can get their shot off under duress, why would their be any uncertainty as to whether or not they can maintain their volume as they transition to the NBA? Wouldn’t it be in their team’s best interest to implement a steady diet of shooting opportunities into their offense for said player? The answer to this is complicated. In the NBA offenses typically subscribe to the philosophy of “path of least resistance”, meaning the bedrock of most team’s offenses comes down to “what is the most direct path which will yield the most consistent results.”

With shooting specialists, if they are schemed a shot it is with the understanding that the advantage typically begins and ends with the player receiving an open shot. And while this will work on occasion, frequently depending how well the play is diagrammed, there is a ceiling to how consistently these playtypes will bear fruit for an offense. The best phrasing I could think of to describe this difference is active versus passive spacing.

Compare these two clips below, for instance, of Desmond Bane and Simone Fontecchio stationed in the corner.

In the first clip, Kris Dunn drives from the middle of the floor, beats his man, and Fontecchio’s defender Fred VanVleet ‘helps the helper’ by rotating over from his initial assignment to prevent the dump-off passing angle to John Collins, all the while leaving Fontecchio open for the corner three. In the second clip, the Grizzlies run a spread pick-and-roll with Bane spaced in the corner. At first glance it seems Fontecchio’s three was the result of a defensive error by VanVleet. Whereas in the second clip Hardaway Jr doesn’t even briefly entertain the idea of leaving Bane to tag the roller in the second clip.

While it seems obvious the ideal execution in these similar positions is to remain closely attached to the shooter as Tim Hardaway Jr. does to Bane, VanVleet was doing what was asked of his defensive scheme as well. The main difference in these two clips isn’t so much the result of the play as the variety of shooter being covered in the play. While Simone Fontecchio is a respectable shooter (shooting 40% from three on the season on 305 attempts to date), what makes him a passive versus an active spacer is the understanding defenders have of how limited their responsibilities are when guarding Fontecchio.

As previously mentioned, usually when shooting specialists are schemed open, the advantage is confined to the three which was drawn up. As seen below, Simone Fontecchio is no exception to this. When the defense runs him off the line, the advantage is effectively ended.

Defenders knowing that a hard closeout, which gets Fontecchio to relocate, or even run off the three-point line, is effective in neutralizing his shooting threat, greatly reduces the strain Fontecchio can place on a defense. This simplified thought process for defenders manifests on the court in plays like the clip below. Michael Porter Jr. is Fontecchio’s initial defender, however he has no qualms helping off Fontecchio to stunt (provide help on a post-up) towards John Collins.

This play embodies the active versus passive spacing dichotomy, as while Fontecchio demands the respect of the closeout, the shooting threat isn’t so great that Fontecchio can carve out space for others outside of a very specific usage. Constant application of these kind of plays isn’t feasible for the simple fact that they introduce perhaps the hallmark of a bad NBA offense, predictability. And while implementing movement shooting elements into an offense is crucial, it is typically used as a feature, not the foundation of an offense.

Take the play below: the Cavaliers run a Ram Veer Exit play, where Georges Niang receives an off-ball screen from Max Strus en-route to setting an on-ball screen for Craig Porter Jr. (this is the Ram part of the action). After setting the screen for Porter Jr., Niang sets a pindown for Sam Merrill (Veer action), while Strus simultaneously receives an exit screen from Isaac Okoro. This play is beautifully designed, and all of these moving parts create a seam for Craig Porter Jr. to drive and score an easy layup. By expertly blending the shooting capabilities of these three players who individually demand respect, Cleveland is able to breakdown the defense without any conventional advantage creators on the floor.

However, if you were to remove all the scaffolding which comes with a well diagrammed play being combined with multiple potent shooters, what would it look like?

Take the play below, for example, a baseline out of bounds play in what is a much less shooting slanted lineup. Cleveland runs Ram Ghost, where Sam Merrill inbounds the ball receives a pindown from Niang and ghosts the on-ball screen. It is apparent from the play that this action doesn’t place nearly the same strain on the defense, with Boston switching 1-4 and not even momentarily hesitant on abandoning their scheme to pursue Merrill. Even with a heavier-footed big like Al Horford switching onto a perimeter player, the lacking off-the-bounce threat of Merrill makes this a simple rotation to execute.

I felt it necessary to reference these players not to undermine their abilities or paint them as devoid of value, but to provide a frame of reference for my concerns with Melvin Ajinca. As I went through his tape a persistent theme, similar to these shooting specialists cited above, was the absence of production when Ajinca was adequately covered out to the three-point line. There were numerous instances of Ajinca hamstringing the offense when he was forced to counter after meeting resistance on the initial action, such as this Spain PNR below…

Or when Ajinca was incapable of capitalizing on an opportunity to attack a short closeout when run off the line.

These clips may be seen as isolated instances, and Ajinca optimists may even interpret these plays as a natural byproduct of a younger player who has received limited on-ball reps. However, I remain skeptical of Ajinca’s potential to drastically improve this skill, as Saint-Quentin has actually attempted to integrate Ajinca more as a ballhandler into their offense. While he has almost exclusively seen these opportunities come in simple, two-man actions such as this empty corner pick-and-roll below, the results have left much to be desired with Ajinca scoring only .784 PPP as a PNR ballhandler this season.

As stated earlier, Ajinca still possesses the qualities of a viable off-ball spacer, but I see these limitations preventing him from ever seeing a usage higher than the current 16% usage he’s sporting for Saint Quentin. For Ajinca, as with most shooting specialists at the highest levels, their inability to adapt when forced to play out of structure curbs their volume, and as a result their impact on a possession to possession basis.

Ja’Kobe Walter

As stated earlier, both Ja’Kobe Walter and Melvin Ajinca’s primary appeal as prospects are their utility as shooters. However, both players have seen drastically different usages and the dichotomy between their respective shooting profiles would show as much. Below is a table of both Ajinca and Walter’s shooting splits over the past two seasons (2022-23 and the current season).

At first these splits seem to represent two players with somewhat similar shooting pedigrees, and in fact this table may stir some confusion as to why there’s such a great deal of separation between the two prospects in general draft media perception, judging by draft boards. Walter has shot a greater volume of 3s compared to Ajinca, however Ajinca’s been more efficient from a more standardized distance (all of Ajinca’s 3s are from the FIBA line of 22.15 feet, whereas a substantial portion of Walter’s long distance attempts are from the high school line of 19.75 feet). Initially I came into this process expecting to see similar calibre of shooters, with the gap in shooting ability between the two players to be equally represented on film; however in reality the effect these players had on defenses held stark contrasts.

To fully grasp the difference between Walter and Ajinca’s shooting ability, a holistic approach is necessary. While Ajinca has more or less seen identical usage in every team context he has been placed in, Walter’s role has varied greatly over the course of his young career. The different levels of usage are apparent in the difference between the number of non-threes Walter has taken compared to Ajinca. The scope of this article so far has mainly focused on these players ability to space the floor from three, but Walter’s shot diversity amplifies his effectiveness as a spacer.

Previously Melvin Ajinca’s processing and ability to adapt off the catch had been greatly scrutinized, and mentioned as a potential limiting factor to his utility to an offense. Ja’Kobe Walter, on the other hand, has a well-refined game off the catch and has melded other aspects of his scoring repertoire to fully exploit his shooting. The disparity between how reliable the two are at parlaying the shooting threat they present is evident in their respective free throw rates, as Walter has posted a robust 0.46 ratio of free throw to field goal attempts compared to a paltry 0.20 for Ajinca. The clips below are a prime examples of how Walter is able to convert these hard closeouts into quality offense.

In the first clip, Baylor runs a simple spread pick-and-roll, with Walter positioned in the weakside corner. Cincinnati’s big is in a high-drop coverage, and because of the angle he takes Walter’s defender (the low-man) has to over-help to prevent the wraparound pass. Once Walter receives the kickout in the corner, he fully capitalizes on the long closeout his man has to make by immediately getting downhill and drawing the foul

What is not visible in this clip, however, is Walter’s excellent footwork attacking these closeouts. Walter consistently is able to deploy ‘negative step’ footwork, where he uses his rear-foot to springboard his drives and mitigate some of his lackluster burst. The play below exemplifies this: the Baylor point-guard RayJ Dennis is able to break his man down off the dribble, triggering Walter’s man to help on the drive. As Walter receives the pass in the corner, his defender simultaneously recovers and is shading Walter towards the baseline. However, the defender’s top-foot is too high on the closeout, enabling Walter to attack and open up a driving lane to then draw the foul and finish for an and-one opportunity.

Why I initially thought it necessary to delve into the different developmental contexts between Walter and Ajinca, beyond their ability to attack closeouts, is how capable they are of adapting to the defense once run off the line. Walter isn’t just fixed to foul drawing when attacking closeouts. His previous time spent as a primary offensive option afford him a bevy of alternatives to place pressure on the defense.

Below is an example of exactly this, Baylor once again is running a spread PNR with RayJ Dennis as the ballhandler and Walter stationed in the corner. As Dennis’ defender loses contain, Walter’s man rotates over to help on the drive, creating a gap for Walter to attack when the ball is swung to him. Unlike the last closeout attack vs Cincinnati where Walter was provided a direct driving path towards the basket, this time Dennis’ defender rotates over from the topside. Despite the added variable Walter is able to quickly pro-hop to navigate the dig, and get to a balanced floater off two feet.

Take notice that as the screen is set Walter and his teammate on the wing, Jalen Bridges, exchange. While this may seem insignificant this is a microcosm of shooters having different levels of gravity. While on the surface Bridges may seem to be the better shooter than Walter, as he boasts a 40.6% 3-point shot compared to Walter’s 34.5%. But Walter is a much more reliable release valve for an offense because of plays just like this.

Synthesizing the information gathered from the tape and available databases like Synergy shows Walter to have a more impressive shot versatility than Ajinca. The table below displays three-point shooting efficiency over the past 2 seasons off handoffs and screens, showing how Walter has actually been more efficient in the most common playtypes for their presumed archetype.

Granted this a small sample, but this lends support to the theory of Ajinca’s shooting efficiency being drastically boosted by shots which don’t generate “gravity” as it is commonly understood.

Walter is not without his faults as a shooter, however, as while he surpasses Ajinca in versatility there is a limiting factor in his shot speed. If you notice in the clips above Walter is able to get downhill because he is operating off substantial advantages created by others and he has the respect to draw hard closeouts. Neither of these are factors can be relied on at the next level, where closeouts lie on more of a spectrum.

To demonstrate the relationship between shot speed and long versus short closeouts, I have pulled a few clips shown below. In the first clip, Moses Moody attacks a mismatch after Golden State gets an offensive rebound, and kicks the ball out to Brandin Podziemski after drawing Pascal Siakam as the help defender. Take notice of the depth of Siakam’s closeout; instead of closing out with reckless abandon or crowding Podziemski to prevent him getting a shot off, he stops a few feet short.

This short closeout is informed by Podziemski’s reputation as a shooter, where despite shooting 38% from 3 on the season and a blistering 44.7% as a collegian this past season, his discomfort shooting over contests and in tighter windows dissuades him from attempts with a high degree of difficulty. And when Podziemski does attempt shots over length, his lower release point makes contesting shots an easier task for defenders, as demonstrated in the clip below.

Podziemski runs off an Iverson cut to receive the entry pass and from here the Warriors attempt to flow into an empty corner PNR. However, the Raptor’s matchup zone clogs up any driving/passing lanes for this action, forcing Dario Saric to flash to the middle of the floor and find Podziemski sinking into a pocket of space left vacant by the zone. Notice again, despite the space a recovering Gary Trent Jr. is forced to cover, he stops a few feet short and is able to well contest the shot. Understandably this may seem like a harsh judgement of an ostensibly quality NBA shooter, however capitalizing on these margins is what separates shooters at the next level.

Contrast the treatment Podziemski receives as a spacer versus a player like Tim Hardaway Jr., for example. Hardaway’s high and quick release, paired with the bordering irrational confidence he has in his shot. When the shooting windows shrink, Walter will need to prove he can consistently get his shot off. Examining his previous tape shows how this will need to be an area of improvement for Walter.

Take the clip below. After Baylor runs some disjointed early offense they flow into a Spread PNR. Walter’s defender, Jameer Nelson Jr., is forced to tag the roller early due to TCU’s big hedging the ballscreen and RayJ Dennis swings the ball to Walter on the wing. Nelson Jr. closes-out on Walter with balanced footwork, and most importantly short. The short closeout allows Walter space to get up an attempt from 3 which Nelson Jr., listed at 6’2, is able to emphatically block.

This play does a great job of capturing the gradient which closeouts lie on. Walter is a dangerous enough shooter to demand some sort of closeout and is proficient driving against hard closeouts, meaning an option teams will exercise is the short closeout where Walter is forced to shoot over a moderate contest. While this block can be seen as an aberration, a single play not indicative of more than a bad decision from Walter, I’m of the belief this represents a wider trend and a weakness which Walter could struggle improving upon at the next level.

First of all, it is not just spot-up attempts Walter struggles getting up quickly, he also frequently had issues getting up shots off-the-dribble up against smaller defenders. Take the clip below, for example. Baylor runs a Get-77 action which is blown-up, and in response Walter lifts up from the corner and runs an empty corner PNR with Jordan Pope as his primary defender. Pope, listed at 6’2, blocks the shot AFTER going under the screen.

I’ve avoided discussing shot mechanics up until now because I don’t think there’s a platonic ideal to what a shot should look like, and often judgements in shot mechanics are more informed by aesthetics than functionality. In Walter’s case however, his struggles transitioning into his shot quickly run downstream from his mechanics. The clip below demonstrates two ways Walter compensates for this mechanical inefficiency.

Walter has a lower release point, to compensate for his struggles generating power from his lower body. This is evident from the valgus collapse in his knees shown more clearly below.

Another idiosyncrasy of Walter’s shot, potentially limiting his shot speed, is an inelastic set-point, also apparent in this clip. Notice how Walter gathers for this shot well outside his frame in order to position his shot so that it is set with his elbow pronated. This elbow pronation is more clearly displayed in the picture below.

Typically a shooter’s elbow is much tighter to his body, and more closely aligned with the shooter’s feet. The elbow pronation makes the set-point rigid, causing the shooter to take another split second to transition from their set-point to release. Both of these deficiencies are a result of Walter lacking general strength, which can be alleviated with time spent in an NBA strength program. However, when he doesn’t have the hair-trigger release speed to be consistently effective off horizontal shooting actions like ghost screens and flares, Walter’s defender can go under the flare screen and still credibly contest the shot, as in the clip below.

For a shooting prospect who cannot draw the hard closeouts necessary to create unambiguous driving opportunities, and who doesn’t necessary have the handle to capitalize on less pronounced advantages, the application of their shooting prowess can be significantly narrower than previously anticipated.

I found the parallels in these two plays and between these two players striking. Both Kevin Huerter and Walter are run off double staggers and neither is able to gain a significant amount of separation from the trailing defender. And when the decision is forced upon them by the defense, neither has the self organization skills to quickly transition into a shot off the dribble or drive to maintain the advantage, so in both cases the play results in a turnover.

This is not to say Walter is a one-to-one comp to Huerter, more so to illustrate the struggles a shooting specialist in his mold may encounter when his jumpshot is lacking in certain qualities. What we want to avoid is a shooting prospect whose draft slot warrants heavy investment of developmental resources, but who ultimately possesses a fungible skillset which I believe is the case with Walter.

Rob Dillingham

Up to this point the focus has been on parsing shooting aptitude based on which conditions prospects FAILED to meet, however, I wanted to delve into 6’2 Kentucky guard Rob Dillingham’s game as an example of what constitutes a high level shooting prospect on tape and by the numbers.

In order to understand what makes Dillingham’s potential as a shooter so appealing, it is necessary to look at his shooting profile over the past two seasons just as we had with Melvin Ajinca and Ja’Kobe Walter.

What immediately stands out about Dillingham’s shot profile is the difference in volume of off-the-dribble 3’s as well as catch-and-shoot 3’s compared to Walter and Ajinca. Dillingham over the exact same time frame and comparable total number of games played (Dillingham played 71 games over this stretch, compared to 75 and 80 for Ajinca and Walter respectively), managed to shoot more 3’s off the bounce than Walter and Ajinca COMBINED while shooting significantly less Catch-and-Shoot 3’s than both players (193 C&S 3’s versus 315 and 353). Some of the discrepancy in shot distribution can definitely be explained by their positional distinctions, but seeing how quickly Dillingham adapted to more of an off-ball role, when his responsibilities more closely aligned with Ajinca and Walter’s, was a revelation. When deployed as an off-ball player and asked to run off screens, Dillingham created space by utilizing the burst and understanding of tempo which made him such a potent scorer off the bounce.

Take the play below for example. Kentucky runs Floppy initially, with Dillingham being defended well on the catch. After Dillingham swings the ball back to Reed Sheppard at the top of the key, he runs towards Aaron Bradshaw on the left block, setting what seems to be the first screen of a baseline double stagger set. However, with Dillingham’s defender going over the top of Bradshaw’s screen, Dillingham recognizes this, reroutes and turns this into a ‘Ricky’ action, where the screener rescreens for the cutter but going in the opposite direction of the initial screen.

While Dillingham was used sparingly as a movement shooter (only 12 3’s off screens this season, on which he went 5/12), this play exemplifies how quickly Dillingham can self-organize and get into his shot off a variety of footwork patterns. Dillingham’s shooting numbers this season for Kentucky were obviously stellar, however a deeper look into the degree of difficulty on these shots quells any concerns I have on the translatability of Dillingham’s jumper. In the clip below for instance, Dillingham breaks convention not by taking a transition 3, but taking it as the primary ballhandler dribbling full speed down the court.

Willingness to shoot in these suboptimal situations, like the plays below where Dillingham comes off a pindown and takes a one dribble 3 with Tre Mitchell splayed at his feet..

…and over a tight contest from Armando Bacot, bodes well for maintaining his shot volume at the next level.

As I watched Dillingham over the course of the season I found there to be interesting parallels between him and a rookie from this past year’s class, Keyonte George. While there are drastic differences between the two in certain respects, there are/were similar concerns in their shot selection as prospects. During his tenure at Baylor, George had been much maligned for a perceived inability to operate within a team construct and even labeled a ‘chucker’ by some draft analysts. I would argue what was considered a weakness has actually been essential to George outperforming expectations in his rookie year.

Take this play from early in the season, for example, where Utah attempts to run Horns Out for Jordan Clarkson in early offense, but when the entry is denied George receives a Flare screen from Clarkson. Notice the apathy the defense displays towards a George three point attempt: if we are judging the value of George as a shooter by the aforementioned Knee-Jerk Reflex Test, it would be pretty low.

What I found so interesting about George’s rookie season was that despite how pedestrian his shooting splits were (38.6% from the field and 32.8% from 3), the coverages he saw over the course of the season transformed in large part because of how consistent he was with his volume. In fact, George saw his 3-point volume steadily increase over the course of the season. In the 2023 calendar year (games played from October-December) George averaged 5.1 attempts/game, and in 2024 George averaged 6.3 attempts/game. The Jazz were intentional in exploring the upper limits of George’s capabilities offensively and he consistently answered the bell. He now demonstrates his comfort shooting in simple flow actions like the DHO from John Collins below, where the sliver of space provided by Steph going under the screen is enough for George to pull the trigger.

George also displayed utility as an off-the-dribble shooter when provided more opportunities on-ball. In the play below Utah flows into a spread PNR as the secondary action and George, without a moment’s hesitation, pulls up for 3 when Bam Adebayo begins to backpedal into drop coverage.

George’s willingness to take these 3’s under duress resulted in him eventually receiving the kind of coverage which stands as the benchmark for offensive players, forcing the defense to place two on the ball.

Later in the same game as the play above, Utah runs Pistol Flare Zoom, a well schemed staple of their offense. Despite the fluid transitions from one action to the next, Miami stifles the offense and the ball finds Keyonte George in the corner. As with most NBA offenses, when Utah’s designed offensive options are taken away they resort to a simple spread PNR. However, because of the threat George presents as a shooter off the bounce, Miami’s big (Orlando Robinson) hard hedges the PNR, triggering the low-man (Haywood Highsmith) to tag the roller and leave Lauri Markannen open in the corner. When George diffuses the pressure of the hedge he quickly finds Markannen for 3.

This is an optimal shot for the Jazz, and Utah was able to create this in spite of Miami playing almost 20 seconds of good defense BECAUSE of George’s off-the-dribble shooting ability. While George isn’t seeing two to the ball with a high frequency yet, per Synergy all 8 of the times he’s been trapped as the PNR ballhandler have come since February 11th, which coincides with George’s rise in shooting volume.

Before revisiting Dillingham’s evaluation, I’d like to reiterate the comparison between George and Dillingham is not being drawn as a 1-to-1 comparison, rather as an example of how a seldom sought after archetype (smaller guards who are high volume shooters) can be extremely valuable if they meet certain criteria.

Dillingham showed himself more than capable of diagnosing coverages where he could utilize his off the dribble shooting prowess. Dillingham, like George in the previous clips, was decisive and consistent in punishing drop coverages which is integral to success for his archetype. In the clip below, Dillingham rejects the first screen in a 77 action (Double Drag) and finds the pocket of space left occupied by the trailing point-of-attack defender and the drop big man, and from there he decisively takes the pull-up 3 with a right-handed gather.

Even as scouting reports became more robust over the course of conference play, Dillingham was still able to get to his pull-up 3 against drop coverage. Like in the play below where Kentucky runs Horns, the POA defender is better able to stay attached to Dillingham and the drop defender is slightly closer to the level of the screen than Hunter Dickinson in the previous clip, however Dillingham is still able to get up an attempt, this time with a left-handed gather.

Even when defenders were playing at the level, like in this play against Oakland in the tournament, Dillingham was undeterred. Kentucky once again is running 77 and Dillingham seizes the space given to take a deep 3 early in the shot clock, despite Zvonimir Ivisic’s defender actually quickly showing at the level.

What makes Dillingham’s shooting ability so enticing is how rare it is to find a prospect who’s not only capable of drawing aggressive coverages with the ball in his hands, but also capitalizing on the attention they draw as shooters off the ball. As previously discussed in Ja’Kobe Walter’s evaluation, attacking closeouts as a shooting threat is of upmost importance. And while Walter’s shot mechanics could limit his effectiveness drawing and attacking closeouts, Dillingham has no such concerns mechanically, along with having an even better process attacking closeouts.

Dillingham was deployed off-ball this season more than any point in his career and shot an astounding 42/88 (47.7%) on Catch and Shoot 3’s. Even more impressive was Dillingham’s ability to parlay the hard closeouts his shooting efficiency attracted into high percentage shots for himself or teammates.

In this clipped play Florida switches the spread PNR placing the big, Thomas Haugh, on Dillingham. Eventually the ball is swung to Antonio Reeves, who drives, causing Haugh to provide gap help. On Haugh’s recovery Dillingham quickly ‘punches’ the gap, drives, and hits a runner. In this play Haugh executes scheme perfectly by funneling Dillingham towards help, but the nuance in Dillingham’s game off the catch renders this advantage.

Dillingham has a wonderful habit of running through the catch, or ‘stampeding’, on closeouts. This creates the finishing angle in the play above, and can be seen even more clearly in the play below. Kentucky flows into a double Zoom action for Antonio Reeves after they’re unable to create a quality look out of the empty corner PNR. When Reeves is stonewalled on his drive he kicks it back out to Dillingham at the top of the key, and Dillingham’s stampede allows him to create the quick separation to finish high off the glass.

Dillingham’s game off the catch can best be described as kinetic in my opinion, whether the possession ends in a Dillingham shot or not, he is able to keep the offense in motion and the defense shifting with his keen sense of court mapping.

In the following clip, Kentucky runs through two hapless spread PNRs with Reed Sheppard as the primary ballhandler. On the 2nd PNR Sheppard rejects the screen and dribbles to the right side of the floor where Dillingham is stationed. As Dillingham lifts from the wing, his defender pressures the ball, prompting a switch onto Dillingham. The switch demands urgency, and Dillingham is able to weaponize this brief advantage on a subpar closeout from an otherwise excellent defender in Cam Matthews.

Dillingham’s drive is an expert display of manipulating defenders with your eyes and tempo, as he waits for both Matthews and the primary rim protector here (Tolu Smith) to commit before eventually making the dumpoff pass to Aaron Bradshaw for a dunk. While some may see this as a combination of bad defense from Smith and solid passing vision from Dillingham, Dillingham’s arsenal of pullups, runners, and floaters, necessitates Smith lifting from his position closer to the basket.

Dillingham’s technical refinement operating off-ball, when paired with high volume off the dribble shooting, amounts to an offensive weapon which could potentially change the entire complexion of a team’s offense. Instead of having a shooter who can only force the defense to react when placed in a set of ideal conditions, a shooter with the depth of tools Dillingham possesses can activate defensive pressure points simply by participating in the play.

An example of this effect can be seen below. Miami runs Iverson 77 Shallow, where Nijel Pack receives the entry pass as he’s cutting across the opposite wing (the Iverson component of the action), and the two elbow screeners flip to initiate the 77 Shallow phase of the action. As previously discussed, 77 consists of double drag screens, however 77 Shallow is a variation where the screens are staggered so the 2nd screener can make a shallow cut to the 3 point line. As Pack takes the 1st screen, the Pitt big man quickly shows to disrupt the rhythm of Pack, a respected off the dribble 3-point shooter. Ideally this should place Blake Hinson in a situation where he’s forced to cover the roller and the shallow cutting shooter, but George is a tick late to lift which kills the window for the advantage to be created. Pack continues dribbling towards the right wing and the gap help from Jaland Lowe carves open a driving lane for AJ Casey who finishes on the drive.

This play encapsulates the interplay between actions designed to get shooters open on the East-West plane, to create North-South gaps for drivers to attack. And shooters who are prolific off the bounce and off the catch function as queens on the chessboard, in how they activate defensive pressure points in either manner.

These versatile shooters also serve as force multipliers for other shooters effectiveness. Take the play below for example, Dallas intends to run ‘Motion Strong Zoom’, where Tim Hardaway Jr. runs off double staggers from the corner (Motion Strong), swings the ball to Dereck Lively, and screens away to initiate the Zoom action for Kyrie Irving. However, as Irving approaches THJ to receive the first screen he is denied, or ‘top-locked’, by Jalen Suggs. This prompts Hardaway to take a handoff from Lively as his (Hardaway Jr’s) initial defender, Anthony Black, and Suggs simultaneously switch their assignments. Suggs switching onto Hardaway Jr. and Black switching onto Irving.

This sequence is so important because with Suggs and Black switching the Mavericks essentially have them dead to rights, as seen in the frame below.

Suggs has lost the battle of leverage, with the switch placing him on Hardaway Jr’s outside shoulder, and Hardaway Jr. being a respected shooter in his own right forces Goga Bitadze to lift slightly out of his drop coverage. This rotation creates the angle for Hardaway to make the short skip pass to Irving, effectively inverting the floor and creating a window for Irving to continue the advantage with a pass to the rolling Lively.

This sequence is a perfect distillation of the synergy between a dynamic off-the-dribble shooting threat and a dynamic, albeit more conventional, shooter. And plays like these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to manufacturing offense between these two archetypes. Utilizing shooters as screeners has come into vogue in a major way recently, and perhaps there’s no team better at combining these elements within their offense than the recent NCAA champion UConn Huskies.

In the following clip, UConn runs a wildly intricate action I could only term as ‘Pistol Motion Strong Ghost Flex Screen the Screener’. Despite the overly verbose terminology, this core concept of this action is quite simple, UConn taking their best and most versatile shooter in Cam Spencer and weaponizing him by involving him in as many phases of the offense as possible. As Spencer fakes the Cross Screen for the player in the weakside corner and receives the down screen (Ghost Flex), his defender tightly trails, attempts to deny the curl, and funnel Spencer into Alex Karaban’s defender so they can switch. Switching being the preferred defensive scheme because of Marquette’s similarly sized lineup and the lack of off the dribble scoring threat UConn’s players possess. UConn uses this perceived weakness against Marquette here by having Spencer set a down screen for Karaban as he’s curling towards the basket, springing Karaban open for 3.

I find these clips relevant to Rob Dillingham’s projection because these are the ways his offensive skillset can manifest not only in scoring opportunities for himself, but for others as well. The confluence of Dilling

Conclusion

In summation, I think all these players have viable skillsets as shooters, however my general philosophy when it comes to the draft is to pick for scarcity. Especially when it comes to a team using a high pick, players who provide unique skillsets allow teams to pivot stylistically and adapt to changes in the NBA meta. When it comes to the three prospects previously discussed, I chose them specifically because it was my belief these prospects main value proposition was their shooting talent. Each possess strengths and weaknesses compared to the others in the other facets of their game, but ultimately if a team is picking any of the three it should be for what their shooting ability unlocks within the team’s offense. And in my estimation Robert Dillingham is the only prospect of the three whose shooting and shooting adjacent skillset warrant a high, lottery level, pick because of the previously discussed attributes. Ja’Kobe Walter, who has an interesting profile as a shooter and scorer, doesn’t meet certain thresholds specifically as a shooter to warrant a higher pick, and Melvin Ajinca is too deficient in certain shooting adjacent qualities to be useful outside of the conventional shooting specialist role.

Prior to delving into these prospect’s games I hadn’t considered shooting ability holistically, I’d previously weighed shot mechanics as most essential to projecting shooting. Having worked through this evaluation I realized early on assessing shooting from a purely mechanical perspective naturally introduced aesthetic bias because there’s no idealized shooting form. Ultimately, recognizing this implicit bias lead to a clearer perspective of other flaws in my shooting criteria, flaws which didn’t lie in the characteristics being accounted for, but instead how rigid my philosophy had been overall.

As I dug deeper and deeper into these prospects I realized scouting shooting talent is as much about evaluating evidence which is absent from a player’s shot profile as evaluating the data currently available. The less variables I was able to see a player interact with, the less confident I was in how their shooting ability would translate to the next level. And finally, perhaps even more importantly with prospects who are shooters first and foremost, recognizing there may be no greater impediment to an offense than a player with an unwarranted reputation as a shooter. This is in reference to the ‘active’ vs ‘passive’ spacer dichotomy previously mentioned, as the narrower a player’s shooting can be applied, the less space they are providing an offense.

The days of conventional shooting specialists are long gone, and avoiding spending valuable draft capital on a player who may fall into this category is an imperative.

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