Since the 2024 cycle, I have tried to dive deeper into answering the question of how we can project and evaluate draft prospects more accurately from the vacuum. I thought the best way to approach this would be to solve the problem systematically. I started by trying to identify what traits were common among the players that succeeded over time regardless of how limited their early usage was and their fit in the roster construction.

In a lot of ways to rank players on a board is taking a step back and looking at scouting the draft through a broader systemic approach. I believe that part of the exercise has intrinsic value. However, to project without a development context has no real value. I think the optimal way to rank and project the players from a vacuum is to identify the caliber a player can reach even if they end up in a less-than-desired development context.

The idea that I kept circling back to is that success was often tied to the traits that were much harder to develop: feel, athletic tools, motor, and touch. Digging through the history of the draft, it landed me on the concept of role malleability – a notion that encompasses these traits. In my experience, showing a high proclivity to role malleability below the age of 23 has been a strong proxy for a player’s processing, application of athletic tools, shooting tools, and motor. With this, my draft philosophy evolved and has helped me formulate my tenets of scouting the draft through my eye test and statistical analysis:

• Age-Adjusted Production Relative To Competition.
• Role Malleability Traits (Application Of Feel, Motor, Application Of Athleticism, Touch).
• Skill Intersections (Positive Or Negative Chain Of Skills That Provide Baseline For Production).
• Margin Of Error On The Court
• Application Of Tools (Avoid Archetype Bias)

In my margins piece, I designed a funnel framework to systematically value the projection of players based on their margin of error – a function of a player’s advantage creation/mitigation skillsets. While I still agree with much of what went into the framework, I realized I structured it too narrowly by using the dependency on scheme (usage of screens or an empty-side action to clear one side of the court). I mainly argued that the dependencies on scheme and volume of advantages created on offense or mitigated on defense derived a player’s margin of error on the court, and therefore their value. While this system was valuable, I noticed it was devaluing the players who do produce at a better rate with the help of scheme than the ones who produce worse and do not require assistance to create or mitigate advantages.

Since reading Avinash’s piece this past cycle, I think a more expanded way to frame the funnel framework would be by defining the Margin of Error On the Court as the application of tools (cognitive, athletic, and shooting) that lead to a positive basketball outcome regardless of scheme dependency. Advantage creation and mitigation are essentially a function of the application of tools and the efficiency of that application.

This change in framework brings more focus to the efficiency and success rate of a player versus the former idea of valuing a player for their lack of scheme dependencies or volume (a number that can be tied to usage/role). The former idea has value but overvalues high-volume flawed advantage creators and devalues players in smaller roles but are extremely efficient. When it comes to projection, having this idea in mind removes the bias of archetypes, especially from the lens of advantages.

This is another reason why I have valued role malleability highly, it captures the idea of showcasing mastery in a number of roles – mastery that only happens when the combination of cognitive, athletic, and shooting tools are applied effectively and lead to a good basketball outcome consistently.

I believe grading a player on the five tenets above gives a better projection of player quality regardless of the development context. This is how I would now evaluate players within the tiers of the funnel framework and each tier directly correlates to a tier of my draft board. Essentially a lot of the philosophy from the original framework still applies but instead of valuing it through an advantages lens, it’s about how well they grade against the 5 tenets of my draft scouting philosophy to take a more holistic approach.

Looking at it from a statistical lens, I think another good way to frame these tiers is through career VORP in the same way Spreadsheet Scouting does with his board. I plan to do my deep dive into different impact metrics to correlate these tiers statistically but for now, using these similar thresholds as a projection benchmark feels like a good approximation.

Pre-Conference Play 2025 Draft Board

Although there is still plenty of time for players to develop and regress to their averages throughout the draft cycle, this is my current assessment of the 2025 NBA Draft. Here, I rank my top draft-eligible players up to this point who I believe have the potential to reach the Green tier of the framework for their career in the NBA.

*Disclaimer: Working with the Mexico City Capitanes this year, I have excluded any prospects that form a conflict with my work and the Capitanes. I have also excluded players who will likely not declare for this draft.

Purple: All-Time Tier (45+ VORP)

• 0.1 Cooper Flagg

Players in this tier tend to check all 5 tenets I’ve laid out above. Cooper Flagg grades extremely well and is the epitome of my philosophy. Productivity at a young age, strong role malleability traits, positive skill intersections, high margin of error, Flagg’s got them all. At a young age, Flagg already has the traits that are tough to develop(size, motor, fluidity, feel, touch) and applies them effectively outside of his 3-point shooting. Even without making 3s at an efficient clip, Flagg’s margin of error is high with his size, feel, and motor which is evident in his ability to scale on and off the ball on both sides of the ball.

The reason why Flagg may not reach this tier would be his peak as an on-ball creator and a lot of this will do with his current offensive process. He creates his advantage by using his size and fluidity to get leverage but oftentimes, even when he has the opportunity to take advantage of that and get straight to the rim, he uses this window to take a midrange shot. This could be a lack of confidence in his handle counters to take it to the rim (mostly uses a spin move when he gets contained off the dribble). Flagg’s handle issue also shows up in his passing deliveries, passing off of a live dribble is still a work in progress so he often picks up his dribble to jump pass and expand his window to pass. The midrange reliance and handle issues could put more pressure on Flagg to be a better 3-point shooter to get to primacy; however, with the touch on midrange jumpers, free throw efficiency, and 3-point volume (7 3PA/100 at Duke), he’s got the chance to become a reliable 3-point shooter even in a problematic development context.

Dark Blue: All-NBA Caliber (30+ VORP)

• 1.2 Collin Murray-Boyles

Players in this tier also grade well against my tenets but there may be a smaller margin of error or limitations in role malleability that stop them from reaching the tier above but are still highly valuable players.

Collin Murray-Boyles is probably the clearest example of applying their tools to the max at a young age, with an emphasis on cognitive tools. We have over 40 games of Murray-Boyles having outlier production as a rebounder, finisher, playmaker, and defender for a 6’7″ player (10+ OREB%, 20+ DREB%, 60+ TS%, 15+ AST%, 2+ BLK and STL%). Playing in the SEC and producing at this level as a teenager is the epitome of functionally applying your tools to a high degree regardless of being undersized for a big. It’s a real proxy for how Murray-Boyles can impose his size, strength, length, feel, and hand-eye coordination even against older athletes. He has such a high margin for error because he produces at an outlier rate in so many areas of the game, but he truly shines on the defensive end. Processing rotations early, the length and coordination to protect the rim, the ability to flip his hips, footspeed, and upper-body strength to contain dribble drives all give Murray-Boyles a high degree of role malleability on defense.

Unlike Flagg, Collin Murray-Boyles is a lower-volume shooter and handler, which has limited his role malleability on the other end, and plays more as a big offensively. While he’s shown a much larger sample of shooting and handling in HS and AAU compared to college, the sample is still limited. There has been an uptick in that volume in his sophomore year compared to his freshman year, but the lack of experience in those situations would need him to end up in a context that would allow him to play through inexperience as a handler and reach a higher outcome on the offensive end. Regardless, he’s shown a high degree of efficiency on non-rim 2s and good energy transfer on his shot since HS/AAU that the shot can be improved with range even without that desirable context. In my opinion, Murray Boyles’ has a high margin of error with the rest of his game that he can reach this tier of player operating as a high feel DHO big and exceedingly versatile defender.

Light Blue: All-Star Caliber (15+ VORP)

• 2.3 Dylan Harper
• 2.4 VJ Edgecombe
• 2.5 Kon Knueppel
• 2.6 Jase Richardson
• 2.7 Thomas Sorber
• 2.8 Derik Queen
• 2.9 Jeremiah Fears
• 2.10 Darrion Williams
• 2.11 Khaman Maluach

The light blue tier tends to have players that have even lower margins of error than the tiers above due to having more red flags in their profile but produced at such an outlier level in my other tenets that they can still provide all-star caliber production. Even with the red flags, the players in this tier can often reach secondary or tertiary creation with varying degrees of role malleability on defense.

Dylan Harper has shown he can be an elite driver with his acceleration, size, rotation in tight spaces, and feel, but he’s struggled with his midrange efficiency since HS/AAU. He’s got mediocre initial burst and vertical explosion. This shows up on tape and in his defensive playmaking numbers against higher-level competition, so he needs to be a high-level pull-up shooter to be a more rounded scorer in the league. These issues drop his margins of error, but with how outlier his driving production is at his age, the shooting is something that can improve in a less-desired context. Especially, since he’s always shown a proclivity to shoot the ball with volume.

Jase Richardson, in addition to Cason Wallace and Johnny Furphy in years past, have been the exact types of players that have caused me to define the margin of error on the application of tools and their efficiency rather than grading them against the volume or the lack of dependency on scheme. Oftentimes, it’s difficult to have high usage as a freshman in some high-major programs due to a) upperclassmen monopolizing usage and b) getting the coach’s confidence to rely on a young player. Players like Jase Richardson are exceptionally efficient in their low-usage roles but often don’t have the leeway to do more even if they can. Being elite at the simple things does not get valued enough and it’s why I believe Richardson has a false ceiling.

He’s exceedingly quick at processing passes that are one rotation away, and ample burst and strong touch make him a multi-level scorer. Richardson has traits that are harder to develop and give him an immediate baseline as a closeout creator, but these same traits are why I think he can scale up with a higher offensive workload. So far those results in on-ball situations since his pre-NCAA sample have been stellar albeit on a small sample. There are some red flags with his size and athletic indicators such as rebounding and defensive playmaking against top competition, but Richardson has such a high margin of error with how great he is at the simple and the role malleability he’s shown in limited usage.

Maryland big man Derik Queen has shown high application of processing, touch, and scoring versatility so far. Even though he is closer to being a sophomore in age, Queen has one of the higher offensive projections in the class. His ability to scale on and off the ball offensively, hurt defenses with his touch, and shift defenses with his playmaking at his size give him a high margin of error. The application of tools is not as effective on the other side of the ball, where he’s not a true shot-blocking presence and will most likely be reliant on hedge and recover situations. Queen’s production would be dominant even for a sophomore and with this margin of error on the offensive end, he could reach All-Star level production in the NBA even with his lack of role malleability on the defensive end.

Green: Career Starter – Above Average Rotational Player (3+ VORP)

• 3.12 Tre Johnson
• 3.13 Noah Penda
• 3.14 Ryan Kalkbrenner
• 3.15 Noa Essengue
• 3.16 Ace Bailey
• 3.17 Joan Beringer
• 3.18 Labaron Philon
• 3.19 Asa Newell
• 3.20 Walter Clayton Jr.
• 3.21 Johni Broome
• 3.22 Kasparas Jakucionis
• 3.23 Anthony Robinson II
• 3.24 Miles Byrd

Finally, the players in this tier tend to have the production to be good NBA players but have clear limitations or flags in their profile that prevent them from reaching higher value. For example, this can be players with strong application of tools but there are specific areas in their game where the tools might be missing or are not effectively applied, causing a far lower margin for error. Due to these issues with their games, these players generally need to end up in a more favorable development context to attain this tier or higher

Ace Bailey is a player who is going to need to end up in a context with defined roles, getting him experience playing in a scaled-down role and working on quicker decision-making. Why? Bailey has been tremendous as a shooter at a young age, especially inside the arc but his feel is lagging to project him as a creator. His shotmaking at his size can be absurd but his low assist/usage ratio, high turnover rate, and lower rim rate give him far lower margins. This shows up on tape too, where Bailey often can hold onto the ball for long periods out of triple-threat situations, slowing down the offense and not capitalizing on a tilted defense. With the right context, these tendencies can be hammered out and you might be looking at a dynamic play finisher that can play multiple defensive roles.

Kasparas Jakucionis has shown a strong intersection of touch and feel at 6’6″ but he has far lower margins of error to be a role-malleable creator considering his high turnovers, low at-the-rim rate, below-the-rim finishing, and difficulty shooting off-the-catch. Perhaps Jakucionis is such an elite shooter that his margins expand, but with these concerns, I have a tough time betting higher value solely on his intersection of touch and feel.

Missouri guard Anthony Robinson II will be below 20.5 on draft night and has had great production in his first real year of usage. At 6’3 with great feel, touch, and length, he’s shown a great application of his tools with his high assist/usage ratio, OREB%, FTR, and STL%. Honestly, from a statistical perspective, there’s not a lot to question in Robinson’s profile outside of his low 3-point volume and efficiency, which could be a function of his role at Missouri because he shot at a 0.42 3-point rate in 17U EYBL play.

He’s also not an outlier vertical athlete at his size with his < 1 BLK% and lower dunk numbers. These issues cause Robinson to have a lower error for margin, but the biggest gripe I have with him is when you turn on the tape. From a statistical lens, it looks like Robinson has a sound handle, but he’s got some issues with lifting from his handle into deliveries in live-dribble situations. Part of this is just general ball control as he has to expend more energy to keep the dribble alive and that often leads to high dribble points. Due to this, Missouri sets highway screens to get Robinson better lanes and he relies on a jail dribble to not have his handle tested. While I think the shooting can be developed with his shooting indicators throughout his sample, the handle gives a lower margin of error to be a creator in a less-than-favorable context. However, with the rest of his profile, he’s got the chance to be a strong starter with development.

The post 2025 NBA Draft Board (Pre-Conference Play) and some draft philosophy notes appeared first on Swish Theory.

It’s no secret that NBA offenses have been improving year over year. We see teams consistently breaking through offensive rating records and this is in part due to offenses taking more efficient approaches to their shot diet. Teams are limiting the long midrange attempts they take while increasing the volume of closer shots at the rim and higher shot-quality three-point attempts.

The court is extremely spaced out which makes it difficult for defenses to cover ground and stay attached to their offensive counterparts. This enables players to have more space on their drives and get a more open shot at the rim, especially with how much NBA scheme is about engaging the tagger and drawing rim protectors away from the basket. Having multiple players who can create offense off of a closeout gives an offense more opportunities to attack defenses and derive these higher-quality shots within a 24-second shot clock. The culmination of these factors has resulted in 2-point shots achieving the same efficiency as 3-point shots in terms of points per possession.

With so much space to operate in today, primary creators can leverage their scoring tools and feel better than ever, and when advantage creators bring two to the ball, that means there’s a wide-open player somewhere on the court. While the value of high-level on-ball creators is undeniable, basketball is still a team sport at the end of the day. As important as it is to have great stars, supplementing an offense with better off-ball creation is how the best offensive teams continue to improve year after year.

Synergy, who tracks this for the NBA, defines spot-ups as possessions where the possession-ending event is a catch-and-shoot or catch-and-drive play. This could involve situations like catch-and-shoot threes, driving to the rim off a closeout, sidesteps or step-backs, or midrange shots created off the drive. One of the most straightforward ways to supplement NBA offenses is to consistently have five players on the court who can problem-solve against closeouts and leverage their tools in these situations.

Take a look at the roster construction of the NBA’s top offenses: at any given time, these teams consistently have at least four players on the floor who excel at dribbling, passing, and shooting at a high level. Teams like the Knicks, Celtics, and Thunder often have five players who can do this, and this truly maximizes the increased usage of spot-up possessions in the NBA.

Le’s dig into the data.

Going back to the 2017-18 NBA season, the average number of spot-up possessions throughout the league has marginally gone up yearly since then. In 2017-18, teams had 21.633 spot-up possessions per game. Now? That number has risen to 26.613 in 2023-24. That’s almost five (!) more possessions per game in seven years.

It’s not just the volume that’s increasing—over the past seven years, teams have also become more efficient at scoring on spot-up possessions.

Doing some basic regression analysis on the seven-season sample, we can see that there’s a strong positive linear correlation between spot-up volume and offensive rating.

The relationship between spot-up possessions and offensive rating can be described by the equation (line of best fit):

Average Offensive Rating=1.106(Average Spot-up Possession Per Game) + 85.53

This means that for every additional spot-up possession per game, a team’s offensive rating increases by approximately 1.106 points on average. Moreover, the R-squared value of 0.816 indicates that 81.6% of the variation in offensive rating can be attributed to the number of spot-up possessions, highlighting the strong connection between these two variables.

Logically, this aligns with the idea that having more spot-up possessions gives teams more opportunities to attack defenses and generate better offense. Essentially, spot-ups have become the fulcrum for NBA offenses in the war of attrition against NBA defenses. Framing the battle between offense and defense as a war of attrition, wouldn’t having five players who can attack off the catch in diverse ways challenge defensive personnel on a more granular level and create better scoring opportunities?

Let me take a step back and get into my nerd bag to reiterate what I mean. It’s a lot like how Team Avatar dismantled the drill attacking Ba Sing Se in Avatar: The Last Airbender (If you haven’t watched the show, please do yourself a favor and watch it immediately). Instead of relying on brute force, they exploited the machine’s structural weaknesses—Toph weakening the supports with earth bending, Sokka identifying the critical points, and Aang delivering precise strikes to bring it down. This is a lot like advantage creation and extending those advantages through closeout creation, having players who can attack off the catch in different ways allows an offense to pick apart a defense piece by piece, forcing it to collapse under pressure. (Skip to 2:04 in the video if you want a quicker explanation).

The NBA Draft…?

As much as scouting the draft is about analyzing the players, it’s just as essential to grasp the evolving trends of the league they’ll be stepping into.

For the remainder of this piece, I’ll focus on five 2025 NBA Draft prospects I value highly for their production and multi-faceted skillsets. What truly sets them apart is their ability to create offense off the catch. To thrive as a spot-up player in the modern NBA, a player must:

• possess shooting gravity to command defensive attention off the catch.
• have driving and handling tools to react to hard closeouts.
• have the feel to pass and extend the play into a higher-quality shot.

All five players in this piece have the building blocks for creating offense off of closeouts, but each brings a unique approach to the table. This diversity in how they attack off-the-catch adds layers to an offense, enabling it to exploit specific weaknesses in defensive matchups. For instance, some defenders may excel at guarding strength-based matchups but struggle with lateral quickness. A player who can attack a tilted defense with a quick first step allows the offense to capitalize on that vulnerability. In essence, variability in closeout creation amplifies the ability to target nuanced weaknesses of all five defenders on the court, giving the offense a distinct tactical advantage.

The Prospects

Now that we’ve explored the concept, let’s dive into the five potential NBA Draft prospects and examine how they leverage their unique strengths to create offense off the catch.

Burst: Jase Richardson (Michigan State) | 6’3″ Guard

The most obvious way to capitalize on a semi-tilted defense is speed: a player using their first step and acceleration to widen the gap in the offensive advantage. Jase Richardson is the perfect example of a guard who can do this, beating defenses off-the-catch with his speed in a low-usage role for Michigan State this year. Going back to AAU and his senior year of high school, Jase has had a lot of experience being in spot-up situations – his second most used offensive play type in both contexts.

His first step is good, but Richardson excels at accelerating and using sharper driving angles to create separation. His ankles and feet can take sharper angles on drives, reducing how much he curls away from the rim, and enabling tighter, shorter drive paths. Accentuated by the acceleration in his second and third steps, Richardson capitalizes on these traits to explode into his last stride on finishing attempts at the rim or get to the middle of the floor to hurt the defense with his touch.

He’s also adept at recognizing where the help is coming from and making the pass to the open man off of these drives. While defenders do give him attention from the perimeter, Richardson’s volume and efficiency as a 3-PT shooter have not been extremely high in the past. He’s shot 30% from the perimeter on a 30% three-point-rate between 17U AAU and his senior year of high school, however, it looks like Richardson’s 3-point shot is on the uptick with a three-point rate of 34.6% and 50% in a small sample of games (9 games) for Michigan State so far. As this shot improvement sustains, defenses will have to guard him tighter from the perimeter, enabling Richardson to leverage his burst even further on off-the-catch drives.

Strength: Noah Penda (Le Mans Sarthe Basket) | 6’7″ Forward

Another way to create off-the-catch is to use brute force to carve space and extend advantages. When a player has outlier strength, they can often effectively penetrate the shell of set defenses. Some players combine burst with strength and apply large amounts of force toward the rim on off-the-catch drives, making it burdensome for a tilted defense. On the flip side, some players use their strength to take a slower, methodical approach which gives them a larger window to make a play while carving space with their body. A strong processor can often use this larger window to leverage their court mapping as a passer, finding a high-quality half-court shot by extending the advantage. Noah Penda’s quick processing and strength paint a true illustration of how this creation works off the ball.

Penda wins with strength against tilted defenses, getting deep into the paint with his stocky frame and making plays off of two feet that maintain the flow of the offense. His patience shines in these reps where he often takes his time to let the play develop, attacking when the defense over helps and gives him an opening. Penda’s handle needs work but his margins on these drives are high with how much space he eats up on the court using his strength. The byproduct of his strength is that it enables him to attack set defenses off-the-catch well, reducing the threshold of how much shooting gravity he consistently needs to win on these drives. Regardless, in 14 games this year, Penda has shown he can be a good shooter off of two feet – he maintains balance and good elbow alignment in these stances which have shown up in his efficiency (37.8 FG%) and increased comfort to shoot 3-pointers (39% 3-point-rate). The issues with Penda’s shot come when movement is introduced, throwing his alignment and balance off and reducing the number of counters he can use as a shooter, whether that’s with stepbacks from the perimeter or his limited volume of off-the-dribble twos.

Change Of Direction: Xaivian Lee (Princeton) | 6’4″ Guard

Speaking of counters, an additional form of closeout creation is the art of using sleight of direction to problem-solve. The junior guard for the Princeton Tigers, Xaivian Lee is the team’s lead creator and pick-and-roll ballhandler where he slices up defenses with his elite change of direction on multiple planes. With how Princeton’s offense revolves around a philosophy of spacing the floor, constant motion, and having any of the 5 players on the court to exploit a mismatch, it can lead to a primary ball-handler like Lee playing in situations where he’s attacking closeouts consistently. Lee has great downhill pressure with his burst, but his elite trait is his combination of spatial awareness and change of direction. He has a great understanding of open space and where his limbs are relative to his body which enables him to determine easier scoring angles, throwing defenders off balance with how quickly he can change direction.

The initial idea that comes to mind with change of direction is moving the body across the transverse plane (east to west – turning and rotating), however, change of direction is also about being able to shake the defense with movement across the sagittal plane (north-south – acceleration and deceleration). Xaivian Lee is excellent at capitalizing on both of these aspects of change of direction, creating easier shots off-the-catch or collapsing multiple defenders and finding the open man on the court. Lee is also quite effective at creating separation off of step-backs and side steps, which gives him a high degree of optionality with direction. While he’s had a down year in overall efficiency with the increased offensive load in 11 games, Lee has always been a versatile shooter, especially on catch-and-shoot shots, which has meant that defenses have always had to respect his shooting gravity and react with strong closeouts. He has limitations as a finisher with his weight and strength as a 6’4 guard but with over 148 spot-up possessions in the past two years, Lee is still scoring 0.966 points per possession and 38% on his spot-up threes. Xaivian’s weight will be a major point of contention with his NBA upside, but his elite change of direction, processing, and shooting touch gives him a strong floor as an off-the-catch creator, especially next to the plethora of jumbo primary initiators in the NBA.

Functionality + Small Space Coordination: Labaron Philon (Alabama) | 6’4″ Guard

Good closeout creation can also come from players who are functional with multiple traits and extend advantages off of the dominance of their micro-skills. Alabama freshman Labaron Philon is a clear example of a player like this, maintaining possessions off-the-catch with a functional handle and his coordination in tight spaces. Philon has functional strength, burst, and touch but he wins by consistently keeping his dribble alive and navigating through a crowd.

Similar to Princeton’s offense, Alabama plays with a lot of space in the half-court with the intent to move the ball and attack off-the-catch. Alabama’s space gives a player like Philon the lane to get downhill against tilted defenses, but even when the court shrinks on the drive, he can problem-solve in those tight spaces to either find an open player or maintain the dribble long enough to find a shot for himself. The functionality Labaron Philon has in multiple areas allows him to be versatile with how he finishes inside the arc, whether that’s slamming his body into rim protectors to create separation at the rim using his strength or launching his patent floater against defenders that sag deeper into the paint. His ability to keep his handle alive gives him larger windows to process the defense and attack accordingly with his different functional traits.

Most of Philon’s issues come with the potency of his 3-point shot. Between his senior year of HS and 17U AAU, Philon has shot 35.9% on 150+ attempts but that has not translated yet in 10 games with Alabama where he’s shooting 24% on 5.4 3PA/100. Alabama’s offense is a good emulation of good NBA offenses today, and when you combine this sample with his senior year of HS and 17U AAU, he’s generating 0.912 points per possession on 149 total possessions even without an elite 3-point shot to fall back on. There’s a strong proof of concept that Philon can be an effective closeout creator and with the touch indicators in his profile, there’s a high likelihood that he can become a strong shooter off-the-catch.

Size + Fluidity: Cooper Flagg (Duke) | 6’9″ Forward

While there are plenty of other ways to describe creation off-the-catch, the last one I will be talking about in this piece is about being the ultimate tweener. The term tweener often has a negative connotation when it comes to a player, usually describing a player that is a jack of some trades and a master of none, excelling at no true position. Another way I have come around to using this term is to describe players that can be cross-match nightmares for defenses: a player that has the positional size to overpower smaller players and the fluidity to break down larger defenders.

If you’re following the NBA draft, it is unlikely you haven’t heard of the 17-year-old forward playing for Duke this year. Cooper Flagg gets his generational moniker from his premier defense in an abundance of roles and how developed his offense is for a player that young. Relative to age, even with some early efficiency issues, Flagg has excelled as a primary creator for the Blue Devils in 10 games so far this year. He’s still in the early stages of experimenting as an on-ball creator, but off the ball, Flagg has showcased that he is already a functional off-the-catch scorer.

Cooper Flagg can also be used as an example of a strength creator off of closeouts, where he’s bullied much older players with his size and functional strength, but it’s the intersection of size and fluidity that makes him so problematic for defenses to deal with. This intersection is an extension of strength creation where players can get lower than their defender and carve out space using their body as a lever. Where this differs from how a player like Penda creates off of closeouts, mass isn’t the sole factor in generating force against defenders, it’s the lever principle generating more force due to the size of the player and how low they can get on drives. Due to amazing shin angles and how low Flagg can sink his hips on drives, it extends the distance between where the input force is applied (Flagg’s shoulder against the body of his defender) and the fulcrum (Flagg’s hips) which generates even more force without requiring outlier mass on his frame. This allows Flagg to carve space regardless of the size of his defender consistently, enabling him to score inside the arc and spray passes when the defense sends help to guard him.

Flagg’s handle is still a work in progress as he can’t consistently pass off of a live dribble, but he uses jump passes to expand his passing windows and get a better mapping of the court.

Flagg’s efficiency woes at Duke have mostly come from his poor 3-point shooting, 22.2% on 6.9 3PA/100. A crucial part of closeout creation is the shooting gravity a player possesses, and while the efficiency has not been good, the volume he takes forces defenses to pay attention to those shots. Moreover, I believe he is due for some positive regression as the season progresses with how he’s shot in previous settings. 36% from the perimeter between his final year at Monteverde and 16U AAU on over 174 attempts, Flagg has been exceptional on spot-up threes where he’s shot 41.4% on 70 attempts in that same sample. As he grows stronger, the stability shooting off two feet should improve and accommodate for larger distances, enabling him to get stronger closeouts from the perimeter and leverage his traits off-the-catch.

Curtain Call

All five of these players have other skills that give them a strong baseline in the NBA, but their most formidable trait is how they create off of closeouts in different ways. Spot-ups are the fulcrum of NBA offenses because the quality, variability, and volume of this play type can often be the difference in the balance of an offense winning or losing the possession battle. Having a team with five players like this on the court who can attack the defense in varied ways captures the greatest strength of an elite offense: the constant exploitation of mismatches to create advantages on each touch a player gets within a team possession.

Stay tuned for my upcoming piece on the 2025 NBA Draft cycle, a companion article that will explore the other side of the NBA spectrum!

The post Closeout Creation: The Fulcrum Of NBA Offenses appeared first on Swish Theory.

Winning at the highest level of the NBA is all about finding advantages within razor-thin margins. If it’s the draft, it could be about maximizing the level of talent you can add on a rookie-scale deal. With scouting, it could be investing in underutilized facets like pro-player scouting where teams can gain an advantage against the field by finding undervalued players in restrictive contexts. On the NBA court, teams and players win at the highest level by creating advantages and effectively acting upon them.

Advantage creation on the basketball court is the ability to create extra rotations against opposing defenses, creating a numbers advantage that opens up easier baskets. Basketball is a sport that is all about creating these extra rotations on the court. That idea is amplified by the fact that basketball has fewer players on the court than other team sports such as American football, baseball, or football. With only five players on the court at a time for a team and individual players able to play 75% or more of each game, the value that impact players such as stars can have is larger than in other team sports (Sanderson and Siegfried, 2003). Having even a slight numbers advantage is often the difference between an offense finding efficient shots versus being deterred by a defense and finding a worse shot.

Think about the 2024 NBA champions, the Boston Celtics, for example. The Celtics run a 5-out offense that maximizes the spacing on the court by consistently having five players on the court who can dribble, pass, and shoot. The increased spacing opens up avenues for players to have larger windows to dribble, pass, and shoot due to the defense needing to give all five players defensive attention, stretching the defense thin. Even within this offensive structure, players need to be able to collapse defenses and put them in scramble mode to create a numbers advantage and truly leverage that spacing. The Celtics’ offense is predicated on this idea of all five players being able to drive and collapse the defense to open up more valuable shots on the perimeter.

The best teams in the NBA can create advantages in different ways, enabling them to be versatile and tackle several different defensive schemes that are thrown at them. Advantages can be created through driving, leveraging strength in the post or even shooting gravity where shooters can move on or off the ball to tilt defenses. Part of the reason that the Celtics had a dominant 16-3 run in the playoffs is that even though their offense was built on the principles of driving advantage creation, they had the versatility to create post advantages through players like Kristaps Porzingis and Jayson Tatum. When healthy, Porzingis was able to create advantages in the post and score consistently in the regular season, the most efficient post-up player in the NBA with at least two post-up possessions a game on a scorching 1.30 points-per-possession.

Drawing two or more players from a standstill without the help of scheme is often the most valuable tool for an NBA offense, and it is often why advantage creation is a star trait. When it comes to the NBA draft, this is often why prospects who can create advantages from a standstill on volume tend to be high draft picks. It is a star trait you can see in top picks like Victor Wembanyama, Luka Doncic, Anthony Edwards, Zion Williamson, and Ja Morant.

All the players mentioned above achieve that level of play not just by consistently creating those advantages, but also by perceiving and capitalizing on them while possessing a counter when defenses attempt to nullify their primary methods of advantage creation (i.e. when the defense clogs driving lanes by helping off non-shooters).

Advantage Creation Vs. Scalability

In the NBA draft, a question arises on how these players bring value to a team when the advantage creation is not to the degree of being a primary ballhandler. How can these players play effectively off the ball if most of their value comes from how they tilt defenses on the ball? This question of scalability arises when talking about these prospects, but I believe these concerns are often overblown because advantage creation is a skill that inherently lends itself to scalability.

With how offenses are built around a player or multiple players’ ability to create advantages, that heliocentric perspective can make it difficult to bring into focus how advantage creation lends to a player supporting an offensive structure off the ball. The degree of value varies across forms of advantage creation, with shooting gravity-based advantages the most scalable off-the-ball with how it stretches defenses. Think of how Stephen Curry completely changes the geometry of the court, without even having to touch the ball, the sole threat of his shot opens up easier shots in other areas of the court.

Even outside of shooting, the skills a player gains through driving advantage creation can help the player scale off the ball. When the player has a high degree of margin with their drives due to the athletic tools and skills they possess, it can create off-ball gravity as well. How, you may ask? Let’s take the example of Zion Williamson who has a truly outlier toolset as a driver but can’t threaten defenses with his shot. How does someone like him keep defenses honest when the ball is out of his hands? A player like Williamson can be sagged off of because they’re not a threat to shoot, but what this does is it gives him a larger window to create an advantage off the ball. It gives him the space to now get downhill, leverage his physical tools more effectively, and collapse the defense to a higher degree, either opening up a shot on the perimeter or an opportunity to score at the rim.

The same skills that Williamson would use on his drives on the ball parlay to a role off of the catch, and change the geometry of the defense in different ways. Post-up players can similarly do this off the ball with drives that turn into post-ups (Barkleys), using their strength to change their proximity to the rim and draw multiple players to protect the rim.

Due to how these traits still tilt defenses off the ball, I believe advantage creation traits are actually the most scalable traits in basketball. That scalability is then amplified by the degree to which a player can create advantages and the vehicle (shooting touch, burst, strength, etc) they use to deliver those advantages. The clear examples I would use are Dennis Smith Jr. (DSJ) and Zion Williamson. The ability to scale off the ball is a lot more effective with a player like Williamson but this does not mean Dennis Smith Jr. can not create off-ball gravity to a lesser degree with the threat of his first step and vertical explosion as a play-finisher. Even though DSJ fell short of his ceiling, his floor was higher due in part to these advantage-creating traits.

Two Feet In The Paint

Outside of shooting gravity, I find that advantages created through driving are often the most efficient ways to create offense due to how quickly these advantages are created within the shot clock and the degree to which it puts defenses in scramble mode. The speed at which these breaks in the defensive shell are typically created makes it more difficult for the defense to react and retaliate, speeding up the ability for an offense to find an efficient shot earlier in the shot clock while also having a higher margin of error to maintain the advantage.

The best drivers in the league also collapse defenses to such a high degree with how deep they can get into the paint. This is a crucial factor when projecting high-level drivers in the NBA: how consistently can the player get two feet in the paint and how complex does their drive have to be to get there? Due to how much ground needs to be covered to recover back out to the perimeter once a deep paint touch is created, the best driving advantage creators can open up high-value shots to the perimeter in strong-side kickouts or even skip passes to the weak side. Two feet in the paint also opens up opportunities for other players lurking near the rim to get easy rim attempts, just due to the defensive attention required by the ballhandler’s paint pressure

Perceiving when these passes are available as an advantage creator is a huge part of being a primary driver, whether it’s being able to find these open shots at the rim or the perimeter on volume.

Advantage Perception

“Advantage Perception is recognizing that there is an advantage and identifying what action, angle, timing and delivery will create the best possible opportunities for the team to score. Advantage perception is about deciding what hurts a defense most at any given time.”

– PD Web

This is what I mean when I say a player has to leverage his advantages effectively. To be a high-level creator in the NBA you need the ability to create advantages to a high degree while also perceiving what shot hurts the defense the most. You need both and let me spotlight that with two examples:

If you can perceive what passes hurt the defense the most but can’t get the defense to completely tilt, you end up with a far smaller shot window.

Here the Creighton Bluejays run a triple drag into an empty-side PNR off of a broken play where Baylor Scheierman (#55) is unable to initially create an advantage off of a drive. Scheierman and Francisco Farabello (#5) set ghost screens off of the drag and Fredrick King (#33) sets a screen to set up the roll for the empty-side PNR. The idea here is for the ballhandler to explode into the space created by the empty side to open up a shot at the rim for King or a pass to the ghost screeners for an open 3. Trey Alexander’s inability to create these advantages from a standstill, especially with the trap from Iowa, forces him to make the pass earlier. Alexander perceives what pass makes the defense hurt, but because he doesn’t create a real numbers advantage with his explosion, the defense can recover back to Scheierman, which makes his shot window far smaller and the offense has to settle for a tougher shot.

On the other side of this, being able to make the defense commit with your paint pressure but failing to recognize these advantages can also hinder the offense.

Here Anthony Edwards (#5) creates an advantage off of his drive, beating Jaden Hardy (#1) off the dribble with his explosion and keeps him on his hip which forces Lively (#2) to play further up on the drive so that Edwards does not have an open shot. The second Lively commits, if there was one more step from Edwards, it opens a lob over the top of the defense or a dump-off finish for Rudy Gobert (#27). Edwards fails to perceive this advantage effectively and it leads to a shot that the Mavs are completely happy with.

The upper-echelon of advantage creators in the NBA need to be able to both create these advantages and perceive them with volume, otherwise, it gives the defense options to deter and force an offense to take an unwanted shot.

The 2024 NBA Draft

So how do we apply this to the NBA draft? The 2024 NBA draft is considered one of the worst in recent times and that may be due to the lack of surefire advantage-creation prospects at the top. There are flawed advantage creator bets in this class, however, I feel like there is one prospect that is going under the radar in this class: a prospect that has both the tools and feel to reach a high-end advantage creation outcome.

Blink And You Might Miss Him

The hardest things to develop to be a volume standstill advantage creator, especially as a driver, are the athletic tools to create advantages and the feel to perceive the advantages. Shooting, and handling development to a lesser degree, can be developed when the touch and coordination are there. Feel and athletic tools are far harder to improve on. The driving prospect needs to show signs of being able to absorb a high volume of self-created drives within their shot diet and the feel to see what opportunities open up with their advantages. Ron Holland is that prospect this year and let me explain why.

Let’s start with the driving. A barely 19-year-old, 6’8″ wing in shoes, 196.8 pounds, and a 6’10.75″ wingspan, Ron Holland’s primary way of getting buckets is as a driver. So how is Ron as a driver, does he create advantages consistently and perceive them? To answer this question I thought it would make some sense to do some statistical analysis and contextualize his driving profile.

I started by compiling a sample that fit these requirements since the 2010 NBA Draft:

• Wing~Forward sized (greater than or equal to 6’6″ and lesser than equal to 6’10”)
• Freshman~Sophomore aged (below the age of 20.5 years at draft time.)
• Top-20 picks (beyond lottery range to account for high RSCI players who may have slid in the draft.)
• From College or G-League Ignite context.

I included Ron in this sample, and I used these thresholds as proxies to fit Ron’s combination of size, age, and talent. Now to measure a player’s driving advantage creation and their passing advantage perception, I captured two stats that could form a proxy. For driving advantage creation, I will use unassisted rim attempts per game to get a fair idea of how many self-created drives a player has. For passing advantage perception, I will use assist/usage ratio to understand how often a player is assisting relative to their usage. While there is noise in both of these proxies, viewing them in relation can form an idea of how a player is creating advantages and perceiving them as a driver.

It’s probably a little difficult to see everything in this visualization, so let’s zoom in to make it easier on our eyes. Since we are looking for drivers who meet the baseline to be a volume advantage creator, let us look at guys specifically over 2.5 unassisted rim attempts a game and an AST/USG ratio above 0.4.

The colors of the dot also represent age to spotlight the production relative to age. As you can see, Holland’s unassisted drive volume is unprecedented at 6.71 drives a game. Over double the volume of players like Paolo Banchero and Paul George, while being almost a year younger than players like that. Now there might be some trepidation with comparing college players with Ignite players, and some of Ron’s unprecedented volume can be explained by the fact that there is more of a developmental focus with Ignite, court dimensions being larger and pace being higher in the G League.

But here’s the kicker, Holland’s volume is unprecedented even against players who played through the G League Ignite context. Players that were closer to Ron’s usage rate (28.1%), like Scoot Henderson (26.8%) and Jalen Green (23.2%), were unable to crack over 4 unassisted drives a game.

Ron Holland (#0) was assisted on only 23.24% of all of his rim attempts, a stat I hand-tracked by watching all of his shot attempts, but how does he do this? Holland uses a combination of elite burst, flexibility, and body control to consistently get two feet in the paint

Holland has this unique ability to keep his upper body upright while getting extremely low on drives and springing back up like an outstretched coil that’s returned to its original state which allows him to explode into tight areas around the rim to access more finishing angles. These movement skills are a product of his body control and you can see it in his driving counters too. He can get extremely far in the paint, despite his slighter frame, due to his explosive burst to beat defenders but it’s his deceleration and change of direction that lull defenses and allow him to get in position to finish the advantage created. The upright upper half also enables him to access more passing angles which he’ll be able to act upon more consistently as his handle develops but this is where Holland’s advantage perception comes in.

Decisions On What Hurt The Defense

Holland’s AST/USG ratio in relation to his unassisted drive volume paints a picture of a player who can carry some creation usage for his NBA team eventually. Holland’s profile steers him clear of maxing out as a pure play-finisher like Anthony Bennett, Kelly Oubre, and Kevin Knox because these players had something in common: extremely low AST/USG ratio (less than 0.3) and low self-created drive volume (less than 2 drives a game). With an AST/USG ratio of 0.58, Holland shows a decent amount of playmaking volume for a score-first wing that is 18 years old in a pro context. The 0.58 AST/USG tracks with other score-first wing-forwards like Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Paolo Banchero, Zion Williamson, Aaron Gordon, Justice Winslow, and Romeo Langford (0.49 to 0.65 AST/USG).

Watching the tape, that number matches up both in how much high-level feel he exhibits as a passer and how he sometimes can be overtly determined to score even when a passing window opens up. Some of Holland’s potential assists also get lost with AST% because it only covers passes where a teammate finished the play. These often counted as turnovers against Holland and it brought his AST/TO ratio to a smidge below 1 at 0.86.

Handling

Holland’s handle has limitations that affect his advantage perception. 61.6% (61/99) of his turnovers were specifically handle-related, caused by early shuffling on drives, not being able to slow his dribble down on some drives, or struggling with stunts and digs at his handle. 38.4% of these turnovers were passing turnovers that were due to a combination of poor ball placement/delivery and teammates not being able to catch passes on the move. Holland’s accuracy as a passer is often affected by his handle as well, throwing errant passes when he’s forced to pick up the dribble.

Holland’s feel is apparent when he doesn’t have to dribble the ball with most of his layered reads coming from a standstill.

His handle has two main issues: ball control and a lack of ambidexterity. He’s often moving quicker than his handle allows for, it’s like his handle is playing catch-up and trying to get back in a race with Holland’s athleticism. This often causes high dribbles when moving north-south, and this causes his handle to marginally mitigate his burst as the dribble does not cover as much ground as his burst does.

The other issue is that Holland is more comfortable using his right hand to finish and pass. He struggles to deliver passes or make finishes at the rim with his left hand, often using his right hand to support the ball when he’s doing this. Problem-solving for Holland becomes more complicated this way as the lack of comfort with his left causes him to access fewer passing angles and finishing angles. He often tries to find ways to finish with his right regardless and this has caused an overreliance on early gathers and windmill gathers to throw defenders off balance and gain access to a right-handed finish.

The combination of these issues also makes it difficult for Holland to gather the ball effectively into passing deliveries, struggling to lift the ball on a live dribble, especially from the left. His AST/USG ratio is mostly explained by these handle issues and it is not an issue of feel or perceiving what passes need to be made to hurt the defense. Holland’s advantage perception is high based on the tape but he is unable to leverage it consistently because of the lack of refinement in his handling and his shooting.

Shooting

The other part of perceiving advantages is deciding when your shot is the best shot to hurt defenses. Holland can take it to the rim with volume, but how does he hurt defenses with his shooting? The results from the perimeter were not great with the Ignite, where he shot 25.2%, but there is some room for optimism with his shot.

Mechanically, Holland has some work to do. He takes a deep dip, pushes his knees outward, and forms a knee valgus when organizing his shot to generate more energy into his release. This is his shooting mechanics accommodating for the strength and stability required to shoot from the NBA line. Additionally, he has inconsistent guide hand usage that causes opposite momentum to his shooting trajectory. He moves his guide hand inconsistently right before releasing, which causes extra rotations on the ball and introduces some side spin at times that causes his shot to be off the mark.

Statistically, some indicators give me confidence in his long-term shooting projection. His touch indicators inside the arc are great for an 18-year-old wing: shooting 73.7% from the free throw line, 33.3% on jumpers, and 37.5% on hooks and floaters.

What I value from Holland’s shooting profile the most is the level of confidence he takes jump shots with and the frequency he takes them considering his high drive volume. He had a 3-point rate of 22%, with high versatility where 49.4% of his shots came off the dribble. To me, this is valuable because volume and frequency when there is touch are the most important statistical indicators of shooting potential because those numbers can be a proxy for shooting comfort, confidence, and how much a coach trusts them to take that shot within the structure of their offense.

These numbers may not look eye-popping at a glance, so let me contextualize his shooting profile against other young wings and forwards that were close to Holland’s passing advantage perception (AST/USG). This should help contextualize Holland’s shot frequency and efficiency against players who similarly assisted the ball relative to their usage.

Shooting projection is complex but Holland has good indicators relative to this sample, grading out on the higher end with free throw efficiency, volume, and efficiency on non-rim attempts inside the arc, and even 3-point rate when you consider how many more rim attempts he had in his shooting profile.

Conclusion

Advantage creation is the lifeblood of NBA offenses and is critical for how efficient an offense can be. As a driver, Ron Holland stands far above his peers with the number of advantages he creates at the rim and the degree to which he puts a defense in scramble mode. His season with the Ignite shows that he can scale his production to a viable creation role in the NBA.

Overall, Ron Holland needs to be able to test defenses with his shot so that they do not go consistently under screens to guard him. With his margins as an advantage creator, the shot will mostly be a counter for his primary form of scoring at the rim. While I do not have the chance to discuss his motor and defense in this piece, these are two aspects of his games that should help him stay on the court early on as the driving advantage creation and advantage perception can be leveraged more effectively with time. The ability to leverage them improving with strength, handling, and shooting development.

His margins as an athlete and the growth he’s shown as a creator since his days in high school (Duncanville), where he played more as an energy big with short roll passing, are real signs that Holland has more upside as a creator. The pitfalls with him are that the handle and shooting may not develop to that degree, but he has a high floor as a play finisher and defender. Take into consideration that this past year was Holland’s first real year of operating as a primary ballhandler. His self-created drive numbers and baseline of advantage perception are tantalizing at his age, and it gives me confidence that Holland is on a development curve where his future NBA team can effectively utilize his creation as a secondary or tertiary valve, and in some high-end cases as a primary.

The post Advantage Creation: The Case For Ron Holland appeared first on Swish Theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FRAMEWORK: The ‘Funnel’ Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

Range of On-Court NBA Value

Functional Basketball Athlete:

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

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

One-Dimensional Player:

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

Functional NBA Player:

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

Advantage Creator/Advantage Mitigator (With Help):

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

Advantage Creator/Advantage Mitigator From A Standstill:

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

The Outliers Within The Outliers:

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

Developmental Margins

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

– Wolfgang Puck

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

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

The Sleepers Of The 2024 NBA Draft

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

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

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

Isaiah Crawford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ajay Mitchell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Mogbo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Importance of Margins and Some 2024 Sleepers appeared first on Swish Theory.

Cooper Flagg | 6’8” Wing/Forward | Duke

As the number one ranked player in the class, the 6’8” big wing did anything but disappoint. Flagg dominated on both ends of the floor, using his length to stifle players on the defensive end and his strong intersection of tools to create offense. The intensity was apparent and he truly showcased his malleability as a defender: effectively guarding ball handlers at the point of attack, providing strong help at the nail, and erasing shots at the rim. His combination of real lateral agility at that size, length, and general feel gives him the tools to be a premier defender in the NBA. 

Offensively, he was consistently able to create advantages as the primary ballhandler, keeping his handle alive against pressure and navigating through multiple lines of defense. Flagg does not possess elite burst, but it still enabled him to get a step on his defender on most drives. Scoring mostly at the rim, Flagg exhibited great touch and high-level contact balance to get through defenders and find angles. Flagg ended up shooting two attempts from the perimeter, missing both, but was confident launching these shots. The energy transfer on the shot for the most part is good, taking a dip to generate more energy but he would create some imbalances when the shot was launched due to cocking the ball too far behind his head. This causes his shot to be closer to two motions and requires him to use more energy to launch, mitigating some of the energy created from the dip.

Dylan Harper | 6’5” Guard | Rutgers

Dylan Harper was the star of the show at Jordan Brand, dicing up the defense with his shot creation and size. In fact, the defining moment of the game ended up being the three straight off the dribble 3s he hit in the second half while Cooper Flagg was his primary defender. At first glance, Harper’s advantage creation tools do not seem striking, with a sub-par first step and limited vertical explosion. However, he is extremely adept at creating space off the dribble to hunt his shots on the perimeter, taking step-backs and side-step jumpers with ease: a function of his great lower extremity strength. When his drives get walled off, he’s extremely comfortable creating these shots as a counter to throw backtracking defenders off balance. 

Where his first step lacks, Harper’s fantastic acceleration tools make up for it. Using his shin angles and good ankle flexibility, he showcased some twitch turning corners and exploding out of his second and third steps. This combination of shooting gravity and acceleration tools bodes well for a potential advantage creator that uses ball screens. It should also help his scalability when using him off-ball to attack off the catch or operate off of actions that can get him downhill like Zoom, Wide-Pin, and Double Stagger actions. He did not get much post-up usage in the game but I would not be surprised if Harper can effectively score off of guard post-ups with his size and frame at higher levels.

Boogie Fland | 6’2” Guard | Arkansas

While smaller in stature, that did not take away from a player who looked like the best advantage creator in the game. Boogie Fland was consistently creating 2-on-1 situations from a standstill throughout the game, using his exceptional first step to slice the first line of defense and attack gaps with speed. He mostly acted upon these advantage situations with quick kick-out passes to the perimeter, but when he had a lane to the rim he was able to find finishing angles with his flexibility.

Boogie ended up taking three 3s in the game and did not make any of them, but I would attribute this to shot variance as his shot mechanics looked fairly fluid. He has a 1.5-motion jumper but releases effectively at a high enough set point to create shot windows. There is a slight knee valgus which can be hammered out with increased lower half strength and balance, but a product of that is that he is generating most of the energy from his shot with his upper body mechanics.

Defensively, Boogie tended to gamble quite a bit rotationally which made him struggle on-ball but his feel and active hands showed up as a guy that can create havoc off-ball through steals. With his straight-line speed, that should also open up his ability to lead transition offense at higher levels, just like he did at Jordan Brand.

Liam McNeeley | 6’7” Wing | UConn

Calling McNeeley an extraordinary shooter might be underselling his ability to bend defenses with his shot. The Jordan Brand Classic was no exception, where he shot 50% from beyond the arc on 10 3-point attempts. He displayed a wide range of shot versatility, shooting off movement, off the catch, and off the dribble. He was also able to weaponize his touch in the intermediary, causing defenders to guard him extremely tightly. There was a drive that stood out to me, where he took a defender off the dribble after a hard closeout and got fouled on the rim attempt. It stood out to me because he struggled to decelerate in traffic. If this is a real issue with his movement skills, it remains to be seen as I would need to take a closer look over a larger sample of his drives to see if this is a consistent issue. Regardless, this is more of a concern if you are projecting real handling usage for McNeeley at the NBA level and less of an emphasis for someone who will use driving off the catch as a counter. 

As a connector, he was maintaining advantages and processing decisions that were one pass away quickly. On the other side of the ball, McNeeley was able to slide his feet and flip his hips well against wings. With improvement in technique, I can definitely envision him containing drives against bigger players at the NBA level.

Isaiah Evans | 6’6” Wing | Duke

Isaiah Evans struggled in certain aspects of the game but you could piece together the type of creator he could end up being at the NBA level with polish and physical development. A dynamic shooting wing, Evans exhibited his feathery touch at all three levels of the court, with the most prominent areas being from the midrange and perimeter. What stood out to me was that although Evans has a slighter frame and weighs a reported 185 pounds (ESPN), he was able to take and make most of his shots when physicality was applied.

Strength will be an important facet of his athleticism to monitor as most of his wins in scoring situations came from space-creation moves and shooting gravity. Although he is a fluid handler, his lack of power and burst on drives forced him into a shot diet of difficult pull-up jumpers. The other issue is his space creation moves like step-backs did not often create enough space, and defenders could stay within his shot window, which is what I would attribute to most of the misses in the game. Strength also affected him on the defensive end as he would get caught across screens while navigating. However, when there was no screen to deter him, Evans showcased his potential on that end with how he operated against ball handlers using his length.

Honorable Mentions

• VJ Edgecombe: Edgecombe struggled to shoot in this game but his ability to break down defense with his burst was on full display. Even without his shot, he was able to affect the game with promising point-of-attack defense and by grabbing rebounds.

• Drake Powell: He had some great moments as a play finisher, making kick-out passes and even operating out of the dunker using his vertical athleticism

• Asa Newell: With Newell, you could see his ability to play finish at the rim and from the perimeter effectively. He was able to flaunt his instincts as a rim protector and take away shots at the rim.

• Kon Knueppel: At 6’5”, Knueppel showed off his proficiency from range. He has a wider shot base that provided more stability on the shot, but outside of this he maintained advantages as a connector and provided real intensity on the defensive end.

• Derik Queen: While he is an undersized big, Queen exhibited strong rebounding, finishing at the rim, and his ability to pass out of post-ups and the short roll. His wide crossover on drives was compact and created space efficiently.

• Jalil Bethea: Great upper extremity flexibility and burst that helped him knife through defenses at 6’4”. He even showcased some manipulative passing in transition.

It will be fascinating to see how these players continue to impact their new teams, post high school, but one thing was clear: the talent pool in this incoming class is stacked amongst a wide array of archetypes and positions. The 2025 NBA Draft is shaping up to be one of the stronger classes in modern draft history, and the Jordan Brand Classic was emblematic of that very notion. 

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Stability: ever-present calmness as the home crowd watches you with bated breath. The senses are overloaded, but the internal dialogue remains the loudest as the player dribbles the ball into a rhythm. Feeling the grooves of the basketball, the player releases the free throw shot with a sigh of relief as it leaves their fingertips.

Chaos and stability are often considered polar opposites but that notion couldn’t be further from the truth. Chaos can not be created without stability preceding it and neither can it be reverted to stability if there is no chaos. It’s two sides of the same coin, coinciding in a symbiotic relationship.

In its essence, basketball captures this conundrum perfectly. The game is built on its dynamism, ever-changing conditions that are presented to players and their teams, consistently being asked to adapt to the flow of chaos and stability.

As the rhythm of basketball echoes the interplay between chaos and stability, how does a young player develop through that? What allows them to reach that path of stardom in this subtle dance between spontaneity and composure? Especially when it may not seem apparent, and those players end up reaching those heights in unexpected, unorthodox avenues.

I believe the answer to these questions lies within three concepts that have cemented and formed my philosophy on NBA draft scouting and player projection. These three pillars of my philosophy for projecting stars are development curves, skill intersections, and role malleability.

False Ceilings

Let me start with the first pillar: development curves. Development is never linear and for that reason, it is crucial to watch how a prospect plays over their basketball careers and how many meaningful experiences they have throughout that young career. It helps paint the bigger picture with a prospect, understanding what skills they started with and how they’ve developed those skills over a period of time. 

To me, this is what a development curve is. Imagine a graph that charted the progressions and regression of a player over time, the average line would look like an exponential curve between those deviations whether that player is improving or in some cases getting worse.

That’s what is happening here: the red dots represent the different improvements in skills over a y-axis and x-axis, axes that showcase production and the timeframe respectively. Different players have different curves, some less steep than the example above and some of them where the growth is far more exponential, a line rapidly reaching new heights in a short amount of time.

Extremely steep development curves are where NBA stars are born. This type of growth in a prospect can be explained with various reasons, for example, it could be a physical growth spurt or they improved their shot or maybe they even begin to understand the game to a higher degree after starting to play the game at a later age compared to their peers.

Regardless of what that reasoning may be, this is what affects the steepness of the curve. When growth happens rapidly in a short amount of time and it leads to efficient production, it opens up the capacity to take on more of a workload as a player, acquiring new skills as the foundational skills that preceded them bolster.

Oftentimes, these types of development curves are hiding in plain sight due to the aesthetic and archetypal biases a prospect may be confined to. Coined by Matt Powers, my colleagues here at Swish Theory have frequently delved into what it means to be a false ceiling prospect. False ceiling prospects are those who have extremely steep development curves, yet their roles often obscure the anticipation of reaching greater heights due to the perceived limited upside.

The best recent example of this is with Franz Wagner, as Michael Neff describes it in his piece, Wagner was a highly productive sophomore at Michigan who was close to the age of a freshman, but likely fell in the draft due to his role on that team. Playing as a connector and a high-level defender, I can see why teams were lower on that type of player, especially when it meant taking a player who may not have enough on-ball equity extremely high.

Today, Franz looks like he should have gone far higher than the 8th pick in hindsight as he toggles between being a secondary and primary creator for the Orlando Magic. For the people who only watched Franz at Michigan, this may have come across as a huge surprise but these higher-level creation reps were hidden in Franz’s tape when he played for a pro team in Germany, ALBA Berlin.

You can see the idea of what Franz would be doing on far higher volume in the league, a crafty pick-and-roll operator with scoring decisiveness that could weaponize his size, touch, footwork, and deceleration on drives.

Taking a glance at his stats at Michigan, another reason why Franz was a false-ceiling prospect is that he was productive and functional in so many areas of basketball. This allowed him to carve out a role seamlessly in the NBA, further enabling him to grow his on-ball creation as he could provide high-level ancillary value to stay on the court while having plenty of opportunities to polish his craft in the pick-and-roll on a 21-51 Orlando Magic team.

The contradiction here is that Franz was a high-floor prospect, and for many, that meant the upside was potentially capped. However, a young player with a high number of baseline skills would inherently have a higher upside due to carving a niche in the NBA early. This idea of upside is further compounded when a player has a complimentary intersection of skills/attributes as Franz does.

A Chain of Skills

Another important idea in projecting stars has been identifying what tools and skills a player might have to lead them down that pathway. What I have come to learn is that more than a singular attribute of a player, it is the connection between those skills and how those intersections project to being functional on a basketball court. This is where my second pillar, skill intersections, comes into play.

Now visualize a steel chain, tightly interlocked between each chainlink that reinforces the overall strength of the chain. You can try to pull on the chain and try to rip it apart but it will maintain its structure, supported by the strength of each link working together.

A basketball player’s skillset and attributes can be similarly imagined, where an individual skill or athletic tool is its own part of the chain. Each skill and tool intersects in unique ways on the court, and sometimes that intersection can even be detrimental. Every player has strengths and weaknesses, but it becomes far more imperative to look at how those strengths intersect with each other and how they can make up for the weaker links in a player’s chain of skills.

For example, let us take a player that is 6’ 7” and is an uber athlete. The player might have NBA size, a great first step, and great leaping tools, these attributes give the player the margins to be a good driver and cutter. However, let’s say this player has a weak handle and sub-par touch. It becomes far more difficult for this player to drive to the rim functionally. When they do get past the first and second lines of defense and there is a presence at the rim, this player will not have the ability to create a counter like a midrange jumper or floater due to the touch. This intersection would then instead become counterproductive, where the weaker handle and touch can be seen as broken chain links that are destructive to the integrity of the overall chain. Due to the depth of talent in the NBA, it would require some truly outlier defense to offset being a 6’ 7” roll man since most NBA bigs can provide that offensive value at a much larger size.

What happens on the flip side of this, when the skills and tools complement each other on the court? Let’s explore how it functioned with Desmond Bane.

The 30th pick in the 2020 NBA draft had spent his last four years prior at TCU, where the 6’6” sharpshooter improved as a shot creator with each year. Extremely productive as a senior, Bane was stretching college defenses thin with his shooting volume and versatility.

Shooting over hard closeouts effectively, making the right passing read out of pick and roll, and being able to funnel wings and slower guards on defense, Bane looked like the makings of a good rotational player at the very least. So why did he end up going so low in the draft in hindsight?

Bane falling to the 30th pick in the 2020 NBA draft was a classic case of anchoring bias. Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes a subject to depend heavily on the first piece of information given to them. In the case of Desmond Bane, it was two data points: his age and negative wingspan.

Indicated by his 13.3 free throw rate, Bane’s handle was still on the weaker side for NBA-caliber wings and guards, making those two data points more prominent for NBA decision-makers. With age being a common proxy for upside and a negative wingspan that could affect his most translatable NBA skill which was shooting, I can understand why teams were hesitant to pick him earlier.

What teams failed to factor in was even with Bane’s negative wingspan, he was truly a unique shooter. He had micro-skills as a shooter that would allow him to operate in NBA margins; his shooting motion was extremely quick and his shooting platform was often away from the long, outstretched arms of defenders due to the high release point.

You could see this consistently in games, even when Bane’s handle took away from his shot windows, he was able to manufacture this space with the usage of screens and creativity when he had to pick up his dribble. Just watch as he tormented a Kansas team with length using his quick and high-release.

Fast forward to the 2023-24 NBA season and Bane looks like an All-Star, the Grizzlies have signed him to a rookie max extension, and the same handle issues are no longer a real concern as he averages 24.4 points a game on 59.7 TS%. How did he get to this point so quickly?

Bane had his flaws but what allowed his game to translate was his complementary intersection of basketball skills and physical attributes. Yes, he had a negative wingspan, and that caused him to gather the ball higher with his handle but the positives he had worked in complementary ways to overcome those issues. Ways that gave him developmental pathways for higher-level creation against better competition.

Drafted to the Grizzlies, Bane would not be required to immediately create like he did his senior year at TCU, where those handling issues would be more problematic at the NBA level. Playing off of creators like Ja Morant, Bane could scale next to these players effectively with his shooting and passing. Primarily as an off-the-catch scorer, Bane could attack tilted defenses with his shooting and straight-line driving, giving him the space to drive more often as the advantage creators on the Grizzlies and simplified role gave Bane the margins to improve his handle. What improved his margins to a higher degree is the unique intersection of shooting skill and uber-strength that Bane had.

Where his handle lacked, upper body strength enabled Bane to get into the chests of defenders and carve space for finishing angles. Due to the degree of shooter he is, he often receives a hard closeout where he could then act upon a defender that was off balance. This, NBA spacing and having a strong lower half would then allow him to consistently add handle counters like different stride lengths, throw-ahead dribbles, and change of pace. This combination of shooting touch and strength at 6’ 6” made him a strong play finisher and improved his handle in a short amount of time, allowing the Grizzlies to scale his usage up as a creator as time passed by.

Bane’s positive skills and attributes meshed well with his NBA role, each positive link in his chain of skills accommodating where the chain was cracked. Those chainlinks grew stronger over time and it led to a chain of skills that was far stronger than before.

This process of improvement would not be possible if it were not for the number of roles Bane played throughout his pre-NBA career that let him scale quickly in the league. As important as it is to identify a player’s chain of skills and understand what development curve they are on, a common trend that I have begun to notice with unorthodox players that grow quickly in a short period is role malleability.

How Do You Help Your Team Win?

We’re finally here, the crux of this piece and my third pillar of player projection: role malleability.

To me, role malleability is another step above the commonly used term in the discipline of basketball, role versatility. While role versatility looks at the spectrum of roles a player can navigate, role malleability takes a magnifying glass to that concept and looks at how productive a player is in those multiple roles and more importantly how quickly that player can adapt to a change in role.

Why would that be important? Remember how I talked about basketball being this subtle dance between chaos and stability? As an invasion sport, games in which the aim is to invade an opponent’s territory and score a goal or point, basketball is mostly in a state of chaos and this can often make it difficult for players to adapt to different basketball requirements quickly, especially for younger players.

Since the realm of sports is infused with the uncertainty of outcomes (Baimbridge, 1998), the athletes and spectators must therefore be prepared to adapt to the changing circumstances (Rahman, Husain, 2022). The productivity of a basketball player is in essence how effectively and quickly they are meeting ever-changing demands on the court.

Whether it’s from game to game or possession to possession, this flexibility to adapt to new constraints quickly and consistently can be used as a proxy for high-level feel in scouting. As Evan Zaucha explains in his piece, he describes feel as the sum of a player’s pattern recognition, visual processing (especially spatial recognition), and processing speed. Role malleability causes a player to consistently test these tenets of feel and this is why I believe it can open more pathways to stardom for a player.

Furthermore, I believe this theory on role malleability is further rooted in the work and research done on the concepts of cognitive flexibility in sports psychology. 

Cognitive flexibility is the human ability to adapt cognitive processing strategies to face new and unexpected conditions in the environment (Cañas et al. 2003). When a person performs a complex task their behavior needs to be adapted to the environmental conditions in which the task is being performed. However, these conditions continue to change as the task develops, therefore in order to be flexible, a person has to focus attention on these conditions on a regular basis. In addition to this, in order to adapt their behavior to the new conditions, the person needs to restructure their knowledge so as to effectively interpret the new situation and the new task requirements(Cañas et al. 2005). 

Cognitive processing strategies, in the context of this definition, are a sequence of operations that search through a problem space (Payne et al. 1993). In other words, role malleability is this exact concept of adapting different cognitive processing strategies to various stimuli. The rate at which younger players can process and adapt to new stimuli enables the mastery of skills in different environments, which therefore gives players the ability to develop new micro-skills upon their foundational skills.

This has been seen in research for other sports. Evidence for adaptability has been reported in unstructured, non-coached games of cricket and soccer (Araujo et al., 2010; Phillips et al., 2010a; Weissensteiner et al., 2009). The variability (e.g. different environment, different ball) experienced by players provided them with an opportunity to develop their sport-specific adaptability; although appearing to specialize early, the extreme variability in constraints they experienced allowed them to benefit from important aspects of both early specialization (accumulation of practice hours) and sampling (Potter, 2017).

A 2018 study (by Reddy et al.) found that brain state flexibility accompanied motor-skill acquisition. They proposed a time-time network for the application of graph theory in brain networks. The results were quite intriguing as they identified two canonical brain states associated with motor sequence learning. One key element they found was that the brain switches between states more frequently in later stages of learning. I believe this element lends itself to the adaptive part of role malleability. Problem-solving becomes more creative and layered when there is true mastery of skills.

Playing different offensive or defensive roles gives the player the opportunity to master the base skills needed to perform that role. With new constraints, players can keep adding micro-skills in response. As the rate of improvement increases, it is a sign that the player is capable of more, and coaches can then increase their workload and introduce them to a new set of constraints. 

This process leading to skill acquisition is the reason why I believe so many players who experience this throughout their young careers have experienced early success in the modern NBA. The most recent examples of this are players like Franz Wagner, Desmond Bane, Jalen Williams, Scottie Barnes, Austin Reaves, Gordon Hayward, and Brandon Miller. 

These players played several different roles over a wide range of competition levels, enabling them to master skills in those roles which could translate when adapting to more complex constraints. This allowed them to acquire new skills far more rapidly as their usage increased.

Oftentimes coaches and players will talk about the game slowing down for star players; I believe this is essentially what they mean. In the chaos of an invasion sport, stardom is found in those who find stability in that very chaos. This is due to the mastery of different roles lending itself to processing the same decisions at a quicker rate, unfazed by new obstacles thrown in the player’s way.  

A prime example of this is the OKC Thunder’s Jalen Williams. Jalen Williams played three years for the Santa Clara Broncos before he got to the NBA, where he played many offensive roles throughout his college career. Before getting to Santa Clara, Williams had a massive growth spurt from 6’ 0” to 6’ 6” by his senior year in high school. Playing as a point guard his entire life up until that point, his ball skills were still there but he had to get accustomed to his new measurements. It takes a while for a player to get used to being coordinated with their new body, William’s body was a new set of constraints for him to recalibrate. 

William’s coaches eased him into offensive usage, playing mostly as a connector attacking closeouts his freshman year, growing into more of a second-side creator his sophomore year, and finally excelling in primary usage on the ball his junior year. Jalen William’s unique intersection of ball handling, touch, and feel at his size allowed him to scale to a number of different roles in his junior year, putting up production regardless of what obstacle was thrown at him. 

Due to his mastery of skills in various roles, he could find stability in the chaos of new constraints. The efficiency was an indication of that mastery and a sign that Jalen Williams could take on more of a workload against better competition. The role malleability Williams has shown he could acquire more skills at a more rapid rate, causing his development curve to become steeper. Today, Williams is the secondary creator for the second seed in the Western Conference in only year two. He’s been a swiss-army-knife wing that has been highly productive in his main role, shooting 44.7% from the arc and an overall 62.8 TS% on the season so far.

Even in the NBA, his level of role malleability still lends itself to stability when he has to operate as the primary creator in instances. He’s truly on a path to stardom as he continues to refine his skills and acquire new ones as a creator.

Shifting gears back to the draft, are there any players that fit these three pillars that I have defined? Are there any players that are highly role malleable, due to their intersection of skills allowing them to consistently adapt to new circumstances? Are any of these players on a steep development curve due to their ability to gain new skills by adapting quickly?

Enter Johnny Furphy.

The Case For Johnny Furphy

Johnny Furphy is a 19-year-old freshman who is currently starting for the 2023-24 Kansas Jayhawks. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, Furphy comes from an athletic family deeply rooted in sports. His father, Richard, made a career as a professional Australian rules football player, while his mother achieved bronze in the Junior Olympics for diving. His older sister plays soccer for Santa Clara and his older brother played basketball and is now a professional Australian football player.

Growing up in such a competitive household, where sports were a way of life, had a significant impact on Furphy. Johnny’s brother, Joe, who is five years older, played a pivotal role in sparking Johnny’s interest in basketball. Johnny Furphy started by playing pick-up with his older brother and his brother’s friends. Being undersized and the youngest for the longest time, Furphy gained an edge that you can see flare consistently when he’s on the basketball court.

For the longest time, Furphy was one of the smaller players on the court. Basketball was always the sport he enjoyed the most, but Furphy played other sports like Australian rules football and cricket during his time in school.

At the height of the pandemic, things drastically changed for Furphy. He was a late bloomer, but the former 5’ 8” guard had grown to 6’ 8” in a short time, a massive growth spurt as reported by Shreyas Laddha of the Kansas City Star. However, due to the strict COVID restrictions in Melbourne, Furphy could not play organized basketball for nearly two years.

Essentially losing his early high school years of basketball, Furphy had to get used to his new body, especially in the context of basketball. Furphy had to get his new body up to speed with all of the ball skills and feel he gained as a small guard. Barely making state teams before his growth spurt, Furphy got his chance to develop his game and body in his senior year with Australia’s Centre of Excellence, a training program for future national Australian basketball players where we’ve seen recent top-ten picks like Dyson Daniels and Josh Giddey come through.

Furphy was a relative unknown in basketball circles due to this development curve he’s been on, but he truly made his name in the summer of 2023 at the NBA Academy Games where he broke out in front of multiple pro scouts and college coaches. The college offers started pouring in, fast forward a couple of months and Furphy is a high-level contributor to a 21-8 Kansas team.

He may only be 19 today, but Furphy’s roller coaster ride of a start to hoops makes him pretty young in terms of high-level basketball experience. His ‘basketball age,’ is far lower when you compare him to the average 19-year-old. The growth spurt made his development curve steeper, and even with the lack of experience and time to grow into his body, he’s been extremely productive in a scaled role as a freshman. Similar to Jalen William’s late growth spurt, Furphy’s newfound size opened up far more pathways as a basketball player. This is one of the reasons why I believe Furphy is a false-ceiling prospect.

Furphy’s Chain of Skills

Before getting into Furphy’s production, let’s take a look at his skills, attributes, and how they intersect on the court.

Standing at 6’8”, potentially reaching 6’9” in shoes, Johnny Furphy possesses prototypical NBA size and length for the forward-wing position, complemented by a long wingspan spanning between 6’11” and 7’0”. Still gaining strength and weight, Furphy weighs a reported 202 pounds. At 19, he has a skinny frame, but this has not deterred him from being aggressive and physical on the court.

Watching him play over the past couple of years, you can see Furphy has high levels of touch and that translates to his most bankable NBA skill: shooting. Furphy is a pretty advanced shooter considering his experience, shooting with high volume and versatility that includes shots off of movement, off the dribble, above the break in transition, and catch-and-shoot. His mechanics have developed over the years, oftentimes having to accommodate for his lack of lower-body strength with a wider base. Today, Furphy’s shot is a 1.5-motion jumper with a high point of release, even mixing in no dip threes when extremely hard closeouts come his way.

The strongest facet of his shooting has been catch-and-shoot, but the capability to add different shots to his arsenal in a short period is a massive sign that he could be a high-level shooter.

I’ve compiled his shooting throughout these past couple of years, and you can see Furphy’s mechanics were initially accommodating for upper and lower body strength. A wider base, low release, and his knees protruding forward are different parts of his mechanics accommodating to larger distances. Even off movement, his stability was not great and self-organization was extremely slow, often needing a rhythm dribble to get into his shot. In just a year, Furphy has gained core strength and improved stability throughout his body, leading to better energy transfer throughout his kinetic chain and that is shining through in his efficiency.

Furphy adding this versatility while shooting with high volume is a proxy for the growing shooting confidence that he and his coaches have in him. What makes this truly impressive is that Furphy has dealt with a weaker lower half since he had his growth spurt, and has not been able to make massive strength gains here due to dealing with minor shin injuries before being recruited to the Centre of Excellence and a severe case of shin splints before his season started at Kansas. The injuries added an extra obstacle to developing his lower half strength due to being in the rehab process.

Even with his weaker lower half, Furphy has explosion and a quick load time off of two feet. He doesn’t cover a lot of distance vertically but this is where his length helps him extend into finishes, which is further strengthened by his ability to explode over the top of defenses off of his back foot. You can really see this in Furphy’s offensive rebounding, drives/cuts to the rim in the halfcourt, and when he attacks the rim in transition.

Give Furphy an open lane to build up momentum and it becomes really difficult to stop him at the rim due to his physicality, functional strength, and leaping mechanics. This intersection of athletic traits and shooting touch gives Furphy a baseline as a high-level play finisher in the NBA, weaponizing it when given space and attacking defenses that are in scramble mode.

But what about his ability to create at a higher degree? This is where his feel kicks in. Furphy already has an advanced understanding of spacing, constantly relocating off the ball and cutting into space for finishes and offensive rebounds. When he does have the ball in his hands, he’s shown to make one-level reads with relatively quick processing.

A 6’ 9” shooter with bounce and connective passing at 19 is a great baseline but to project even higher forms of creation, it requires an NBA player to be able to self-create half-court drives on volume. This is the weakest part of Furphy’s chain of skills on the offensive end, where a weak handle hampers his creation reps.

As a driver, Furphy does have one unique aspect: lower body flexibility. Although he’s a large player, Furphy is consistently able to get lower than players on drives and leverage his physicality. This is in part due to his shin angles, allowing him to get lower and use his shoulder as a lever to manufacture space.

Furphy doesn’t create his advantages on drives in orthodox ways using burst, it’s a pure combination of lower-half flexibility and strength. When he can get deep in the paint, his explosive last stride, touch off the glass, and length help him finish these drives. The problem is what happens in between those two events.

His handle limits so much of his drives, unable to react effectively to stunts and digs, causing him to gather extremely early on drives and rely on his last stride and touch. Furphy has to look at his handle consistently on drives too, which is another reason why he’s slow to react to help with his handle.

Similar to freshmen Bane in that way, it isn’t a death sentence to Furphy’s upside as a creator. Like Bane, he has tools that will help him work the handle issues in NBA margins. Furphy has already added handle counters like deceleration, behind-the-back crossovers, and jabs out of triple-threat situations in the past year. What he needs to work on is his ball control, introducing more changes of direction and different stride lengths to freeze defenders, all things he’s capable of athletically with improved lower body strength.

When lack of space is the constraint given to Furphy’s handle, his issues there become far more emphatic but in transition, he’s able to problem-solve with his handle in space and bring the ball up the floor functionally.

As someone who can grab an offensive rebound or create a steal by getting into passing lanes, Furphy’s aggression in transition offense while being able to weaponize his feel and touch from the three levels of the court gives Furphy a unique intersection of skills on the court. Skills that thrive off of each other, enabling him to carve a role early regardless of competition.

Furphy’s Role Malleability

A lack of experience would have faltered most young players when it comes to adapting to different roles, Furphy on the other hand has shown he can be productive in a wide range of roles. Even before he truly started playing high levels of competition, Furphy was able to relatively master transition offense due to his background in another invasion sport, Australian rules football. Gaining reps where you have to cover massive amounts of ground over a gigantic field gave Furphy the offensive skills to be aggressive in space. As a contact-heavy sport, this is where Furphy’s functional strength comes from as well because he would have to consistently absorb contact and finish plays in football.

As he gained more opportunities to play basketball after his growth spurt, Furphy was put in a number of offensive roles throughout various levels of competition. Playing mostly off-the-ball early on, he honed his off-ball feel and scoring in those roles which eventually allowed him to start running second-side pick-and-rolls when the primary action failed. Experience polished his skills, allowing him to eventually run pick-and-rolls as the primary ball-handler in limited reps. This forms a parallel with how Franz Wagner would often adapt effectively to various off-ball roles at the same age, but when he was used as the primary pick-and-roll handler he was still productive in those limited reps (fifteen possessions) in his final year with ALBA Berlin. Similarly, whether it was game to game or possession to possession, Furphy’s productivity in multiple roles was apparent.

Are there any areas where he has not been productive? I haven’t spoken about Furphy’s defense yet but there is a reason for that. College teams have consistently attacked Furphy in space since he’s been hit-or-miss when it comes to containing drives. Furphy also has issues navigating screens as a bigger player but I believe there is a common reason for both.

You guessed it, it’s lower body strength. Due to his lack of strength, he’s unable to get low enough in defensive positioning and stay with players laterally. This also limits him in screen navigation as he’s unable to get low enough, turn the corner, and explode back into the play. Furphy is role-versatile when it comes to defense but I would not say he is malleable enough in this area. He can play a multitude of roles on this end, whether it’s at the point of attack, in gaps, or even some deterrence at the rim but he does not truly thrive in any of these roles outside of being a nail defender. There is some low-hanging fruit with the lower half development, allowing him to become more stable on closeouts and stay laterally with offensive players, but his ceiling on the defensive end is dependent on the degree of strength he’s able to add.

Regardless of the defense, Furphy has been extremely productive in a scaled off-ball role at Kansas. Playing in a high-major system like Kansas, there are far fewer on-ball flashes for Furphy in this role. Due to how their system operates, I believe Kansas would rather Furphy use his gravity on the perimeter to space the floor and do not want him to drive more in their half-court offense with creators like Kevin Mccullar able to take on that offensive load.

The important part here, in the context of Furphy’s projection, is that he has been productive in the role that he’s been given.

This did not mean the development process ended, in fact with more complex problems to solve in a comfortable role, Furphy has been able to add micro-skills to meet his new constraints. One of these micro-skills is baiting fouls when he’s finishing a play. He’s been far more effective at selling contact in these possessions and that is apparent from his 42.9 free-throw-rate. In pre-college samples that same free throw rate was consistently in the sub-thirty range.

Conclusion

While I believe Furphy will be a good NBA player in most contexts, like most prospects, reaching his upper-end outcomes as a creator will need an optimal development environment. An NBA team with cemented creators and a DHO big will enable that team to leverage Furphy’s off-ball value early on. The creators can help his handle limitations stand out less, while a DHO big will find him on cuts and in handoffs as a shooter. Letting Furphy become comfortable at the NBA level will then open up his creation pathways. There is a case that Furphy’s intersection of skills will allow him to develop his handle as an off-the-catch scorer, attacking tilted defenses like Desmond Bane did with the Grizzlies early on. This should give him the time off the court and the space on the court to fix the weaker links in his chain of skills.

The skill intersection, the ability to play on and off the ball, and his current development curve give Furphy the ability to scale to most basketball contexts with the ability to take on more of a workload as a creator when experience builds up.

He’s a false ceiling prospect for these very reasons. In most draft classes, a young dribble-pass-shoot wing with the potential for above-average defense would justifiably be a top-10 pick. In a class, where that archetype is not only rare but the top of the draft is wide open, I believe it is justified to take Johnny Furphy with a top-5 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.

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