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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