Any sort of useful basketball analysis thereby requires layers of abstraction to simplify its dynamism. In particular, the draft scouting process necessitates that the fluid biopsychosocial complexities of a player are abstracted to foresee potential rather than celebrate dynamicism.

At its core, scouting is intellectual reductionism, an inherent projection of the future rather than the dynamic present.

Abstraction does not, and it should not, have a negative connotation. Reductionism is inevitable, as thoroughly understanding every single minutiae of every interaction under the hood of our bodily mechanisms is absolutely impossible. This is highly theoretical, but it should be. On first watch, 99% of the happenings in a single possession are impossible to be perceived by any human. Some occurrences are objective while others require a sort of epistemological contextualization: the timing of a pass, the angle of a screen, the defensive rotations —all these elements combine in ways that are both tangible and abstract. We innately rely on our abstractions to make sense of the complexity of the game, extracting the essence of each moment without being overwhelmed by its intricacies.

This recourse to abstraction intertwines intricately with linguistic relativism—the notion that our language molds our perception of reality. Consider ballet: to an uninitiated observer like myself, I cannot appreciate a ballet performance, as it would appear as a mundane sequence of seemingly indistinguishable movements. Everything would appear the same. Yet, to an expert, the intricacies of each motion are distinct—a pirouette, a pointe, a pique. Without understanding the associated schema, it is virtually impossible to understand these subtle distinctions and the technical precision.

Language builds perception, and thus perception is restricted by language. This is the essence of linguistic relativism.

When I first learned about linguistic relativism, my mind was blown. Everything that we perceive is simply a product of our language. There’s even some languages with names for more colors, and its native speakers have been shown to literally perceive more colors. Every thought, every idea, every concept that you may deem original and objective has been filtered through these linguistic structures we’ve internalized.

Why does this matter? What does Demon Edey have to do with abstraction and linguistic relativism?

Well, assuming you’re on Twitter, you’ve witnessed the development of two distinct factions of scouting, factions that often clash in the comments of any given draft-related tweet. It’s the statheads vs the eye testers, bart boys vs the tape tribe, BPM nation vs the film truthers.

Of course, neither side is explicitly correct, as it’s typically never useful to over index on a specific approach to scouting. A more holistic contextualization would apply principles from both sides. 

On one end, you have the film truthers, who believe that absorbing information from film and strengthening one’s eye test is the surest way of ascertaining a prospect’s goodness. The more games you watch of a prospect, the more credible your opinion on a prospect’s projection. Some believe that the eye test is partially intrinsic: that certain people are born with an eye for scouting, and that this second nature underlies truly elite scouts.

On the other end, you have the production truthers. From cherry picked bart queries to a proclivity for spreadsheets, this is the side of Draft Twitter that is most frequently maligned. While some spreadsheet scouts’ boards may seem too strongly correlated with box score stats, this is oft by intention to qualify all prospects with a sort of quantifiable precedent.

Zach Edey is the epitome of this divide between the production test and the eye test. 

Edey’s production is undeniable. Edey leads every single college basketball impact metric available. Edey obviously has the greatest box score metrics in decades, but he also has the greatest impact metrics in decades: his adjusted plus/minus, on/offs, etc. have all sharply risen every year of his college career. His effect on Purdue has strongly improved every year, despite rising usage. But for such a promising production profile, Edey faces some of the strongest backlash of any prospect that I can remember.

And to some degree, I do understand it. Every play seems so similar: Edey backs someone down, and either takes a feathery hook shot or dunks it home over the help.  If the only real skill Edey has on offense is posting up, and postups aren’t en vogue in the NBA, how is he going to survive? Sure, there’s been hundreds of 7 footers playing D1 basketball, but coaches just aren’t able to figure out how to stop this specific postup and dunk height merchant.

See, something has to give. If Edey is so utterly skill-less, then how has his impact increased each year so dramatically? You tell me what’s more likely: that the single most impactful player in college basketball was simply a height merchant, or that there’s more to Edey than just postups and size? 

I tend to lean towards the latter, that the true complexity of Edey’s gameplay is absolutely convoluted by the simplicity of his moves. This brings us back to the principle of linguistic relativism – as we abstract the dynamism of each possession into aggregated play types, we must also question whether our evaluative language has constrained the eye test and collective perception of a player’s true ability.

I recognize that this is a long introduction to a long article about a seemingly boring player. But I do think it’s important to be cognizant of our most pervasive implicit biases by virtue of linguistic relativism and abstraction.

I’ve been a strong proponent of selecting Zach Edey with a high pick for a long time. And during this time, I’ve encountered many of the same, invariable talking points against Edey’s NBA future. These critiques often lack creativity, focusing on outdated stereotypes and simplistic heuristics rather than meaningfully considering the applications of such a unique value proposition.

This piece is meant to be a compendium, my attempt of going through the 10 most common arguments against Edey and providing my take. I’ve listed each of the arguments below, and while each section varies in length and approach, I’ve done my best to mix a bit of philosophy, statistical analysis, and projection conjecture. Through this argument-counterargument framework, I hope to also juxtapose the often-overlooked aspects of Edey’s profile with my own philosophies about player development.

Let’s dive into the most productive, most impactful, most physically gifted prospect in decades.

Argument: Edey is a prototypical four year college big, another iteration of Garza, Tshiebwe, and Hansborough.

Zach Edey is not Luka Garza. He is not Oscar Tshiebwe. He is not Kofi Cockburn. He is not Frank Kaminsky. He is not Ethan Happ. He is not Jahlil Okafor. He is not Tacko Fall. He is not Drew Timme. 

Over the last three years, I’ve seen a bevy of shameless Edey comparisons. People basically compare him to slow, post-up oriented bigs who dominated college and failed in the NBA, and use this availability heuristic to prove that Edey is destined to fail too.

Edey is genuinely not in the same stratosphere as these players. Besides being generationally large (seven foot FIVE!!) with generational production, Edey clears these players in yet another very unique way: interior dominance.

To me, interior dominance is the single most important offensive trait for a big. You need to be able to score inside at a consistent level, against a variety of different coverages. From Sengun (50 dunks in his pre-draft year) to Bam (100 dunks in his pre-draft year), strong interior performance is both sticky and highly undervalued by draftniks. 

For instance, perhaps the most ubiquitous Edey negative comparison is Luka Garza. Let me put that comp to rest real quick: Edey had 86 halfcourt dunks in his senior season, and Garza had 8 halfcourt dunks in his senior season. Just a vastly different level of athlete and interior force.

Edey just had the most dominant interior season of the modern era. 109 dunks, 80 FTR, most FTs in a season, 80% at the rim; these are video game numbers. Trust me when I say that no one in at least a few decades comes close to those kinds of numbers. Don’t ignore that ridiculous free throw rate; Edey made the most FTs of the modern era by virtue of his one-of-a-kind controlled physicality. Tshiebwe, Garza, Hansborough, Kaminsky all had some slight issues with their offensive interior dominance, and yet this is Edey’s biggest strength. How quickly we forget, the game is about a bucket.

I could stop here. You can skip ahead to the next refutation if you’d like. I think I’ve done a sufficient job of demonstrating that Edey is nothing like his infamous comparators.

But observers of the game aren’t this dumb. Everything that I just mentioned seems fairly obvious with a cursory film watch: Edey is bigger, stronger, more dominant on both ends, and just far better than any of those names. The impetus for these terrible comps has to be more profound than just similarity bias.

To me, there’s a sort of ad hominem at play, one that stems from contemporary basketball viewers holding a view of modern basketball that is seemingly antithetical to the essence of college basketball. Modern viewers have now grown up on an era of Steph Curry pullups and Rudy Gobert playoff lowlights. The epistemology of the modern college basketball viewer is fundamentally top-down: it starts with these abstracted NBA concepts and then eventually builds down to an abstracted ground truth. We’ve learned to see the world from a POV of pace-and-space, to speak in absolutes of PnR versatility, to internalize its goodness and embrace its principles. This results in the villainization of players that don’t match the physical embodiment of this epistemology. Players like Zach Edey.

I have never, ever seen such extreme levels of vitriol aimed at a player simply for existing.  Some players are natural villains; their antics and post-game pressers are meticulous and designed to receive acknowledgement, and the resulting derision is simply compensation. But there is a genuine hatred for Edey, in a way that is truly baffling; and while some of it can be chalked up to sports fans indulging in their need for a villain, this goes beyond mere fun. 

It’s more than just a bit; Edey is hated by the consensus despite being a pretty unproblematic, high character guy. And this animosity no doubt colors their assessment of Edey as a prospect. This pervasive bias detracts from the ability of many scouts to provide an objective projection of Edey’s skills, reducing a nuanced evaluation to a series of superficial judgments.

The lack of humanization in the draft space is often alarming – how quickly we forget that these prospects are just barely adults. Unfortunately, it’s not too surprising that the same people that despise Edey are now questioning his NBA upside. Ad hominem for the win, again.

Argument: Edey won’t be very good if he’s entering the league as a 22 year old.

Let’s clarify the observations and assumptions intrinsic to this argument.

Observations: 

1. Edey has stayed in college for 4 years
2. Players in recent memory who stayed in college for 4 years have not been very successful, particularly centers. Think Garza, Tshiebwe, Tyler Hansborough.

Assumption: 

Edey seems like he’s going to be next in line amongst these underperforming 4 year players. Seems like a logical relation: age at entry is the demonstrated cause of underperformance.

Unfortunately, this is a classic example of post hoc fallacy. Let’s refute each of the faults in this causality.

The first issue is the timeline. Entering the draft as a 22 year old should not inherently limit any players’ upside, because superstars used to stay in college for four years all the time. Think David Robinson, Tim Duncan, or most HOFers back in the day). So what changed? Why do prospects declare earlier, and why is age now considered an inhibitor of upside?

The reason is simple, but the logic is more complex and not well-articulated. In this modern age of “one and done”, future NBA stars tend to declare early (at age 19/20) because they produce early. There’s an undeniable production aspect of upside that’s so much more profound than an amalgamation of skills. After all, most All-Stars were BPM demons as teenagers. Being really good at age 19/20 is THE indicator of upside; let’s call this phenomenon precocious productivity.

A lack of precocious productivity is why prospects who “break out” at ages 21/22 should face some degree of skepticism: if they were unable to break out until their NBA-caliber peers were in the NBA, then their production holds less merit. Pretty much all NBA-level players should be dominating college basketball by the time they hit their junior and senior seasons.

But it’s important not to conflate all productive age 21/22 seasons as late breakouts. Age is just a proxy for precocious productivity.

Imagine a player who dominates as a 19 year old, 20 year old, and 21 year old. Intuitively, it would not make much sense to demean this player for their age, as they exhibited precocious productivity unlike many of their similar aged NCAA peers. This is the key similarity between the “one and done” modern era and the former era. Sure, a guy like Tim Duncan or David Robinson stayed in college for 4 years, but they were also immediately impactful from day 1: they exhibited impressive precocious productivity.

A great example of this is Trayce Jackson Davis, who was one of the best freshmen in the country, one of the best sophomores in the country, one of the best juniors in the country, and then the best senior in the country (all by box plus-minus). And yet, he ended up dropping in the draft due to age concerns. Say it with me: age is a good proxy for upside, but precocious productivity is an undeniably stronger proxy of upside.

Yes, Zach Edey is 22 years old. But he has some of the strongest precocious productivity that we have ever seen.

By the numbers, Edey has been insanely dominant every season of his college career. He has not one, not two, but three seasons of above 12 BPM (the only player with even two seasons is Steph Curry). Let’s focus on his production during his sophomore season, where he put up a 12.3 BPM, good for 10th amongst every sophomore since 2008. All but one of the names above him were first rounders.

What’s especially impressive is that Edey spent his entire sophomore season as a 19 year old. He was born in May 2002, meaning that he is very young for his class. For context, UConn’s Alex Karaban is only 7 months younger than senior-aged Edey despite being a sophomore. 

This is all very compelling, but I haven’t touched on the most fascinating aspect of Edey’s profile: his absolutely meteoric rate of improvement.

Edey started playing basketball in his sophomore year of high school. 

Usually, I don’t take these “late to basketball” rumors very seriously: not only are they often embellished, but there’s no definitive proof that a late start to basketball implies a more rapid development, barring perhaps a remarkably small window between the late start and entry into the draft.

But within a year of playing organized basketball, Edey was recruited to IMG Academy, mainly by virtue of his height. At IMG, Edey played on the IMG blue team (basically the B team) during his junior year. He played on the Under Armor AAU circuit, and then in his senior year, Edey was promoted to the A team. I struggled to find any meaningful statistics for Edey given his sparse playing time. These are the only stats I could find:

The summer before his senior year of high school, Edey averaged 3.8 points and 3.3 rebounds in 8 games for the Northern Kings, a Canadian 17U team on the Under Armour AAU circuit.

In his senior year, Edey averaged 2.2 points in 11 games for IMG’s A Team.

That’s right: Edey averaged a whopping 4 ppg in AAU and 2 ppg in high school. He was ranked 436th in his class by 247, but his recruiting was definitely driven by the potential of his size rather than his paltry production.

Edey went from a guy averaging 2.2 points per game as a senior in HS to… this:

I don’t know what Edey did in that summer after his senior year of high school, but he had a very strong freshman year. Which player is putting up 63% TS, 5 bpm, and 9 points per game in the Big Ten the year after averaging 2 points per game in high school?

Immediately after Edey’s solid freshman season, he headed to Latvia for the 2021 FIBA U19 International Tournament. He absolutely crushed the competition, leading the tournament in rebounds, double doubles, and efficiency rating, while ranking 2nd in FTs/game and 4th in blocks/game. This tournament was Edey’s coming out party, a definitive benchmark at an age-standardized simulacrum that underscored the robustness of his production. He was named to the All-Tournament First Team alongside four future first rounders: Jaden Ivey, Chet Holmgren, Nikola Jovic, and Wembanyama. 

Over just two years, Edey went from averaging 4 ppg on a middling AAU team to being named one of the top five teenagers in the world

Again, Edey is not your typical four year player. He played against prospects his own age at FIBAs and dominated. He didn’t simply put up gaudy stats for three years straight – he put up one of the most dominant careers in NCAA history. All while being on the younger side for his class and starting at a ridiculously low pre-college production baseline.

Before labeling Edey as a perennial bench big, please think about Edey’s precocious productivity and his monstrous rate of improvement.

Argument: Edey’s offense is too postup-reliant to work in the NBA. 

Before we start here, it’s important to underscore that the strategic and technical skills intrinsic to Edey’s offensive repertoire are indubitably understated by virtue of our friend linguistic relativism. It’s hard to differentiate the intricacies of Edey’s paint domination, and so everything just seems like just another postup or a dunk over future accountants and litigation attorneys.

Yes, Edey is a highly efficient postup player on elite volume. His combination of efficiency and volume on postups probably places him in some elite company, if there was historic postup data. That does not mean that posting up is all that Edey is capable of doing. This is an interesting argument, as it’s the first time I’ve seen a legitimate strength contrived as a weakness.

There’s a couple reasons why Edey’s pure efficiency on post-ups still understates his postup skill. Obviously, Edey’s maintained strong efficiency despite remarkably high postup volume. Purdue’s offense is also fundamentally based on getting Edey a post touch and leveraging his gravity down low. Edey’s postups are defended more aggressively than anyone else; not a single coach in the nation (save Dan Hurley with Donovan Clingan) dares to guard Edey in single coverage. We’ve somehow normalized Edey receiving double and triple teams; he would undoubtedly boost his already strong efficiency numbers if he was guarded more traditionally (he put up 37 points on 60% shooting against future top 5 pick Clingan). 

Furthermore, Edey gets some very shallow post touches. Edey’s post-up radius is much larger than virtually any post-up big I can recall, as he’s able to receive the ball several feet away from the basket and still convert. He has a surprisingly low center of gravity, able to create space with bumps and explode off a drop step. He’s obviously quite strong and coordinated, but he has so many counters within postups, by virtue of his feathery touch and comfort off either shoulder and either hand. This should not be taken lightly: Edey’s ambidexterity development is so impressive given his baseline just two years ago. Add another exhibit in the gallery of Edey’s rapid skill acquisition.

Edey’s combination of sheer size, post gravity, postup volume, postup distance, diversity of counters and efficiency makes him one of the most dominant low post prospects in decades. 

There’s also a sort of hand waving that occurs with Edey’s postup usage. There is (an often correct) assumption that the modern NBA is postup-agnostic, largely because postups tend to be highly inefficient possessions that obstruct the paint. Well, postups are not entirely dead: guys like Bobby Portis and Jonas Valanciunas average ~ 5 postup possessions a game. An especially interesting thought exercise is the exact value proposition of an Edey postup. An Edey postup possession should theoretically continue to be a highly efficient shot attempt given his hyper efficiency and development of counters on a remarkably tough postup diet. It really comes down to the efficacy of his post gravity in the league, which I’m fairly confident about: if teams start throwing aggressive coverages against Edey, he has the awareness to capitalize on advantages. If Edey has legit gravity in the post AND can efficiently sink postups, then there isn’t a particularly intuitive reason why he can’t rely on his postups for SOME offense.

But please, do not conflate Edey being elite on postups with Edey ONLY being good at postups. Again, postups are perhaps the most functional proxy for strength, and Edey’s goodness on postups checks out: he’ll walk into the NBA as the heaviest player on day 1.

The name of the game is deep post positioning. The deeper Edey gets in the post, the harder it is to stop him. But based on his coverage, it’s a deceptively difficult bet to get the ball to Edey deep in the post when he’s getting swarmed. So what Painter sometimes does is roll Edey into the paint. This isn’t officially counted as a PnR for obvious reasons, but the trademark screen and roll allows Edey to get a head of steam into the post, thereby scattering the defense and allowing him to receive and get into the postup.

This is the first of many times where i’m going to highlight Edey’s strong awareness. Edey has been double-teamed in every college matchup and knows that anything short of optimal positioning by the coverage leads to holes that he can exploit. Consequently, he’s developed an exceptional mastery of positioning in the post. Edey skillfully uses his body to create space, bumping the coverage just enough to establish a clear trajectory for a pass from his not-so-great guards. He fundamentally understands the chess match of these matchups, recognizing mismatches like when a guard tags the roll, and pouncing on these advantages. 

It’s hard to emphasize how efficient Edey is at nearly every action. He may seem like a primarily postup player at the NCAA level, but make no mistake: Edey is a legitimately elite roll man. It’s obviously kinda hard to be a consistent roller when teams are pre-emptively packing the paint, which is why so many of Edey’s rolls intentionally lead to a postup instead. But seriously, if coverages aren’t perfectly in position, Edey has no issue rolling and dunking over someone with ease. His catch radius is absolutely ridiculous, with Braden Smith often just throwing it high and trusting that Edey will throw down the lob. It’s a real life “Edey out there somewhere” moment.

I find it interesting how people suddenly lose all semblance of creativity when discussing Edey’s offense. Some players are seen as infinitely malleable balls of clay, capable of incredible skill development simply due to their athleticism. But when it comes to Edey, conversations rarely consider his potential for skill acquisition, despite demonstrated outlier, deliberate growth in critical areas.

Is it not reasonable to expect that the preeminent postup god with counters galore and ridiculously good touch won’t be able to command a healthy number of post touches? When teams aren’t sending triple teams and preemptively blocking Edey’s roll to the paint, do you really think he won’t excel against single coverage? And most importantly, why isn’t the rapidly improving 7’5 center with a 7’10 wingspan, who is already a dominant rim threat and an hyperefficient roll man, given the slightest benefit of the doubt? The name of the scouting game is projection, yet there’s a baffling lack of imagination and recognition of Edey’s potential to simply parlay his size and touch into a more NBA-esque playtype distribution.

Argument: Sure, but what does Edey do without the ball in his hands?

This is probably the most common question that draftniks have for Edey. How does a guy with a 34% usage, the guy with the most 2s made in a single season since at least the early 90s, the guy who can’t space the floor, how does this guy play off-ball?

Before we even get into this, I want to acknowledge that this on-ball/off-ball offensive bifurcation isn’t particularly useful for prospect evaluations. “Affecting the game without the ball” is an overrated concept, particularly for centers, and with the phrase “not being able to play off-ball” typically just a euphemism for not being able to shoot and generate “gravity”. In this case, Edey’s ability to efficiently operate on high usage (an undeniable strength) is being contrived as a legitimate weakness; high usage is being conflated as an inability to operate at low usage.

But it’s important to note that most centers in the NBA are not generating closeouts to the perimeter. Here’s a simple answer: whatever Jonas Valaciunas does “without the ball”, Edey can do without the ball. Setting screens, drawing coverage with deep post position, offensive rebounding, passing out of doubles: Edey is not just feasibly capable but has actively demonstrated how he can “affect the game without the ball”. Let me explain.

First off, Edey is one of the most physically imposing screeners to enter the league in a long, long time. Edey’s arguably the best screen setter in the class, and it’s because he understands the nuances of position exceptionally well. If I was trying to design a player to set impossibly difficult screens to navigate, I would undoubtedly end up describing Zach Edey. Contrary to public opinion, Edey is deliberately swift and adept in dribble handoffs; when he sets screens, they are wide and hard to maneuver.  In particular, Edey is a master of the Zoom action, where a simple handoff near the top of the key gives the BH a full head of steam while also himself providing the threat of Edey on a potential roll.

Why’s this important? Edey is going to be a huge screen assist producer in the league. Not only does he set difficult screens to navigate, but Edey’s awareness in setting screens especially stands out, as he’s a master of positioning. When setting screens, he really understands how to shift the angle of the screen to best inhibit the reaction time of the defense to the ball handler. We’ve seen how useful guys like Gobert and Sabonis have been in generating screen assists; Edey seems likely to be next in line.

He’s even exceptional at disguising his movements in screening actions. One of Purdue’s most frequent actions to get Edey a dunk early in his collegiate career was a screen reject lob action that was based on the aforementioned zoom action. Edey would set up for a standard handoff in but then he would unexpectedly dive towards the basket for an easy finish of the lob, catching the defense off guard. You could really see Edey develop optimal awareness in these situation, as he became more cognizant of his own gravity and how to leverage it to make impactful, winning plays.

This leads me to my second point: Edey is a legit good passer for a big. Edey peaked at 3.7 assists per 100 possessions this year, with a 15% assist percentage to boot. For context: since 2008, Roy Hibbert is the only drafted player taller than 7 feet with an assist rate even above 11%. Edey is at 16%, 13% and 15% in the last 3 years. 

While a common anti-Edey talking point is his 0.9 assist to turnover rate, this understates how well Edey protected the basketball. In reality, Edey is coming off a strong 12.7 TO%, which is pretty damn good for a guy with 32% usage. Turnover percentage measures the proportion of turnovers for a player relative to their total possessions used. So, relative to his usage, he’s actually remarkably good at avoiding turnovers.

I watched all of Edey’s turnovers, and by far the most common cause was aggressive coverage on postups. Such a high proportion of the turnovers were either: 1) Edey getting swarmed as he tries to postup, allowing a guard to poke the ball out of his hands 2) Edey getting intercepted as he tries to pass out of a double team. Look man, if we agree that Edey isn’t going to be posting up as much in the NBA, then 1) is largely a moot point. Interceptions out of double teams is an undeniable issue, but it’s again largely a function of coverage. Still, I’m moved by the fact that he’s able to recognize and capitalize on openings on the perimeter. I’m also not as worried considering that so many of his turnovers are again a function of swarming coverage.

It’s these little things that make me so confident about Edey’s translation. Of course, he’s a generational mover at size, generational size, etc etc. But Edey seems uniquely fit to cognitively fit into NBA game speed. His passing out of doubles, low TO% relative to usage, his counters in the post to garner advantageous positioning, his granular screening tactics: Edey has undeniably good feel. He will be ready for counters in the NBA.

And now, we come to Edey’s most projectable skill: offensive rebounding. Edey enters the league as perhaps its best offensive rebounder from Day 1. How many prospects can you say that about anything? He has two of the best offensive rebounding seasons of all time, and need I remind you that he has a 7’10 WS? 

I hear the term “advantage creation” a lot. I think the discourse around advantage creation is certainly an exodus from its true essence; it’s now applied most commonly to slinky wings with strong movement aesthetic. But in every sense of its literal essence, Edey’s offensive rebounding is the ultimate form of advantage creation. Hell, everything about Edey’s functional strength is a means of advantage creation. Having such a powerful offensive rebounder is also an undeniable way of extending possessions and implicitly leading to more potential advantages. Having the most physically imposing, best offensive rebounder on your team means something, and if Edey is matched against a smaller big, as is common in this era of pace-and-space: it’s over. I know I’m not emphasizing this enough, but being such a force on the boards is a lost art, and it certainly raises Edey’s expected value. 

Purdue went 1/7 on 3s against UConn in the championship. I promise you, NBA teams aren’t doing that shit. The advantages that Edey generates are going to be more momentous, and any sort of double coverage or overcompensation to prevent Edey exerting his wrath on the roll is going to lead to open shots and clear advantages that Edey can extend.

Oh, and the foul drawing? It’s pretty generational too. Edey just put up the most FTs in a season since Armstrong landed on the moon. Blaming refs in college, who are actually pretty lenient towards fouls, is just not accurate, especially since Edey isn’t even remotely grifting for fouls. Edey is a monster foul drawer for objective reasons: he’s extremely physical and an expert at positioning. His strong awareness and physicality will translate, and it is ridiculous to expect anything other than Edey becoming a strong foul drawer in the NBA as he was in college. Unlike lumbering bigs of the past, Edey is also a good ass FT shooter, so hack a Edey isn’t gonna go particularly well.

Again, I find it baffling why the same margins of creativity aren’t being provided to Edey. The criticisms levied against Edey are fairly ubiquitous and can be applied towards any other player. How will Edey score against Embiid? How will Edey adjust to the pace of the NBA? Well, how is a team without a good ass seven footer supposed to guard Edey without conceding advantages elsewhere? The 7’5 center with a 7’10 WS who just led the NCAA in dunks, FT attempts, and offensive rebounding while also demonstrating strong feel on passes and deliberate positioning has the potential to legitimately break our understanding of offense. Walk with me, and dream a little.

It’s not only reductive, but straight up incorrect to imply that Edey’s sole goodness on offense is as a postup threat.

Argument: Edey will not survive on defense. 

This is where things get interesting. The primary issue with impact metrics is that they are most unable to ascertain defensive mobility. Perhaps the best proxy is steal%, but even that has its issues. Unfortunately, while Edey has a solid 7% block rate, he has a career 0.5% steal rate. This is the biggest flag in his profile to me, but he’s not entirely cooked.

Garza, Hansborough, Okafor, Tshiebwe etc were all terrible defensive prospects because they weren’t good rim protectors. They lacked size and rim protection production. This is a trait shared by most four-year college bigs to whom Edey is oft compared. Edey not only has demonstrated efficacy as a primary rim protector for 3 years running, but he also has a 7’10 WS. It’s a terrible comparison.

Let’s take a look at Edey on/off swings this year. When Edey is on the floor, teams shoot 9.2% worse at the rim, and they take 7% less shots at the rim. Teams shoot 7% worse on 2s when Edey is on the court, and opposing team free throw rates drop 9 points. Opponents offensive rebounding rates drop 5.8%, and opponents shoot 4.3 eFG% worse. Overall, Purdue’s defense allows 8.6 fewer points per 100 possessions with Edey on the court. Just look at the colors- These strong swings are indicative of a highly productive drop big. The swings in rim frequency is indicative of Edey’s legitimate rim deterrence.

Edey on/off swings, garbage adjusted, 20234season 

If you’re worried about on/off samples being too noisy in small size, here’s Edey’s on/offs from 2023. It’s the exact same story, demonstrating a two year sample of Edey being a highly productive drop defender.

Edey on/off swings, garbage adjusted, 2023 season 

Just for context, Iowa’s 2021 team had virtually no change in defensive productivity with Garza on and off the floor. 3.1 fewer points per 100 possessions with Garza off the court, with no change in rim %, 2P%, or eFG%. Just an absolutely abhorrent defender, with no evidence of drop goodness.

Argument: Maybe he can play drop, but he’s too immobile to stay on the floor otherwise.

There needs to be a level of nuance to the Edey mobility debates. There’s a faction of Draft Twitter that ignores anything combine-related at all: scrimmages, anthropometrics, shooting drills, agility tests are all non-functional and should be ignored in favor of good ole in-game tape. There’s another faction that takes all the data points of the combine at face value, using them to make macro projections about prospects. The first faction ridicules the second faction for applying Edey’s strong lane agility and shuttle run performances, especially relative to Sarr, Missi, and Clingan, as an antidote for Edey’s mobility concerns.

I don’t find myself in the middle, but rather chasing a new standard, nuance. It’s typically a mistake to ignore any data points, and the combine provides a set of highly standardized data points that can be benchmarked against decades worth of prospects. However, a quick look at the historic applicability of the tests puts some of the Edey pro-mobility discourse to rest. 

First off, there are 3 total agility drills. The three-quarter sprint drill was the one drill that Edey performed poorly in, and unfortunately, that’s the drill that is most correlated with mobility in a traditional NBA context. The most direct application of the three-quarter sprint can be understood as leaking out in transition and in closeout quickness. Furthermore, Edey’s vertical was amongst the bottom of testers. Some of these issues can be masked by Edey’s sheer size, but it inevitably dampens Edey’s ability to self-organize or make longer rotations. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been much discourse about Edey guarding bigger lob threats in the NBA, as I’m a bit worried about scenarios where he’s not quick enough to backpedal and not functionally fast off the ground to contest. There is a slight bit of poster potential on Edey, and this seems like a bigger issue than large space mobility to me.

However, watching Edey compared to last year, it’s clear that he’s made legitimate athletic improvements. His athletic testing improved from last year to this year (especially on max vert and lane agility tests), but so did his ambidexterity. On offense, we’ve seen Edey become more comfortable posting up on either side of the block and not hesitating to use his left hand hook if need be. On defense, it’s the same story, able to contest with either hand. Edey’s development on defense over the last 3 years has been remarkable to watch, with dramatic improvements in his technique and converting awareness to reaction. Further functional vertical improvements will only make his value proposition as a legit good drop big even more robust. 

I’d say some of Edey’s biggest weaknesses right now are slow backpedals and a lack of aggression on contests (often post-backpedal/as he rotates). There are certainly times when Edey’s hands are down as he rotates. But generally, I think there’s some conflation of lacking aggression with staying out of foul trouble. Edey is coming off two straight years of guard-like foul rates (2.4 fouls called per 40 this year), and much of that appears to be by design. It makes sense; the fulcrum of Purdue’s offense needs to be on the court as much as possible, and his length and size alone provide a strong enough baseline of deterrence as it is. It is far too risky for Edey to be in foul trouble, giving rise to his somewhat aggression-averse nature on defense. Especially in the tournament, I think Painter estimated that the opportunity cost of Edey fouling out was far too high; I’d wager that he instructed Edey not to chase as many blocks, consequently deflating his block volume during those last few games.

While Edey’s large space mobility is somewhat questionable, his small space mobility is quite good, and it’s a large part of why he tested so well in the shuttle run and lane agility drills. I also believe that there’s definitely a sort of visual bias at play: since bigger players have longer limbs, their movements appear slower compared to smaller players with quicker, shorter movements. Slower movements do not mean that taller players cover less ground or are slower in terms of timed speed or agility. I think a lot of the criticisms of Edey stem from either unrealistic expectations, or an overemphasis on his lack of large space mobility. 

What’s interesting is that Edey’s strong shuttle run and lane agility performances would intuit that he is a strong backpedaller, but he actually seems to struggle in this regard. Perhaps there is some low hanging fruit, or maybe this is just an intrinsic physical limitation. Regardless, Edey is a very aware defender, especially when flipping his hips in tight spaces. He’s made leaps and bounds in converting from awareness to functional reaction as of late.

So what does this all mean for Edey’s defensive projection? Well, he’s going to be somewhat limited to drop for the start of his career, which he is quite good at. Edey being such a good rebounder should mitigate some concerns with drop; even if he switches onto the ball handler, he’s long and physical enough to fight for the board and avoid an offensive rebound. There’s lots of great drop defenders in the league, so this isn’t a death sentence at all. However, I do think Edey’s rapid improvement curve and innate body control should allow him to eventually play more aggressive coverages. He’s such a smart player, and he has much larger margins to err based on his dimensions. I think he’s able to eventually guard closer to the level and recover without getting brutally beat off the dribble. 

Argument: Edey is a system player and is only good because he is a stat padding height merchant.

“Edey is only good because he’s tall” might be the most ridiculous criticism I’ve ever heard. Was Shaq a height merchant too? Yao? Giannis, Embiid, and Jokic are height merchants? Basketball is centralized on controlling vertical space, and it’s absolutely a benefit to be taller in this game. And while the NBA does have better athletes than college, Edey will still be at a far and away size advantage, especially since Edey has the best measurables in the history of the combine. This guy is 7’4 without shoes with a +6 wingspan and a 9’8 standing reach. It’s absolutely insane to me that Edey’s measurables are somehow being cast in a negative light. 

Let’s look at it from another point of view: Edey’s combination of structural anthropometrics/measurables and functional physical dominance on the court makes him one of the most menacing interior players of all time. The most productive and efficient player in college basketball also happens to be its tallest/longest. Sure, there’s the chance he could have a harder time asserting his physicality against NBA athletes. When Edey plays against the Embiid’s and Gobert’s of the world, he’s going to have a “welcome to the NBA” moment. This is inevitable. It applies to literally every single prospect in the history of the draft- everyone in the history of the NBA has faced an uphill battle adjusting to their contemporaneous physically dominant bigs.

Now, onto the slightly more relevant issue: Edey does get a lot of “system player” allegations. And there’s probably a bit of merit to this: Matt Painter has a history of building offenses around lumbering seven footers, and those players’ translation in the league has been shaky to say the least. However, there’s a great, strongly established means of sniffing out system players: on/off stats. 

The essence of on/off stats is pretty straightforward: if a team’s net rating drops with the player off the floor, that player is likely important. If a team’s net rating rises without a player, that player is likely somewhat of a detriment. It’s obviously a bit reductive, but modern tools allow us to filter out garbage time and games against mickey mouse opponents. There might be some collinearity, but Purdue guard play is just so terrible that it’s probably not an issue. It’s also useful to use a two season sample, as these samples tend to be a bit noisy if not robustly sized.

So, let’s take a look at Purdue’s on/off stats for its last 3 bigs: Matt Haarms, Trevion Williams, and Zach Edey. And let’s use two year on/off samples. We’ll filter out garbage time and only focus on production vs t200 teams:

• Trevion Williams: -4.9 net rating in 2021 (jr), -10.9 net rating in 2022 (sr)
• Matt Haarms: 13.6 net rating in 2019 (soph), -8.8 net rating in 2020 (jr)
• Zach Edey: 13.1 net rating in 2022(soph) , 24.6 net rating in 2023 (jr) , 32.4 net rating in 2024 (senior)

FYI: Haarms was older as a sophomore than Edey was as a senior.

Aggregate two-year net rating of +57 is NUTS. Unsurprisingly, Edey has the best on/off splits in the NCAA since 2018 (this is the farthest that the database goes). We can use RAPM, or regularized plus minus: Edey has the highest RAPM score since at least 2010.

Just for fun, let’s compare this to Garza. Garza had an aggregate +35 net rating in 2020 and 2021 combined vs t200 opponents, garbage adjusted. Good player, good numbers! But Edey’s on/off swings this year (+32) were nearly as good as Garza in two years combined (+35). Again, Garza was not even remotely as impactful as Edey is.

Let this linger for a bit. If Edey’s on/off swings are so damn violent, what does that say about him as a “system player”, and what does that say about the personnel around Edey?

These plus-minus stats aren’t just your typical box score sourced numbers, and you can’t just grab a bunch of rebounds and dunk a ton to boost your RAPM or on/off score. It’s much harder to fake these numbers, as they’re a regularized look at impact; they are meant to sniff out statpadders. Edey just happens to have the legit best impact by the numbers for the last 15 years at minimum.

Let it be known that these include defense as well! Edey is the anchor of a legit good Purdue team, and even bifurcating into offensive and defensive ratings, the on/off swings on defense are just as violent. But you know that now.

Edey isn’t a system player. He is the system. He is the single most impactful college player that we have seen for a long time. 

Argument: Edey will be played off the floor because he cannot space the floor

The biggest misconception about the modern NBA is that centers need to space the floor. That literally couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sure, some of the best centers in the league shoot, kind of. At ~ 5 3s per game, JJJ and KAT pace all centers in 3P volume. Vuc, Brook Lopez, and Jokic are around three 3P/game. AD and Giannis take two 3P/game. But this assumption that all centers need to shoot is generally pushed by casual fans who keep up more with the highlights from the league’s best players. When you go down to even the upper middle tier of centers, you see the three point volume decline precipitously. 

In terms of career 3s made: Jarrett Allen has made 19 career 3s, Ayton has 18 career 3s, Drummond has 15 career 3s, Bam has 8 career 3s, Plumlee and Poeltl have 2 career 3s, Steven Adams and Zubac have made one total three in their entire career, and Mitchell Robinson and Clint Capela have never made a 3 in the NBA. 

Lack of shooting isn’t a death sentence at all. In fact, you can be a quite good offensive center without ever shooting. The corollary is that you have to make up for a lack of shooting elsewhere, namely via inside-the-arc hyper efficiency. All of these nonshooters demonstrate subtleties to their game that makes them consistently dominant interior forces to be reckoned with. Good thing Edey is the most dominant interior scoring prospect that we’ve seen for decades.

We’ve established how good Edey can be without the ball in his bands, and in this section, we’ve so far demonstrated how ubiquitous non-shooting centers are in the NBA. But the million dollar question remains: can Edey actually shoot in the NBA? Let’s do some analysis.

There’s been very very few bigs who come into the NBA as even decent shooters. JJJ, Chet, Wemby, and Kristaps are probably the only notable names. There’s a handful of guys who shot a small volume of 3s pre-NBA, but most were middling FT shooters: Jokic took 2.85 3s/game on 32% 3P with 67% FT, Myles Turner/Vuc/Kevin Love all took around 4 3s/100 on ~70% FT. 

But those tend to be the exception, not the norm. Interestingly, many of the “stretch bigs” we know today were complete non-shooters in college. AD, KAT, Embiid, Al Horford, Sabonis did not shoot at all pre-NBA. Neither did DeMarcus Cousins, Brook Lopez, Paul Millsap, Julius Randle, or Blake Griffin. Even many of the low tier stretch bigs were absolutely non-shooters pre-NBA: Meyers Leonard, John Collins, Robin Lopez, Mareese Speights, Gorgui Dieng, Aron Baynes. If you’re wondering where I’m getting these names, I found this list of stretch 5s. At least half of them were absolute non-shooters pre-NBA, and most of the rest were very low volume shooters.

I can anticipate two criticisms. First, a few of the non-shooters who turned shooters were only non-shooters in their freshman year. As the logic would go, Edey is a senior aged player and is already behind the eight ball in reaching his innate capacity for shooting. That is true, but we have to remember that Edey is a relatively young basketball player. Not only is he young for his class, but he only started playing basketball as a sophomore year in high school! He’s clearly followed an exceptional developmental trajectory thus far, so it’s fair to use these younger players as a point of reference. Also, most of the names I provided were multi-year college guys, so there’s clearly some precedent of non shooting 21 year old → decent shooting NBA big.

There’s pretty much only two ways to ascertain “touch” for non-shooting centers: FTs and non-rim 2s. As a sanity check, JJJ was at 47% on non-rim 2s and 80% on FTs, while Kristaps was at 43% on non-rim 2s and 75% on FTs. Edey is at 45.7% on non-rim 2s and 70.6% on FTs over his 4 years in college. This isn’t too surprising either; Edey’s touch is incredibly good. His coordination and silky touch on hooks and touch shots out of postups is especially impressive, with a remarkably quick release. The speed of release is so quick that it may underlie strong processing skills, a concept derived from embodied decision making.

But obviously Edey’s touch doesn’t mean too much in regards to projecting 3P shooting, as it could conceivably yield false positives. This begs the question: how many non-shooting centers have matched Edey’s touch indicators, and how many of them ended up shooting in the NBA?

Here’s one particularly compelling example: John Collins. Collins made no threes in two years of college, yet he’s transformed into one of the premier pick and pop threats in this league. Despite his lack of three point volume, Collins certainly exhibited touch. In his final season at Wake Forest, Collins shot 74% on FTs and a whopping 44% on non-rim 2s. 

John Collins, 2016-17 scoring stats

Guess who else also happens to be pretty decent at shooting long 2s and FTs. 

Zach Edey, career scoring stats

Upon first glance, it’s evident just how good Edey’s touch is. Even at the rim, his efficiency is astounding. 

Not convinced? Let’s drop these thresholds a bit and see if there’s any historical comparisons. Let’s find drafted players who shot 72% on FTs and 40% on non-rim 2s. We’ll set the volume thresholds at minimum 50 made far 2s and maximum 2.0 3pa/100.

Yes, there are some big misses. Obviously the Zellers never got around to shooting, neither did Nick Richards or Sacre or Brice Johnson, and Bairstow/Hamilton/Osby fell out of the league fairly quickly. But there’s some real success stories here. Thomas Welsh never stuck in the league, but he shot 36% on 132 3P attempts over 2 G-League seasons. Rui and Stewart have really transformed into quite good shooters. Metu, Collins, and Meyers Leonard appear to be the most similar profiles to Edey, and they all ended up shooting decently.  Overall, most of this list ended up pretty solid shooters by center standards.

I won’t get too in the weeds though: I recognize that there’s definitely an element of analytical dissonance in deeming a complete non-shooter as a potential shooter in the NBA simply off some touch numbers. There’s a good chance Edey just ends up a non-shooter like Zeller and Sacre.

But honestly, it would be a disservice to not try to develop Edey as a shooter. Obviously a 7’5 guy shooting threes is not a complete novelty anymore, but it’s still a pretty ridiculous mismatch – his length would make him pretty much impossible to contest. I really don’t think it’s too crazy to think that Edey could end up shooting 1 to 2 threes per game on like 35% unguarded C&S. And if he ends up with a real shot, that raises his ceiling even more. 

Yes, it’s hard to project shooting for bigs. Yes, this is a slightly aged list, and yes, many recently drafted bigs are showcasing perimeter skill in pre-NBA. Yes, this exercise is largely hypothetical, and yes, you may take this with a grain of salt. But for all the shooting projection that is applied to prospects with far worse circumstances, this isn’t too crazy to estimate real shooting development with Edey.

Ultimately, Edey has only been playing basketball since he was 16, he has innately good touch, and bigger players have consistently demonstrated a much longer developmental curve. I’d assume there’s minimal issues with core stability based on his functional strength, and the kinetic control between upper and lower extremities is somewhat mitigated by his inevitably two-motion shot. It’s quite plausible that Edey could shoot on solid volume, and there’s a good chance he doesn’t shoot at all. I trust NBA teams to eventually develop Edey as a shooter.

Argument: Edey would have been an elite pick in the 1980s, but he was born in the wrong era.

This is probably the most ubiquitous comment on any post I see about Edey. Something along the lines of Edey traditionally being a good pick a few decades ago but not worth a good draft pick in the “modern” NBA.

I totally get why we are taxing Edey for era. The line of thinking goes, if Edey was coming out before this fast paced, three-point heavy era, then his weaknesses (not shooting and not mobile) would be diminished and we must just adjust our expectations. But to me, you have to be realistic about the extent of those overadjustments.

1. If you think Edey would have been a top pick during the 80s/90s (back in the good ole days when players played all four years and bigs used to post-up and guards used to handcheck and shoot midrangers), then that tells me that you think Edey would have been an All-NBA/HOF level talent in his prime back in the day. That should be a pretty reasonable expectation for a top pick.
2. If you think this is true, then you would essentially be arguing that there exist certain All-NBA/HOF talents from the 1980s/1990s who would not stick in today’s NBA.
   1. If so, name them. Tell me HOF-level 1980s-1990s guys who you wouldn’t draft. 

This is where I disagree: I think that EVERY All-NBA and HOF level talents from the 80s and 90s, even those with unvalued archetypes by the status quo, would still be quite good in today’s NBA. If you genuinely think that those players would fall out of the league, then that’s fine, but it’s not a natural equilibrium, and now the burden of proof is on you to provide examples of such players. 

So, by this logic, Edey should be able to stick around in the league for a bit. And by the Hollingerian adage that there’s ~20 players that “stick” in the draft each year, maybe taking Edey so high wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Argument: Edey projects as a sixth man type, and that’s not worth a high pick.

This is such a ridiculous concern that I considered omitting this section completely. But I’ve seen it said enough that I need to address it. They revolve around Edey supposedly not being “fit” to play more than a bench role in the NBA, usually because of some worry about durability and health in the pace-and-space NBA.

Edey is one of the most well-conditioned, durable prospects above seven feet in the history of basketball. Out of the hundreds of players above seven feet that have played in D1 college basketball in the last 15 years, Edey played the most total minutes in a single season.

Edey is not just durable relative to centers – he’s remarkably consistent for any star player. He averaged 32 minutes a game over his junior and senior seasons without missing a single game. With a monstrous career 32% usage, the Purdue offense is built around Edey, and opposing coaches primarily scheme against Edey. He lives in the paint, dealing with swarming double and triple teams night in and out, leading the nation in points and rebounds. All while also being the anchor of the team on defense. The brand of basketball that Zach Edey plays is severely physically taxing, and yet his consistency on both ends is absolutely historic. 

Take Edey’s March Madness run. In four consecutive games, Edey never left the floor: he played an average of 40 minutes while averaging well above 30 points and 13 rebounds without ever dipping under 62% TS single game.This is a pretty insane intersection of production and robustness for anyone, and it’s exponentially more impressive given his size.

The bar is so low that Edey is genuinely the first prospect that I can remember who is well over 7 feet tall and doesn’t have durability concerns. This is only more impressive considering that Zach Edey shoulders the most substantial per-game burden of any player in quite some time, regardless of size. Make no mistake; this is indicative of generational durability and potentially generational longevity for his size.

There’s so many possible applications of his generational durability. Perhaps his mobility and defense improves as his usage approaches the level of mere mortals. Maybe the conditioning advantage serves as a schematic advantage, forcing teams to devise multiple solutions to stop him if their primary center is worn out. 

Given the accepted inverse relationship between usage and efficiency, the physical burden that Edey consistently endured over 4 years at Purdue is an important asterisk that may disguise a fascinating upside tail.

Closing Statements:

There are so many independent schools of thought when it comes to projecting upside.

One school of thought includes the skill purists, often maligned for over indexing on the “ball don’t stop” theory: the belief that putting the ball in the basket is the ultimate objective and that prospects who can get a bucket should be valued most.

There’s the calculator boys, who look for strong box score stats and impact metrics. They argue that consistent statistical dominance in key areas often translates well to the NBA

There’s the developmentalists, who believe that a strong track record in formative years is the most reliable indicator of a player’s potential to thrive in the NBA. This school of thought often looks for prospects who have continually dominated despite rising competition levels.

There’s the intangibles enthusiasts, who often pore over hours of draftexpress player interviews to find the prospects that stand out in mental attributes like work ethic and leadership qualities

There’s even the tools truthers, who believe that athleticism is critical to opening up upside avenues. The greatest players of all time were all uber athletes, so chase physical behemoths with monster wingspan, length, speed, agility, and verticality. 

Edey is the rare prospect that crushes every single possible assessment of potential upside. He’s by far the most dominant scorer in college basketball. He’s easily the most statistically impressive college player in decades, putting up historic productivity in every single year as a starter, while crushing the age-standardized FIBA U19 tourney to boot. He’s not a foul grifter, has no personality or character deficits, and of course, this guy is 7’5 with a 7’10 WS with strong mobility testing and outlier strength. 

It’s ridiculous that Edey is being talked about like a perennial bench big. It doesn’t matter how you slice it: Edey’s ceiling is incomprehensible. The fact that Edey has to face Luka Garza allegations is a case study in how innate and learned biases can implicitly lead us to develop heuristics that lack any sort of objectivity. 

There’s also simply a remarkable lack of creativity when projecting Edey. The man 5 inches taller and straight up far better at this beautiful sport than his most frequent comparators, Steven Adams and Ivica Zubac. Why are we hyperfocusing on correctable, reparable, bad-faith analysis of a player with as many generational strengths as Edey? Spare me the lecture on the overuse of the term generational: how many guys in this class have a single, remotely generational trait?

Our engagement with Edey’s capabilities illustrates a broader cultural and cognitive phenomenon: the imposition of narrative structures on the fluid chaos of this beautiful sport. We categorize, simplify, and unfortunately distort the raw dynamism of the  game into abstracted, comprehensible parts. These Boban/Zubac/Garza comparisons, the “matchup dependent, bench big” discourse, the “low-ceiling” narrative; these are all manifestations of how language affects the abstraction of evaluative paradigms, which restrict our perception. Edey’s dominant production is viewed through the prism of systematic accommodation that fundamentally fails to capture the essence of what makes him so remarkable. Exceptional attributes cannot challenge conventional frameworks without a consciously unmasking of linguistically determined evaluative paradigms and their downstream effects. And Edey has some exceptional, dare I say generational, attributes that make him such a fascinating, potentially game-breaking prospect.

Generational height. Generational wingspan. Generational weight. General box-score productivity. Generational impact metrics. Generational efficiency to usage. Generational offensive rebounding. Generational foul drawing. Generational rim scoring. Generational low post scoring. Generational screen-setter. Generational durability.

Not too bad for a guy who averaged 2 ppg in high school just 4 years ago.

The post The Edey Enigma: A Systematic Defense of a Generational Talent appeared first on Swish Theory.

What role will Leonard Miller play in the league? I have no idea. What I do know is that role projection analysis is capped, the issue with historical analysis is overgeneralization, and Leonard Miller should most definitely not be mocked in the 20s for the 2023 NBA Draft.

I can say with strong confidence that there really has never been a prospect like Leonard Miller. And quite frankly, there’s no reason why his integration of skills should be demonized (see: Refutation). His combination of physical tools, tangible skill, and sheer productivity is ridiculous, and it’s best epitomized through the following Skill-Paradigm framework.

Skill: Youth + Productivity

Paradigm: Exceptional productivity at a young age is indicative of untapped upside.

Leonard is freshman aged (Nov 2003, born in same month as Taylor Hendricks and Keyonte George). He is averaging a whopping 18 ppg with grown men on spectacular efficiency. 

63% TS, 66% at the rim, and a whopping 38 dunks. 24 points per 40 minutes, which would place him 5th across prospects in ESPN’s latest mock draft. He is genuinely a high volume scorer with simply tremendous efficiency and interior dominance. 

Since Leonard is at 63% TS, 38 dunks, and 18 ppg, let’s look at all freshman prospects who have ever hit 60% TS, 30 dunks, and 17 ppg:

1. Zion
2. Marvin Bagley
3. DeAndre Ayton
4. Vernon Carey
5. Jahlil Okafor

Four Duke bigs and Ayton is crazy. Lowering it to 16 ppg adds the following: 

6. Evan Mobley
7. Onyeka Okongwu
8. TJ Leaf
9. Zeke Nnaji

Again, pretty limited company. (Note that no one here had a FT% above 73% and none of them were really operating from the perimeter. That will be important soon.)

I understand that the G League has a different pace, but it’s almost certainly harder to score in the G vs college. You can waffle about rim protection but these numbers should at least contextualize Leonard’s scoring dominance. He was putting up numbers in the G League that only five other freshmen have even come close to in college.

But why does this matter? Why is the combination of youth and productivity so important?

Suppose I gave a group of college students an algebra test. Their scores would generally not be very useful or predictive, for obvious reasons. However, if I gave the algebra test to a group of 6th graders, it’s more likely to hold insights regarding their foundational skills. Obviously it’s not perfect, since access to resources/rate of development can vary dramatically, but it’s at least better at differentiating between performance. 

In the same way, a 19 year old dominating in a league full of grown men is an incredibly important statistical point. The age curve is real, and Leonard was not only the most statistically dominant teenager in the history of the G League, but he did it despite limited high-level experience – he was playing in Canadian youth circuits a year ago. High volume scoring at high efficiency is impressive and very rare among 19 year olds within the NCAA, let alone the G-League, which is littered with former college stars.

In other words:

(Historic Examples: Walker Kessler, Franz Wagner, Tyrese Haliburton, Mikal Bridges, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The relative heterogeneity of the group is a testament to the power of precocious productivity)

Skill: Size + Touch + Youth

Adjust usage of touch indicators based on size and youth.

Leonard is not a good shooter at the moment. He’s a very strongly below average shooter at the moment. This is a player who was below average or worse on jump shots, catch and shoot (both guarded and unguarded), dribble jumpers, early jumpers, runners, and hooks- literally every shot category not at the rim, Leonard was solidly below average. At the combine, Leonard finished dead last in the shooting drill, tied with Oscar Tshiebwe. 

Now that we have that out of the way, I say with as much confidence as I can for a player with such a negative shooting profile: Leonard is a relatively good bet to shoot. Let’s break this skill integration down:

1. Skill: Size + Touch

Leonard’s exceptional touch is most obvious to anyone who has watched even a modicum of Leonard film. I’m assuming readers are somewhat familiar with Leonard’s incredible bevy of floaters, off the glass ambidextrous pushes, and off-foot, off-hand finishes. If not: basically, Leonard Miller has incredible touch, but less in the traditional sense of strictly being a good shooter and more so in the sensuous control and finesse of his release in the short-intermediate area.

Leonard also shoots 80% from the line on strong volume. This is especially impressive considering the G League foul rules generating only one free throw per shooting foul, rather than two FTs/foul as in NCAA. The second free throw is anecdotally easier to make than the first free throw, with some armchair statisticians citing 4-5% increase in accuracy on the second FT vs the first FT. Given the robust sample size and the one FT rule, Leonard’s 80% FT is probably a slight underestimate. That is wild.

There’s obviously touch in terms of shooting, but how does touch operate in regards to ball handling fluidity? 

Well, Leonard has a wildly functional handle at 6’11.  He can genuinely dribble in small spaces extraordinarily well, and can maintain his dribble despite pretty significant pressure. The underlying fluidity of Leonard’s handling (he inadvertently throws  passes with one hand off a live dribble?) indicates another layer of the insanely high threshold of fine motor skills that Leonard possesses. We often tend to abridge dribbling as a learned skill, but it’s just as much of a function of biomechanical/motor underpinnings. Does this mean that he has a higher likelihood of hitting fadeaways and maybe even legitimate pull-ups off an improvised dribble cadence? Is he even going to be able to hit inside the arc fadeaways off hostage dribbles? I think these are legitimate potential outcomes. Nonetheless, Leonard’s fluidity and touch extends beyond just his free throw mastery to his BH craft, and I think his BH upside is significant enough to consider.

2. Skill: (Size + Touch) + Youth

The “coordination curve” is real. Tall players tend to undergo much more drastic skill improvements than shorter players. This is but another generality, but this is either because 1) the wings have been dominating by virtue of physicality for a while and are thereby at a skill disadvantage or 2) said player has grown immensely over a short period of time and is reaping the benefits of activating newfound avenues of scoring by virtue of increased frame and mass. Leonard may be the rare case that fits in both categories.

This might be intuitive, but young, wing sized players need to be graded on a much less harsh shooting curve- they are most prone to making massive in-season shooting leaps. Just look at Brandon Miller 3P volume/%  leap this year, or even Tari Eason’s FT% jump from freshman to sophomore year in 2022. Touch indicators are probably more robust for wings than guards, since the shooting curve is longer for wings. Speaking as someone who had Devon Dotson insanely high, Devon Dotson shooting 80% from the line but only 30% from 3 is not as strong of a shooting bet as someone 6 inches taller than him. Leonard has great touch indicators, he’s 6’10”, and he’s 19 years old. His already strong touch indicators are even more impressive in context of his size and age. He is certainly not destined to be a “bad” shooter.

3. Skill Gap: Shooting woes are a function of mechanics not touch

Leonard’s jumper issues are mechanically a function of energy leakage. The load mechanism is inconsistent from jumper to jumper, leading to a mistimed synchronization between the lower body to the core/upper body. This breakdown of the kinetic chain limits the push-off from the legs. 

The subsequent force generated from the lower body is meant to transfer throughout the hips and core, thereby enabling rotational torque about his center of gravity that thrusts the ball into trajectory. However, Leonard has a low arching push shot that is visibly segmented from the workflow of the kinetic linking, leading to a disparately visible discrimination between the set and push of the shot.

The hitch seems to cause variations in the release point of the ball. The pause disrupts the natural fluidity of the shooting motion, making it challenging to replicate a consistent release point from shot to shot. Leonard appears to over-rely on his upper extremity strength to generate power, bypassing the opportunity to maximize force production from the larger leg and core muscles.

Here’s the bottom line: Leonard is generating virtually no energy transfer between the kinetic linking of the upper and lower body. Part of that is the limited core stability symptomatic of the landing leg kicks and even poor one-legged landing mechanics after dunks. 

Touch + Energy Transfer = Shooting

Touch, which is succinctly the nexus of sensory feedback and coordination, operates synergistically with energy transfer to manifest in shooting goodness. Shots such as free throws and intermediate area shots are somewhat standardized to an extent- neither rely on a consistently dynamic change of energy transfer up the kinetic chain, and they are much more effective in indicating underlying touch.

Essentially, Leonard excels at these kinds of shots, since he has such good touch but not so great control over a homogeneous synchronization of energy transfer. Since his specialty – free throws and intermediate area shots – are more touch based and less dependent on efficient energy transfer, he excels at them.

However, when extending range to long 2’s/threes, there’s a necessity for more fluidity from upper body to release by virtue of the increasing distance. Leonard seems to be over reliant on his touch on the longer range jumpers/threes, which is probably why he seems to be pushing the ball so vigorously; the lack of effective energy transfer necessitates this vigor. The lack of core stability is either a symptom or root cause of the limited kinetic control- its the underlying bridge between the lower and upper extremities. I cannot emphasize how his one leg landings are really really bad, which is further evidence of his limited core stability.

Leonard has good touch and bad energy transfer/rotational torque. I’m no Chip England, but this is a far brighter picture than what the numbers portray. Core stability seems like an issue that can be fixed, and he also has insane touch- not just good touch, but borderline ridiculous touch. Fixing a shot mechanically is tough, but having the underlying elite touch makes it much lower hanging fruit than for a true “non shooter.” 

Skill: Physicality + Dawg

Unorthodox athleticism and motor at a young age is a strong indicator of outlier development.

Leonard is such a strong athlete. He fights hard for every single rebound and loose ball, which is impressive considering how often the Ignite were losing this year. He was ranked sixth in the entire G-League in rebounds a game, averaging 12 per 36 minutes. That is insane. A 19 year old who is quite visibly not even close to filling out physically, is inexplicably out rebounding grown men. For context, he’s averaging as many rebounds as Kenneth Faried. 

His per-game rebound rate is easily the highest among draft-eligible underclassmen, he’s fourth overall among draft eligible players… and he’s doing this against grown men, not against college players.

The intrinsic dawg of Leonard enables his rebounding goodness in the face of his lack of tangible strength and youth. He has an incredibly high motor, and he’s physically gifted (6’11” with a 7’2” wingspan and functionally very very strong, clearly) with seemingly much more room to grow and gain strength. The intersection of Leonard’s insane physicality, potential for even more physicality, and sheer dawg is not only rare, but seemingly ripe for outlier development. 

The most egregious part is that this 6’11” teenager legitimately moves like a guard. With long legs, flexible hips, and an incredible vestibular sense, Leonard can maintain stability while stringing out spins and stepbacks. In every sense of the term, Leonard is an advantage creator. His low shin angles, rapidly veering lower body rotations, and the sheer variance in his weight distribution allow him to lower his center of gravity and generate paint touches off a perimeter standstill. Again, how many 6’10 guys in the league can get a paint touch in the halfcourt?

Refutation: Role Projection is Imprecise

I fundamentally disagree with lowering a player’s projected outcome because of uncertainty regarding their projected role.

When we see a prospect that has an entirely unique set of flaws and weaknesses, role projection becomes much more difficult. There is no one to cross-check with, no one to even remotely compare the prospect and get a sense of what kind of outcomes they can achieve.  An intuitive byproduct of this is that when an unfamiliar, newer type of archetypal prospect emerges, they are mistakenly demonized for not being easily projectable. Here’s the issue though: precise role projection is hard as hell. Besides using general terms such as “future PnR BH”, “cutter”, “connector”, it is extremely difficult to project future roles for players. This is why I find it a bit ridiculous to be low on a player because you can’t project them well: Since when can we effectively project roles to begin with?

Of course, I am speaking in generalities to an extent. But if the biggest question for Leonard is not his productivity, ability to hold up against NBA defenses, or scoring touch, then uncertainty about role is quite a weak reason to limit his outcome projection. And this role uncertainty does seem to be the primary question regarding Leonard.

Closing Pitch: Leonard Miller is Good

Leonard Miller is projected to be picked outside the top 20, which, regardless of evaluatory paradigm of choice, is borderline ridiculous. I believe he has a legitimate top 10 case, and should at least be considered with a lottery selection. 

The issue with historical analysis is overgeneralization: history doesn’t repeat itself. It may follow incredibly similar patterns, making the process of prediction easier to elucidate. But there are far too many confounding variables to project variability by virtue of precedent alone. 

Again, anyone who pretends that precise role projection is somewhat feasible is lying to you. Most people base role projection almost entirely off precedent, which means that when an unfamiliar, newer type of archetypal prospect emerges, they demonize them for not being familiar. We often conflate projecting outcomes with projecting roles. Most role projections are outright wrong, so quite frankly I don’t see too much of an issue with not knowing how Leonard will project.

Who is Leonard Miller at his peak? I honestly have no idea. He’s such an unprecedented player with such wide discrepancies between his strengths and weaknesses; his role is impossible to project. 

What position does he guard? To be honest, I’m not losing sleep at night regarding the primary position that Leonard Miller, a 6’11 teenage wing with a 7’2 wingspan and insatiable motor, will guard. Again, I don’t know what role he will play, but isn’t the most dominant teenager in G-League history a good bet to be a role player at least?

Hollingerian draft analysis is predicated around the idea of stability of floor, wherein there are 20 players who will evolve into feasible contributors, and searching for those 20 players in any given draft should be a primary consideration of any big board. While this approach has its flaws, including overfitting without effectively capturing changing league context, it’s a floor-centric approach that should theoretically favor Leonard. 

This is the beauty of the Leonard Miller draft evaluation. You can be a tools-centric truther, a pure hooper, a calculator boy with a distaste for ahistorical analysis, a Hollinger disciple, or from the Zwickerian tree of making a  series of objective extrapolations off every minutiae of tangible skill. Leonard Miller combines all sectors of evaluatory paradigms with his unprecedented integration of skills.

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