“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”

Or, as I probably oversimplify it, “climb the ladder to forget the ladder.” This passage has always stuck with me. Climbing the ladder refers to the constructs we use to advance our knowledge. In essence, once you have used certain tools to conceptualize an issue, you should focus on what you’ve learned rather than fixate on what got you there.

In draft work we are constantly climbing ladders. The name of the game is summarizing a player’s entire future performance in an ever-changing sport in a single numerical number: their rank. To do this we must conceptualize, using shorthand to assign values to various aspects of a player’s game. “Strong handle” we may label to several players on a big board. We give players these labels through visual cues, box score watching, media consensus, etc., all which color in the lines of our conceptualizations of a player. When you rank someone, you imagine their game in your head, but have to shorthand it through a skill grouping (“he’s the most versatile, therefore he’s a lottery pick”), player type (“he’s the best advantage creator, therefore he’s first overall”) or player comparisons (“he’s a Jaren Jackson Jr. type, therefore he is a top five prospect”).

We all do this, it’s the only way to get through it as there is no single perfect measure to represent this complex answer. What I am proposing, however, is to be more explicit about it. This is why I made a major change to my philosophical framework this draft cycle. I took all that I had learned from prior cycles where I had used a top-down model to assign discrete values. I climbed the ladder by internalizing the lessons from this framework, but left it behind to construct an original, new model.

My top-down model in the past worked like this: for every prospect, I would assign probabilities of them being anywhere from a -8 to +8 impact per 100 possessions player at their peak. I then assigned values to each outcome, where +8 was more valuable relative to +6 than +6 was relative to +4, and so forth down the line. There is a limit to how negative a player will be, so everything -4 and worse was scored as a zero.

The goal was to better capture the extreme outcomes, but ultimately fell prey to the same biases that are involved with a pure rank. This system led me to being far too low on Brandin Podziemski, for example. While I liked everything about Podz’ game, I did not assign him any star odds given his mid major competition and seemingly mediocre lateral quickness. I let these two concerns convince me that even in an optimistic scenario he would have limitations keeping him from star upside. Now I’m not so sure.

My 2023-24 model, rather, is bottom-up. It looks at underlying components that make up a player’s relation to the game of basketball. Instead of handing out odds, I grade three factors on a scarcity scale. While I’m still coming up with numbers in a way that’s likely subject to biases, the hope is that this factor-driven approach can drastically reduce them.

The first factor is production. This is essentially how many good things the player makes happen on the court. There are many attempts (such as Box Plus-Minus) to measure this which offer helpful aids in analysis. But there are also non box-score events like screens, deflections, box outs which are technically still production even though not counted. The way I liked to think about production is “how many things does this player make happen almost by accident” to capture the moving block of skill that is a productive player.

The second factor is feel. Now, we already see issues limiting the utility of my model. How does one produce without feel? How can you gauge it separately? Well, I can try. There are some measures that give clues, like assist to turnover ratio and stocks to foul ratio, but that is far from the full picture. Like productivity, but even more so, we must rely on the tape.

Third is dynamic athleticism, i.e. how much dominance a player can assert through physical means. Once again, overlap with the other two, but other clues available like number of dunks, offensive rebounds, drives, free throw rate. But I again find tape-watching essential: how does a player move and will it hold up at the next level?

I took public notes on my process, writing the three pieces linked above to show examples that were helping me determine the definitions. A quick reaction time to swipe a ball away: that is productive but also high feel, and if employing physicality then a plus for athleticism as well.

One major source of comfort in this methodology is that, even if there are overlaps in my grading, it would likely be in fertile territory for growth. The goal is not to measure current performance but that of a player over the course of their NBA career. The traits that fit into all three categories are likely solid foundations to grow upon. These are the undisputed tools that feed into development as much as current production.

One example of how the tri-factor process plays out, obvious to anyone following my content this season, is Jonathan Mogbo. He grades very well in all three factors: he was a highly productive NCAA player (though with competition level questions leading to a very good rather than elite grade); he was a highly effective passer, nailing teammates on structured and improvised reads alike (though his occasionally poor defensive reaction time keeps him from elite territory); his athleticism is unquestionable, third in the NCAA in dunks at 6’6.25’’ and a 7’2’’ wingspan. Why wouldn’t he be a successful NBA player?

However, the issue still persists: this is not a clear measurement of basketball value, more like a fuzzy approximation of ability and developmental slope. The overlap between factors will lead to misses, as my biases inevitably will assign points for gray area traits in multiple categories for some players. A full cycle of providing these grades certainly helped make the lines between factors are clear as possible, but there are still limitations. While the model is bottom-up in dissecting a player’s characteristics, it does not map cleanly to on-court happenings.

That’s why we’re mixing it up again, babyyyy.

I am more than happy with my board outcome, with Zach Edey at the top, and other sleepers in Oso Ighodaro, Terrence Shannon Jr., Dylan Disu and Tristen Newton. But can we do better?

This time, we’re staying completely on the floor in the most literal way imaginable. Once again, we have three factors, but we’re splitting apart by dimensions of basketball impact. Expect a new series of three detailing this new process but the essence is this: how does a player move their skillful self around with pace while applying force? A mouthful to say “how good are they at basketball,” but a better definition of what we’re trying to measure.

In this way we can separate impact by stationary skillsets, movement traits and physical force. All items are indirectly observable through film and box score watching, and therefore have less overlap with each other as tied to direct observation. It will take some training to translate each factor distinctly, but that’s what Swish Theory is for.

Implementing a beta version of this model shows one clear beneficiary who my previous method may have been too low on: Gonzaga’s Anton Watson. While I was still higher than consensus before, now I wonder if he is a legitimate rotation piece. Here’s why.

In my previous model, I ranked Watson low in production, high in feel/processing and mediocre in athleticism. The low usage rate for a super senior was the production red flag in particular. But considering the new model, what exactly does Watson not accomplish on the court?

Anton Watson had a 9.2 Box Plus-Minus, second in the WCC to Mogbo, which he accomplished partially by being skilled for his size. At 6’7’’, Watson can dribble some, shoot some and pass some, all while being a high stocks player on defense. Getting steals is skillful, and Watson has some of the best hands in class to help him do so. While not much of a shooter over his college career, he came alive this season as a 67th percentile efficiency spot up shooter and 74th percentile efficiency on runners. His touch was elite on layups, at 92nd percentile efficiency. He can set strong screens. There are not many areas of the court where Watson can’t have an impact. There is our first dimension.

Watson is also a good mover, not necessarily through mobility (though that’s fine) but intentionality. Watson is always in the right spot, leading to a very good 2.8% steal rate and 2.1% block rate while only fouling three times per forty minutes. He also advanced his driving, up by 40% per game from the season before. Not only is he skilled, but he moves to the right spot to utilize that skill. There is our second dimension.

Finally, Watson is strong as f*ck. He is a menace when he has a head of steam, a perfect 30 for 30 on dunks this season, and with a strong 0.44 free throw rate over his college career. Watson is skillful and able to be in the right place and also strong enough to enforce his will. There is our third dimension.

There were other major shifts in my ranking, too.

Players with substantial rises up my board: Anton Watson, Jaylin Williams, Ulrich Chomche, Dillon Jones, Reece Beekman, Kevin McCullar, Jared McCain, DaRon Holmes II, Dylan Disu.

Players with substantial falls down my board: Baylor Scheierman, Cody Williams, Zaccharie Risacher, Dalton Knecht, Matas Buzelis, Carlton Carrington, Alexandre Sarr.

Let’s see what trends we can parse from these differences.

Summarizing all the stats for these groups shows the risers exceling in two areas in particular compared to the fallers: steals (+47% in steal rate) despite a decline in fouling (-9%) and assists (+33% assist rate, +21% assist to turnover ratio). The increase in steals while declining in fouls points to surgical physicality and movement ability, as does the increase in assists with only modest increase in turnovers. This fits nicely with our new conceptualization of “skillful self moving with pace and force.”

The increase in assists, particularly to this degree, may be surprising, but passing is a substantial factor for covering ground. In particular, this method puts a premium on passers with a variety of deliveries, like Tyler Kolek, Reece Beekman and Dillon Jones. The more ways a player can make the ball move, the more space the opponent has to cover.

While Carlton Carrington has a very high assist rate, he still tumbled down my board due to very poor applied physicality: Carrington has the lowest steal rate of the groups and a sub-1% block rate. A player of Ajay Mitchell’s mold, meanwhile, struggles to pick up stocks without fouling (highest foul rate in both groups at 4.7 per 40 minutes). But he makes up for it in applied force due to his shiftiness on offense. With his flexibility and change of direction ability, his defender feels as if he was pushed backwards: that’s force applied by the ballhandler.

It may be surprising to see some names I was already low on among the fallers, specifically Williams, Risacher, Knecht and Buzelis. All four of them have limitations with their passing and steal rates and are below average in applied force. There is a good chance one of the four proves me wrong, but right now I view them as borderline undraftable players. A major divergence from consensus, with validation depending on the eventual results.

Ulrich Chomche is another standout name, rising from UDFA territory to first round consideration. Chomche is very young at 18.5, playing with NBA Academy Africa this past season. A very unusual profile for the three games with stats available, Chomche shot 33% on few attempts from two but 38% on many attempts from three. He did this while also blocking a ton of fouls and almost never fouling. Watching him, this applied physicality jumps off the page, especially for his age. His passing ability and shooting form are both excellent for a 6’10.25” player of his age as well. In the little game tape that is available of Chomche, he can be found making hit ahead passes in transition, operating out of the top of the key and just generally trying things. While still raw, he may be quite difficult to play against in his prime. The bet is appealing because if he hits, he has access to much more of the game and with more tools to act than someone like the 2024 draft’s number one pick.

There will certainly be flaws in this methodology as well, which is what the next cycle is for. We all use a lens to watch the game, whether aware of it or not, so might as well be explicit about it. This new model does not replace tape or data-based prospect analysis; in fact, it supplements it as the exact purpose. While there remain points of clarification, still, let’s check back in a year from now and see if we have gotten any closer.

The post Lessons from the Draft Cycle appeared first on Swish Theory.

We’ll have to wait and see if Arkansas turns into a prospect factory, but the Kentucky to NBA pipeline through Coach Cal is now officially over. Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham, both projected lottery picks, are the last to join this high-achieving group. But can they reach the illustrious heights of the names above? How do Sheppard and Dillingham stack up to their Kentucky counterparts? 

A Brief Introduction

I wrote about Reed Sheppard in December, and much of my analysis remains the same. Sheppard was shooting 57.1% from three back then, a number so incomprehensible that it seemed impossible for it to hold up. Yet somehow it did. Sheppard finished the season at 52.1% from three on 144 attempts, displaying the versatility to hit spot-ups, pull-ups, and fire from the parking lot. 

Physical tools and creation juice have been the main question-marks surrounding Sheppard. Is he capable of holding up on the defensive end? Does he have the handle and burst to get to his spots against NBA athletes? Still, Sheppard’s knack for being in the right place on both ends of the floor and other-worldly efficiency are enough for him to rank 3rd on Rookie Scale’s consensus big board. 

Rob Dillingham, who slots in at 11th on the Rookie Scale board, is one of the most electrifying offensive players in this class. Dillingham is an elite advantage creator who wins with his shifty handle, killer first step, and silky jumper. He averaged 15.2 points per game in just 23 minutes off the bench. Dillingham uses his gravity well to capitalize on passing windows and find open teammates out of drives and pick-and-rolls. 

As with Sheppard, physicals are amongst the oft-discussed concerns. Standing at 6’1” without shoes and 164 lbs., Dillingham will have to be truly special offensively to leave a positive imprint on the game at the next level. How will he finish amongst the trees against NBA rim protectors? And with his erratic defense, will he be singled out as a weak link?

Pitfalls and Takeaways From the Past

For the sake of this exercise, we will compare the 13 Kentucky guards drafted since 2011 to Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham. (Note that this excludes John Wall and Eric Bledsoe from 2010 due to shooting data inconsistencies.)

2011: Brandon Knight*

2012: Marquis Teague

2013: Archie Goodwin

2015: Devin Booker*

2016: Jamal Murray*

2017: Malik Monk* and De’Aaron Fox*

2018: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander*

2019: Tyler Herro*

2020: Immanuel Quickley and Tyrese Maxey

2022: TyTy Washington Jr. 

2023: Cason Wallace*

*Indicates Lottery Pick

It’s impossible to evaluate the exact success rate of Coach Cal guards given how recently many of them were drafted. But whether they’re getting MVP votes, making All-Star teams, or simply sticking around as starting caliber backcourt pieces, the eye-ball hit rate here is remarkably high. I’d say that Marquis Teague and Archie Goodwin are the only ones who never really found their footing. Early returns from TyTy Washington have been worrisome, but it’s hard to fully count someone out before their third year in the NBA. Either way, all of Washington, Teague, and Goodwin barely snuck into the first round, each drafted with the 29th pick in their respective classes. Simply getting mocked consistently in the lottery bodes well for Sheppard and Dillingham. 

Aside from merely glancing at draft position, other indicators could help us weed out some lower-end outcomes. Let’s look at how each Kentucky guard got their shots up, specifically inside the arc. Here is every prospect organized by (lay-up attempts)/(off-the-dribble two and floater attempts).

Kentucky Guards by Lay-up to Long 2 Ratio: 

This might seem like an arbitrary statistic, but attempting a high number of long twos, along with a low number of rim attempts, could indicate athletic and creation deficiencies. If one can’t consistently create paint touches against college athletes, how will they do so in the NBA? But there’s also a flip side to this logic – getting clean looks at the rim is challenging against NBA length, so having an in-between game to lean on is vital. Notably, the lowest ratio belongs to TyTy Washington, who attempted just 0.38 layups for every floater or pull-up middy. Meanwhile, Archie Goodwin had the highest ratio at 1.72. Finding the balance is key. 

I think a main takeaway is that players should be phenomenal at the shots that they take. For example, let’s compare De’Aaron Fox and Marquis Teague. Both have similar rim-centric ratios at 1.44 and 1.42. However, Fox shot 5% higher on lay-ups, had 13 more dunks, and a 13.4% higher Free Throw rate. If you’re taking a lot of shots at the rim, be an awesome finisher. The signs were also there for in-between development for Fox, who shot 43.6% (24/55) on runners versus Teague’s 17.0% (8/47).  

As far as projecting All-Star outcomes, this metric seems to favor slightly more rim-centric prospects. Those with a lower number of layup attempts to long twos have settled into strong starter/6th-man-ish spark plug roles, such as Immanuel Quickley, Tyler Herro, and Malik Monk. Jamal Murray, Devin Booker, and Tyrese Maxey weren’t necessarily paint-touch machines in college, but all have higher layup ratios than the aforementioned group. 

How do Sheppard and Dillingham Stack Up?

Reed Sheppard’s Shooting

Shooting is the obvious selling point for Sheppard, whose unreal splits pop off the screen next to any prospect in recent memory. Even when compared to our pool that contains plenty of high-versatility and high-volume snipers, Sheppard’s numbers stand out. 

Sheppard shot 52.8% on pull-up twos, 6.6% higher than 2nd place Tyler Herro. It’s worth noting that the PU2 isn’t necessarily Sheppard’s preferred shot, as he gets a significantly higher share of his looks from beyond the arc. As a matter of fact, only Tyrese Maxey and Immanuel Quickley attempted less off-the-dribble mid-range jumpers/40. Even on low volume, Sheppard has displayed a simple but effective mid-range bag, capable of stopping and popping and flowing into pull-ups with ease. Even when off-balance, Sheppard has the touch and body control to finish tough looks. 

Pull-up threes are an area where we can see some evolution in Coach Cal’s system. Many were discouraged from taking said shots, most notably Tyrese Maxey and Devin Booker. Both of the Kentucky guards this year rank top three in pull-up three attempts/40. Again, Sheppard’s efficiency is bananas. Immanuel Quickley and Marquis Teague made higher percentage but on a minuscule number of attempts. Amongst players to take over one pull-up three per 40, Sheppard ranks first by a whopping 12.6%. He’s comfortable getting to his three out of pick-and-rolls and isolations and has the confidence to pull it from way beyond the line. 

And then there’s catch-and-shoot threes, where Sheppard got up a respectable 4.57 attempts/40. That per 40 volume is a good bit behind guys like Jamal Murray (7.32 attempts), Devin Booker (6.76), and Malik Monk (5.98), but still higher than Tyler Herro and Tyrese Maxey (4.28 and 3.33). Sheppard is the group’s most efficient at a blistering 51.4%. The defining features of his catch-and-shoot profile are his range and shot-prep. Sheppard wasn’t tasked with sprinting around screens at Kentucky, but he’s an apt off-ball mover and after-pass re-locator, allowing him to excel on semi-movement looks. 

For those of you keeping track, Sheppard is the most efficient Kentucky jump-shooting prospect on catch-and-shoot threes, pull-up threes, and pull-up twos. He shot a higher percentage all over the floor than Book, Jamal, whoever. Choose your fighter, Reed shot higher. Remember when I said that players should take shots that they are good at making? As far as jumpers go, Sheppard made everything he took. 

Rob Dillingham’s Volume

It’s gone underrated how large a load Rob Dillingham carried offensively. Yes, Dillingham came off the bench and played fewer total minutes than any other player on this list. But when he was in the game, he ran the show. He leads our sample in usage rate, assist rate, and off-the-dribble jumper attempts/40. 

Recall how I mentioned that Reed and Dillingham each ranked top three in pull-up threes/40? Well, it turns out that Dillingham is actually the top dawg by a lot, averaging 3.11 attempts. He ranks 2nd in lay-up attempts/40 with 6.01, well below De’Aaron Fox at 7.52, but above Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s 5.26. 

Dillingham is unlikely to develop into an SGA-level slasher, a player whose height and length give him a massive boost. Further, Dillingham did notably more damage scoring in transition than Shai, whose bread and butter has always been generating half-court rim touches. However, all of this does speak to the level of creator that Dillingham has the potential to be – someone who can threaten the opposition with his pull-up while getting into the paint and putting defenses in rotation. Even without the finishing tools of an SGA, he still creates lay-down windows with his downhill playstyle. 

Dillingham certainly has his physical limitations, as the lightest, shortest, and least lengthy player in our sample. But he boasts some elite creation tools, mainly his handle and stop-and-start abilities. His change of direction while moving downhill is phenomenal. At his ceiling, Dillingham can become an elite off-ball scorer. His herky-jerky style of play will lend itself well to actions away from the ball. Dillingham is tough to stop when running off screens and getting into his jumper or attacking the rim off the catch. He’s incredibly decisive versus already off-balance defenders, and his side-step is a dangerous counter to hard closeouts. On catch-and-shoot threes, Dillingham’s 47.7 FG% trails only Reed Sheppard. 

I’m also high on his ability to initiate offense in transition, using his raw speed to blow by defenders running back and stopping and self-organizing for quick pull-up threes. 

Stocks, Stocks, Stocks

4.6% steal rate. 2.5% block rate. Sheppard is an all-time great events creator for a guard. Cason Wallace, already a plus-impact defender as a rookie, is the closest thing we have with a 3.7% steal rate and a 1.6% block rate. There are real questions about Sheppard’s foot speed on the ball and he lacks the size to guard up for stretches, but man, he might have some of the best hands and feel I’ve ever evaluated. Routine passes around the perimeter turn into turnovers when Sheppard is on the floor. He’s more menacing than you’d expect at the point of attack, constantly stripping opponents. Even on plays where he’s seemingly out of an action, Sheppard covers the ground and can get his fingertips on a ball. 

Given that none of our Kentucky guys can match his stock numbers, let’s at least compare him to all First Round Picks since 2008 with 4+ steal rates and 2+ block rates (via barttorvik):

There are a few players who you might expect to see: Marcus Smart, Thybulle, and Tari Eason. But I think it’s interesting that guys like Harden and CJ McCollum hit these thresholds – two remarkably skilled, crafty, and intelligent scorers – but not players lauded for their defensive aptitude. Perhaps high stock numbers could be indicative of feel, which would also translate to the other end of the floor. This bodes well for Sheppard, who, despite his Smart-esque defensive events creation, is still an offense-presenting prospect.  

With Dillingham, I have genuine concerns about his defensive fit against NBA athletes. His 2.4% steal rate is the 6th highest amongst our Kentucky pool, and while he has some nice moments of peskiness, Dillingham is a chronic gambler whose risky decisions don’t always pay off. He fouls a lot – there isn’t much reason for a one-position defending guard to average 4.5 fouls/40. Without the elite feel of a guy like Sheppard, Dillingham’s defensive ceiling and floor are both low. 

Rob Dillingham’s Efficiency

Knowing that Dillingham is the group’s leader in usage, takes a lot of wild shots, and suffers the physical deficiencies I discussed earlier, where would you expect him to rank in True Shooting? 

If you somehow guessed third, you’d be correct. Reed Sheppard is number one at 69.9%. Another sentence, another ridiculous Sheppard outlier stat. But Dillingham slots in below only Devin Booker. TS% isn’t everything, but it does clearly matter. TyTy, Goodwin, and Teague are the three least efficient of the sample. Dillingham’s splits aren’t in Sheppard territory, but they are still the marks of an elite shooter. 

Dillingham’s Shooting Splits:

• 40.7 Off the Dribble 2P%
• 37.9 Off the Dribble 3P%
• 47.7 Catch and Shoot 3P%
• 52.8 Runner FG%
• 50.9 Lay-up FG%

The only really concerning area of the floor is the rim. Dillingham’s highs are high, contorting his body, absorbing contact, and somehow getting difficult looks to fall. But physical limitations make it impossible for him to finish at a high clip. Plagued by his lack of strength, Dillingham struggles to get clean looks consistently in a crowd, taking off early and trying to twist his way to finishes. His style would lend itself better to someone with more length, as he frequently scoops for extension lay-ups and forces his way into windows that his arms are simply too short to capitalize upon. This can improve as he gets stronger, but how much weight can he realistically add? I don’t expect him to ever be a real free-throw rate tank despite his high rim volume. What’s promising is that Dillingham already has a relatively reliable in-between jumper and boasts feathery touch on his floater, which should help him compensate.

Sheppard the Creator

This is where things get interesting for Sheppard. Everything I’ve said up to this point may have you believing that Reed Sheppard is a can’t miss superstar. But I do question exactly what level of perimeter initiator he will be. 

In lay-up attempts/40, Sheppard ranks 2nd to last with 2.39. He’s ahead of only Immanuel Quickley, whose allergy to lay-ups has been well-documented. Sheppard has the standstill burst to get by the first line of defense, but I worry about his inability to punish defenses with his proceeding steps. He is not someone who carves out space on his way to the paint with big stride lengths or change-of-direction moves. Lacking in top-end length, vertical explosion, and finishing craft, Sheppard has moments where he gets engulfed in the paint. Further, his turnover rate is the third highest of the group, trailing only Teague and Goodwin. He can struggle to navigate tight areas and needs to be better about feeling out gap help and maintaining ball control versus digs. 

While Sheppard’s low per-40 rim volume is concerning, his 1.12 lay-up-to-long two ratio signifies that he still prefers getting to the rim over settling in the mid-range. This mark is higher than Maxey, Booker, and Murray. Sheppard is at his best starting his drives from further back behind the 3-point line, using the space defenders give him as a runway to build up speed. His touch around the rim stands out, finishing at a 57.9% clip on lay-ups, and while his craft could improve, there are noteworthy flashes of in-air adjustments. 

Sheppard’s passing pops as well. Despite ranking last in usage rate, Sheppard is 6th in assist rate. He has real versatility as a live-dribble passer in both the half-court and transition, capable of making inside-out passes with either hand, throwing accurate lobs, and finding teammates for hit aheads. His vision and delivery on kick-outs are uber-impressive, somehow finding open teammates on the perimeter out of a crowd. 

Parting Thoughts

Kentucky guards tend to work out. It feels wrong to say a prospect will excel at the pro level merely because of the college they chose to attend, but between the history of UK success, the film, and their overall stat profiles, I feel confident in both Rob Dillingham and Reed Sheppard finding their places in the NBA.  

Dillingham has the chance to be a fantastic offensive piece, a guy who can legitimately create for himself and others, while running around screens and carving up defenses as an off-ball scorer. Despite the defensive concerns, his offense is likely worth a top 5 or 6 gamble, especially in a class supposedly devoid of high-ceiling prospects. 

Even amongst our pool which includes multiple NBA megastars, Sheppard is a massive outlier. Nobody has shot like him from all areas of the floor. Nobody has created so many defensive events. This is what upside looks like – outlier skills and youth. Even if Sheppard isn’t a high-flying athlete, his two-way feel for the game is a clear indicator of future growth. 

There are many positive outcomes here – a player who can facilitate an offense, play off other stars, and scale his usage up or down depending on who he shares the floor with. And given how unique an advantage he has in so many statistical categories, I don’t think we can rule out the possibility of an unexpected usage spike in the NBA, in the vein of Tyrese Maxey or Devin Booker. Especially if Sheppard hits a high-end shooting outcome, the extent of the strength and handle improvements he’ll need to undergo will be far less. There is a case to be made that Sheppard is the best prospect in the entire 2024 draft, not just for his perceived safety in a class lacking an obvious #1, but for his upside. 

The post Are Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham the Last Great Kentucky Guards? appeared first on Swish Theory.

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

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

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

Reed Sheppard

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

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

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

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

Contextualizing Production

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contextualizing Production: The Kentucky Factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Mogbo

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

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

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

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

Numbers represent team ranks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

They are, after all, the only tangible thing we’re guaranteed, from birth to death, and treating them as we would a sacred place of worship is an act of self-love that isn’t inherently religious. Viewing healthy physical habits the way a spiritual leader views the upkeep of their temple breeds gratitude, if not for a divine creator than simply for having your body to begin with. Of course, such gratitude leads to self-acceptance, and we’re more encouraged to do our daily stretching or follow our diets when we think of them as treating our bodies/temples kindly, rather than being bred out of dissatisfaction with what we’ve been given.

So believe me when I tell you I feel like a reprobate in saying that Nikola Topić is an uncommonly gifted 18-year-old hooper regarding his processing, his understanding of where the pressure points of a defense are at any given moment, and that I’d trade a whole lot of those smarts away for his f***ing shins to be a few degrees more malleable.

First, let’s focus on the rare basketball sense Nikola Topić has, which he displayed this past season in both his time with Mega Basket of the Adriatic League, and after his call-up to Red Star, where he mostly faced Euroleague competition when he wasn’t on the shelf with a left knee injury. (His season was ended by a partially torn ACL).

With Mega, Topić was the offensive engine entrusted with running repeated pick-and-rolls, which became the layout for many of his reads. Over 13 games, he averaged seven assists and three turnovers, but given how often the ball was in his hands, conservative decision-making actually depressed each of those categories, as Topić was occasionally too smart for his own good.

Here, Topić sees two defenders come to the ball as his screen-setter dives to the rim, with the ‘lift’ shooter rising from the strong-side corner. That defender sticks with the shooter instead of recovering to the roller. Great! But then, Topić realizes there’s surely a defender in the other corner he has to worry about, and technically, he makes the right decision to skip it to that other corner to create a catch-and-shoot jumper.

I went through this season’s tape chronologically after watching many of his shots/assists/turnovers from the prior season with Beograd to get a baseline, and it was immediately clear that the young Serb had the 2-on-2 situations down. You know, drive-and-kicks one pass away, hitting the dunker spot on drives, hitting the roll-man vs. drop coverage, dynamic situations in transition, that was all great. Sometimes awesome:

But you saw the wheels really turn for Topić when considering the whole court, and earlier in the season, particularly with Mega, it felt like he perceived potential advantages at a high-level, but not the actual ones, as in that first clip: It’s exciting to see an 18-year-old guard immediately processes two on the ball, and then one help defender, and then another one in the opposite corner…but the highest-value read was probably just to hit the roller anyway, right?

Same thing here, on an empty pick-and-roll where two defenders come to the ball. Topić hits the big at the top of the key, whose defender was the only helper who could recover to that roller; now he has to guard the pall, and Topić is pointing to the next read as soon as the ball leaves his hands:

But Topić probably could have made that play himself, had he not been knee-capped by a fixation on the admittedly correct help defender to fixate on. Which is why I was jumping out of my seat by the end of his season, when Topić frequently took matters into his own hands by not only analyzing help defenders, but manipulating them himself.

Look at him manipulate the low-man on this pick-and-roll with his eyes, allowing him to make the highest-value pass by not just recognizing the potential advantage, but actualizing it:

This is where I believe Topić will add value as an NBA contributor, perhaps next to a renowned advantage-creator. His ability to exploit advantages is on a clear incline, and his sense of defensive pressure points does not disappear when he’s not the ball-dominant, pick-and-roll puppeteer he was at Mega Bemax. Across eight games with Red Star, where he had a larger share of off-ball opportunities, he displayed the type of quick decision-making and connective passing every team wants to surround their big guns with:

Yes, I am high enough on Topić’s decision-making that I’m not overly worried about his 29% 3-point shooting this season with regards to his future as an off-ball contributor, though that should improve too. (He is, historically, a high-80’s free-throw shooter.) But certainly, his sell as a prospect is that of a high-volume on-ball creator who gets into the paint at will, but that’s not all he can be.

Here’s a clip from the very first game of Topić’s 2022-23 season with Beograd, where he roasts a closeout that doesn’t come near the 3-point line:

It’s another positive bit of decision-making off the catch, but it’s also instructive as to the type of driver that Nikola Topić is, even in more static situations like a half-court pick-and-roll. He will pick that ball up early, often beyond the free-throw line, and trust that he can get all the way to the rim or somewhere near it afterwards. For most of his career, this has been a fine strategy, given his straight-line burst and wonderful body control/touch while in the air.

Per Synergy, he shot 68% with Mega this season on half-court attempts at the rim, which does not include a single dunk. That’s explained by a combination of a reported 6’5.5″ wingspan and that tendency to pick the ball up early, which again, didn’t matter much with Mega against Adriatic League competition.

Plenty of his buckets looked like this, where he operates the pick-and-roll, and despite taking his final dribble outside the 3-point line, finishes over the outstretched arms of a big man whose technique and/or athleticism could use just a bit of work:

Or, perhaps something like this, where Topić executed a no-frills, straight-line drive against a big man on a switch, just blowing by him with two dribbles that don’t cover a ton of ground.

No, those don’t dribbles don’t cover much ground, and sigh, it’s time to talk about those shins.

What I’m referring to is a concept known as “shin angle,” referring to the angle between a player’s shin and the floor; the more acute (closer to parallel) it gets with the floor, the more torque/later mobility they have off that step. Think of the most flexible players you know, who can bend tight corners by getting low to the ground or change directions and demonstrate a damn-near truly parallel shin angle like the inhuman Shai Gilgeous Alexander:

This is decidedly not Nikola Topić, who has exemplary north-south pop, but with lateral mobility that belongs on a pavement court the morning after it rained. His routes to the rim take the shape of a banana, rather than a zig-zag. On his very first possession with Red Star in 2023-24, he blows by a poorly executed switch, but instead of careening right off the defender’s hip, his wide angle to the rim allows that defender to recover, though Topić evades him by hanging in the air:

On that play, we see Topić’s other athletic flaw, in that he’s not very flexible with his upper body. His shins get reasonably low to that ground there, but his center of gravity is not. Of course, if SGA and Kyrie Irving are the bar, then we’ll never be satisfied, but this is still quite the difference:

Against Euroleague bigs, Topić started to feel the weight of his driving limitations, for perhaps the first time in his life. He shot just 6-of-14 at the rim, per Synergy — small sample size, I know — but it matched the eye test, as wide driving angles that were exacerbated by aborting his dribble too early turned would-be makes against weaker competitions into some blocked shots and impossible floaters against more mobile defenders:

That said, Topić still showed flashes of downhill production, exposing weakness in point-of-attack defense. When switches and hedges were slightly off-kilter, or defenders were the slightest bit confused by, say, a ghost screen, Topić was more eager to take advantage of that daylight. Somewhat similar to his playmaking strengths and weakness, the tantalizing guard prospect has no problems identifying advantageous driving lanes. It’s creating them that we have to worry about.

I do say tantalizing guard prospect intentionally. Despite a lack of horizontal shake and a consistent outside shot, Topić offers enough talent at such a young age (18 on draft night) that I wouldn’t balk at anybody who has him in the top-tier of prospects.

That does bring me to the first larger question when evaluating Topić, though, one you might be able to guess if you’ve read the title to this piece, and that’s one of complementary skills. In a vacuum, a guard with plus-positional size who has both excellent feel and excellent touch who’s already displayed advanced acumen in the NBA’s preferred pick-and-roll style has to be near the top of your big board, right?

Well, not if you don’t believe in the glue that connects those skills. For Topić, the glue could be the horizontal shake needed to access that superb touch and feel on the ball and shooting off of it; there’s reasons to be skeptical in both areas, particularly the former. And this season, we often saw a lack of burst in small spaces dim his playmaking. Do we think he couldn’t process and execute these baseline drive-and-kicks, or could he not access these because he couldn’t turn the corner on his matchup?

This is the crux of Topić’s defense as well, where his processing and understanding of rotations is as strong as it is on offense, but the end of the floor where his lack of lateral movement skills come back to bite him even more. And speaking of defense, NBA teams will let him access his strengths even less often than Adriatic and Euroleague teams, even beyond the improvement in individual defenders.

Why would an NBA team put themselves in rotation by hard-hedging Topić, the coverage we saw in many of his on-ball passing clips from the first section? Before we even get to drop coverage, will he not have years of seeing teams test him by going under ball-screens or switching? He’s not shy to pull up from three, but brashness is a long way from effectiveness, not to mention a lack of mid-range counters that seem antithetical to his full-speed-ahead driving nature.

Finally, can a worthwhile bet be made on exposing the cracks and slippages of an NBA defense? This, after all, is what I’m most confident about in Nikola Topić’s game, that the spaces created by confusion at the point-of-attack are ripe to be uncovered by his aggressive, north-south nature. However, is a truly enticing ball-handling prospect not one who primarily thrives on creating something out of nothing?

Nikola Topić might have been the most polarizing prospect — non Zach Edey division — in this NBA Draft class before he clocked in with a negative wingspan and a partially torn ACL this month. And after diving deep into his film, despite the obvious combination of production, youth, and skill, I can say I understand the skeptics for the reasons I delved into above.

However, I disagree with them. There is feasible skill acquisition within reach that would secure Topić’s outlook as one of the best bets in the 2024 NBA Draft class to return value as an offensive creator an NBA team can depend on. We’ve gone 2,000 words without discussing his ball-handling ability, just his tendencies.

But those tendencies, namely the early pickups and lack of ground coverage, have far more to do with the shin-angle and flexibility limitations that I think will see marginal improvements as he nears legal (American) drinking age. But even if they don’t, Topić’s handle itself is where my optimism lies.

Topić has the ball on a string, both trusting it in tight spaces and in north-south situations:

There was even a glimpse or two of a late change-of-direction, such a spin move after Topić realized he didn’t have the angle to the basket simply going full speed.

Watching him prove that these dribble counters — particularly that spin move in the lane — are in his bag, but so infrequently pulling them out, is a sign that Topić has rarely had to rely on them when his signature sprints to the rim have been enough to get by. I don’t know how much I trust his horizontal shake to improve, but I do trust that he start taking the extra dribble more consistently.

In his age-18 season, it was in his bag, just unnatural for him. Still, that coveted extra dribble was the difference on possessions like these, first where he draws a foul, and secondly where he makes a poor decision with the ball, resulting in a turnover:

Topić has beaten defenders to the rim all his life by putting his head down and turning it into a track-meet, facing real resistance for the first time in his mid-season jump to Red Star this past winter. There, his circuitous driving routes were exposed a bit, but more importantly, so were his lack of counters. We hardly saw late spin-moves in the lane, or shielding a shot-blocker with his body, and jumping off two feet. It would have helped here:

The glue that has bound Nikola Topić’s strengths together has been his straight-line burst, an ability that’s forced defenses to trap and hard-hedge him in an effort to prevent him from wreaking havoc in the lane. That, however, opened up his advanced play-making; the counter then would be frequent switching, but competition with Beograd and Mega rarely featured a big who could keep up with him. Transition offense was child’s play.

The glue to connect his playmaking and finishing in the NBA will change. No longer will it be enough to put his head down and go, and while the side-to-side athleticism will rarely leave defenders in the dust, this is where skill acquisition will elevate Topić’s game. Shooting, of course, is an obvious swing factor, but so is taking extra dribble to get further into the lane, or to the other side of the basket, prolonging his decision-making window.

Against Euroleague competition, Topić would frequently find himself with no live dribble, about to jump off of one-foot without having created an advantage, a situation he rarely found himself in with Mega or Beograd. His drive was hitting the fan, and he’d have to find a bail-out option rather than a high-level read:

I believe Nikola Topić has the necessary ball-handling ability to build a web of counters, to continue his downhill marches against NBA defenses particularly as his shooting improves, especially as he provides enough off-ball value to earn a longer leash with whatever team drafts him.

Would I still trade much of his basketball sense for that east-west shake we desire in our lead guards? It’d be the safe move, as it would likely assure Topić’s main selling point would translate to the NBA, that he’d at least be able to get into the paint vs. anybody, regardless of the decision-making surrounding his drives. Whoever drafts him would more likely be getting the version of him they’ve seen on film.

Yet, I’m a believer in this version of Topić, the only one we’re going to get, perhaps for the same reason I’m a believer in doing ten minutes of yoga a day. He is a uniquely challenging prospect to evaluate with extreme strengths and weaknesses, but in leaning toward acceptance rather than dissatisfaction, analyzing what tools he has rather that what tools he doesn’t, I’ve found the improvements Nikola Topić has to make are within reach.

The post Nikola Topić Scouting Report: On Complementary Skills, NBA Defenses, and Skill Acquisition appeared first on Swish Theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observations: 

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

Assumption: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument: Edey will not survive on defense. 

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

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

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

Edey on/off swings, garbage adjusted, 20234season 

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

Edey on/off swings, garbage adjusted, 2023 season 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Collins, 2016-17 scoring stats

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

Zach Edey, career scoring stats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing Statements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The board below contains archetype tags, sourced from my articles for the Stepien discussing rim protectors, shotmakers, connectors and offensive engines. Also included are four custom metrics, gauged subjectively rather than statistically. Scalability is one’s ability to scale up or down in usage on either end of the court. Readiness is where on the contribution timeline a player lands. Specialness is the collective rarity of skills (or, on the flipside, commonness of other traits). Versatility is what it sounds like.

Big Board Spots 1 through 20:

Big Board Spots 21 through 40:

The post Matt Powers’ 2024 NBA Draft Big Board appeared first on Swish Theory.

Carter was an intriguing prospect in the Big East last year, mainly due to his athletic juice and tenacious guard defense. His offensive game was rough around the edges, as he only shot 29.9% from deep and 42% on non-dunk two-pointers, but a guard with his length, motor, and screen navigation seemed like a solid rotational bet. Fast forward to 2024, where Carter posted an 11.4 BPM, put up 19.8 points per game on 59.8 TS%, and established himself as one of the best offensive players in the conference. How did Carter make such a great leap? And how can this newfound offensive production translate to the next level? 

Carter is an elite functional athlete. How many 6’3” guards can climb the ladder for reverse alley-oops, sour in for putbacks, and elevate with ease off cuts? No high major player under 6’4” had more dunks this year (26) and his 0.89 dunks/40 minutes is somewhere between high flyers like Ja Morant/Zach Lavine (0.93) and Dennis Smith Jr. (0.79) in their pre-draft seasons. 

Carter has fantastic burst, capable of blowing by his man off the bounce for easy lay-ups. He averaged around 5.5 rim attempts per game this season. But where Carter has shown immense growth is with his patience. He doesn’t strictly win with blow-by-speed. Providence frequently utilized him as a pick-roll-handler and ran him off curls and handoffs. He does a good job coming out of actions and getting to his spots with pace manipulation. Once he gets inside, Carter uses his length to his full advantage, extending over outreaching contests for finishes. He loves to stop and work with his pivot foot, getting to his turnaround or stepping to the rim. Per Battorvik, he shot 65.2% on 181 rim attempts. 

With his improved pacing, Carter’s passing has leaped. While still a score-first player, he looked much more comfortable waiting for plays to develop and finding lay-down windows. He upped his assist rate from 14.3% last year to 23.3% this year. There are times when he misses reads or doesn’t see a helper and forces the issue. Carter’s awareness of recognizing digs and gap help needs to improve at the next level. Regardless, his downhill style lends itself to creating open windows, which he usually capitalizes upon.

Shooting is the other major area of growth for Carter. Last season, he shot 33.3% on 69 catch-and-shoot three-point attempts. This season he took 127 catch-and-shoot threes and nailed 40.2% of them. His raw three-point percentage increased from 29.9% to 37.7%. The question is whether or not Carter’s leap is a fluke. 

After watching and hand-sorting all of his catch-and-shoot threes this season, I found that 54 of his attempts came off of movement, while 73 of his attempts were stationary. Many of these movement looks came with a high degree of difficulty – sprinting off screens and firing from way behind the line. On stationary attempts, Carter shot 42.4% (31/73) versus 37.0% (20/54) in motion. Note that this is imperfect hand-tracked data from yours truly, but my main point is that Carter took a lot of difficult shots and was still pretty efficient. His 3-point efficiency could rise even higher with a tamer catch-and-shoot diet. That’s not to say he shouldn’t be empowered to shoot off movement at the next level. Carter has the self-organization skills to make difficult shots. It’s just that some of the stuff he was hoisting up this year was absolutely bananas. 

Carter also shot 34.0% on dribble 94 off-the-dribble threes this year, using his deceleration ability to create space for himself. I expect him to pull it versus unders pretty early in his career. 

His release looks a bit funky with a low set point, but the volume and versatility have me tentatively buying the shot. Carter is much more comfortable letting it fly, upping his 3PA/100 every year he’s been in college (5.8 in Freshman year, 6.5 in Sophomore year, 11.2!!! in Junior Year). This is someone who is undoubtedly confident shooting a basketball. 

Will Carter run a pro offense? Most likely not. But that doesn’t mean his offensive growth and usage spike are meaningless. The NBA isn’t made up strictly of creators and non-creators. High-level complimentary guards must be able to create to some degree and capitalize against a tilted defense. There’s a strong chance that Carter is a potent enough shooter to demand closeouts, which makes his offensive pitch all the more appealing. 

But it’s the defensive end of the floor where Carter will make his money. There were moments this season when he floated around, likely a side effect of his hefty offensive burden. But the vast majority of the time, Carter is locked in and suffocating. He’s a pest on-the-ball with strong, quick hands. With a 2.8% block rate, he’s a shot-swatting machine for a Guard. He routinely blocks jumpers on closeouts and is a deterring presence at the rim. There could be real tertiary rim-protection equity here with his vertical pop off two feet, length, and activity. Carter is exceptional at navigating ball screens, agile enough to stay glued to his man through picks, and boasting the recovery tools to impact shots from behind. 

Even at 6’3”, I think that Carter can guard some wings in a pinch. He has a strong base, preventing him from getting moved by larger-bodied offensive players, and his near 6’9” wingspan makes him functionally larger than his listed height. He held up well on switches this year, maintaining his ground against physicality and using his length to contest. 

The obvious drawback here is that Carter is old, having already turned 22 years old. But as has been well-documented, plenty of older prospects have been severely underdrafted. A quick checklist for evaluating multi-year college prospects…

Year-to-Year Improvement

If a player spends multiple years on campus, it’s vital to look for legitimate areas of improvement. Growth isn’t linear, but if a prospect is the same player they were as a Freshman after two years of school, the sell for further development beyond college becomes trickier. Desmond Bane is a player that comes to mind in this category, a sharpshooter who made strides as a ball-handler and passer throughout his time at TCU. As a senior, Bane nearly doubled his assist rate from the previous season (26.0% vs. 13.6%). 

Vince Williams Jr. is another example – a guy who went 12/55 from three his first two seasons at VCU and ended his career jacking up 10.1 three-point attempts/100 and drilling at a 38.7% clip. 

Production

Many of the best NBA role players were legitimate stars in the college ranks. Josh Hart and Derrick White were both 18+ PPG scorers in their pre-draft seasons. Production matters – an older college player should be able to put up numbers and dominate against college-level competition. Max Strus and Payton Pritchard each averaged over 20 PPG at DePaul and Oregon as Seniors. 

One player who I recently undervalued was Jaime Jaquez. I struggled to see how he would produce at the NBA level without maintaining his usage at UCLA. However, I ignored the most important thing about Jaquez’s game: he is good at basketball. Players that are uber-impactful in college are always a good bet. Jaquez has settled nicely into a lower-usage role in Miami, where he made an immediate impact for a playoff team. 

Immediate Go-To Skill(s)

Especially for older prospects, for which teams have less patience, a player needs to have something that keeps them on the floor immediately. Even players on the more raw side of the spectrum must give teams a reason to play them. This is something that should pop off the screen. Sam Hauser could shoot, giving him the in-game reps to develop into a formidable defensive player. Caruso and Herb Jones played their hearts out on defense, empowering teams to invest time into developing their shots. 

NBA Athleticism and Tools

The downfall of many. There is a baseline of athleticism that every NBA player needs to hit. Those who are small, slow, and weak become liabilities on both ends of the floor. Even guys who aren’t typically known for their “athleticism” hit meaningful benchmarks in college. Derrick White had 142 rim attempts and Christian Braun had 27 dunks. 

Carter fits each of these criteria with ease. He grew as a shooter and ball-handler and produced in a big conference. He’s a day-one havoc creator on defense whose athleticism pops off the screen. I think there’s a path for Carter to become a true star-impact rotation piece at the next level – someone who could easily wind up one of the top few players in this class.

The post Devin Carter is Still Underrated appeared first on Swish Theory.

Player B.

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

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

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

Mechanic Specifically

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

• Speed
• Versatility
• Volume

Shot Speed

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

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

Volume & Versatility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ja’Kobe Walter vs Melvin Ajinca

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

Melvin Ajinca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ja’Kobe Walter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rob Dillingham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The post 2024 Draft Shooting Heuristic appeared first on Swish Theory.

We will cover four aspects of athletic display in basketball: offensive rim dominance, offensive midrange dominance, offensive perimeter dominance and defensive dominance. Each of our four examples demonstrate their “flex” in vastly different ways, but to the same result: getting or preventing buckets in a way that will persist as competition rises dramatically.

We’ll define the term athletic dominance as we go.

Rim Dominance: Jonathan Mogbo, San Francisco

Rims are not safe around Jonathan Mogbo. The guard-turned-big is only third in the NCAA to Zach Edey and Ryan Kalkbrenner in dunks, despite being seven and four inches shorter, respectively. Mid-major teams have elite athletes, too.

The number one most important tool for Mogbo is his catch radius. Catch radius defines how big your target is as a roller, and is constructed of several factors: max and standing verticals, vertical load time, wingspan, hand size. Mogbo scores highly on all of these. But catch radius is also about timing, and being physically able to change your location at a moment’s notice. That is a cognitive aspect, namely one’s reaction time, but a physical one too.

Can you change your short strides into long ones, and vice-versa? Mogbo can. He is capable of skying a foot or more above the rim to crash upon the rim. But he can also sneak in quicker oops, reminiscent of a middle hitter in volleyball. He can catch bad passes with his range but also very good ones with precision and timing.

A framework around – “outflexing” or “physical dominance” – whatever term you prefer, lies in how your body relates to others. Namely, how your body can physically withstand abrupt change but also resist a counterforce. Mogbo, in his true versatile fashion, is capable of both. Despite his bulky, wide-shouldered frame, Mogbo is capable of getting low to the ground and into an opponent’s body. Then, uprighting himself with great balance to sling a pass or attack the rim.

With alley oops he’s skyrocketing himself upward, but getting low-to-high near the basket is a major advantage, too.

Finally, the withstanding force. Mogbo has quick feet, which, again, are capable of chopping in an instant. This combined with his wide frame and great balance mean he is difficult to blow by, especially good at absorbing drives, hitting a roller or boxing out.

Essentially, Mogbo is capable of surpassing final walls of defense with his catch radius and sneaking through with his timing. His agility, foot speed and balance allow him to be specific in his movements; his strength allows him to withstand drives while driving himself into an opponent’s chest. Despite being only 6’9”, Mogbo is the premiere vertical threat in his class (with respect to Edey and Holmes) by blending in all these aspects.

Midrange Dominance: Isaiah Collier, USC

Just, and likely more important, than shooting a high percentage in the midrange is the ability to get there in the first place. Often the first item young ballhandlers struggle with at Summer League or the pre-season is getting past that first line of defense. As guards rise through competition levels, the ground coverage and ground resistance capabilities of their median point of attack defender rise exponentially.

Enter Isaiah Collier.

If Zay wanted to, he could have a picnic, take a nap, read a book in the paint. He is as comfortable breaking down a first line of defense as anyone in college basketball. Not built like a freshman, Collier can withstand a hard hand-check once, twice, however many times is needed to either power his way with a drive or power his way with a post up.

No size of defender is capable of withstanding Collier’s force, routinely pushing bigs backwards into the paint with choppy but strong strides. Because of this, no door is truly closed for Collier.

We see again the importance of being able to get low in an instant before popping back up at will. Collier is capable of doing this with short, quick steps to better position his heavy frame, with rare lower body stability to withstand the shifting of weight.

Collier weaponizes his paint touches well, particularly improving in efficiency as the season went on. He has the second best two point shooting percentage of any high major freshman with 200+ two point attempts. In fact, of all the players since 2008 who are categorized as Scoring Guards in the barttorvik.com database, Collier shoots the best on twos. He is also sixth in assist percentage. These inside the arc numbers combined with his passing is similar, at least statistically, to De’Aaron Fox and D’Angelo Russell’s NCAA profiles.

Collier is highly creative, which combines perfectly with his paint pressure. He is capable of getting to the “flex” spots of the floor that most bend the defense, and then is inventive in finding the best thing to do with the ball. When he uses his burst directly into a high speed pass, it may lead to turnovers here and there but the reward is often wide open layups.

This creativity is a big reason why Collier can get to finishing angles inside the arc, in spite of being a limited vertical athlete.

He can simply burst by his opponent, back him down, take elongated strides, create space with an arm bar, by backpedaling, or spinning into his body, or a hip check.

When he uses his acceleration in combination with appropriate application of strength, Collier is nearly impossible to contain. That’s what we’re looking for in midrange dominance, and easy bets say Collier will do just fine getting into his strength areas at the NBA level, too.

Perimeter Dominance: Rob Dillingham, Kentucky

Rob Dillingham has taken 128 threes and made 45% of them. He has taken 98 deep twos and made 44% of them. But it’s not the efficiency that stands out, but rather how Dillingham is getting his looks. It looks like he is playing on ice skates.

Dillingham’s movement ability is impressive. Not just bursty, not just quick, but also agile, nimble, shifty. When most players would be disoriented playing with such pace and skittishness, these traits are automatic for the Kentucky freshman. With space to operate, Dillingham is the best in class at hunting for perimeter openings.

His athleticism permits him to create horizontal space: with a wide cross or tween, he can shift his weight seamlessly to cover more distance than the opponent expects out of the listed 6’3” Dillingham. His body swings violently back and forth, as Rob utilizes his true superpower: his balance.

He uses this balance (in combination, again with a tight handle) to toy with opponents, exemplifying the hunting part of out-flexing.

His athleticism also allows him to create negative space: decelerating at full speed, Dillingham is able to go from low to the ground to upright in an instant. Yet again, the balance. Not just to be able to stop on a dime, but to then *reload* for your shot, requires moving in three distinct directions (sprint forward -> decelerate to a halt -> leap forward into a shot) in a second.

The important part of Dillingham’s game is not just that he has the arsenal, but is clever in deploying it. That functionality appears automatic as he predicts where his opponent will stick their top foot, already attacking as they do.

I have harped on the importance of changing your body shape from low to high, small to big and vice-versa, but Dillingham adds dimensionality to that. When he’s in his perimeter playground, Dillingham can change from slow to fast, low to high, high to low, left to right, front to back, accelerating fast, decelerating on a dime, all of that. While closer to the basket dominance requires more power, Dillingham is both sleek and stable in hunting perimeter openings.

One additional, significant benefit to that comes in his foul-drawing. While his free throw rate is still low for a given prospect, in consideration of his predilection for distance shooting and small stature, even a 0.25 free throw rate is enough to provide another dimension of value. The aesthetics stand out again, as does the method. When Dillingham attacks, he attacks. Weaponizing his deceleration but also shiftiness in general, Dillingham is able to get into a bigger opponent’s body with ease. The physical toll is likely a lot to manage over a full NBA season, but it is an important part of the arsenal. His ability to seek out physicality keeps defenders honest as they try to blanket his perimeter space.

Defensive Dominance: Ryan Dunn, UVA

Take everything we’ve learned about offensive dominance. How sleek while bursty movement creates force. Now, try to negate it – all of it – in a single player. That player looks like Ryan Dunn.

The first important quality is stickiness. How much can you stay glued to the hip of a perimeter creator without fouling? Opponents shoot a remarkably low 22% from two on drives when guarded by Ryan Dunn. He suffocates with long strides, chopping feet to then react in an instant, sliding in lockstep with the offensive player.

It’s partially his high feel overlapping here, as his instantaneous reaction speed allows him to gamble in ways that still keep him in the play. It would be bad technique, but Dunn recovers better than anyone. His 10.6% block rate, despite being only 6’8”, speaks for itself.

His wingspan also helps to close gaps quickly. He springs into action with his 7’1” length which matches well with his burst and second jump speed. The court shrinks for Dunn, where he is a beat away from making his presence felt at any given point. This is the ideal for a defensive forward: blocking off space with length; covering space with speed.

He can withstand force, too. His lower body maintains its springiness while also being extremely durable, a rare combination. Dunn was built to prevent buckets all over the court.

On any given possession, UVA trusts Dunn to play like an aggressive strong safety, hedging, icing, blitzing, trapping, monitoring whatever gaps. Dunn has done it all as he patrols the court. Some may saw this is a negative – NBA players shouldn’t gamble with abandon like this. But that is what Dunn has been asked to do, and he performs it magnificently. We know what happens when you ramp up his activity, and it’s only good things. Despite being top 5 in the NCAA in block rate and top 50 in steal rate, Dunn only fouls three times every forty minutes. In fact, no other high major player in the barttorvik.com database has improved upon his combination of steals, blocks and foul rate, with only Nerlens Noel coming close.

Putting it all together, Dunn stops rim dominance with his length, quick first/second/third leaps and his ability to withstand force. He cuts off drives preventing access to the midrange, while also blocking off passing lanes that would create easy looks. On the perimeter he is able to stick with guards with timely sliding. His long lower legs propel him back and forth while also staying on balance after dramatic movements over a distance. He is nearly the perfect defensive wing, capable of stopping actions from any angle. The offense may be nearly nonexistent, but there are few better defensive prospects than Ryan Dunn.

The post How Prospects Outflex Their Opponent appeared first on Swish Theory.

That’s the first question I ask myself as I begin the process for my 2024 NBA draft board. By separating production, feel and athletic premiums, I will try to show my notes as I sort out my analysis of 2024 prospects.

Starting with production makes sense given it is the most observable, and by far. Players produce by getting stats, and we have plenty of stats. However, it is not as simple as a 1:1 translation, as many highly productive college players struggle to reach close to that production in the pros. The reverse – little production leading to great production – is rarer, but still occurs.

For our analysis, the definition of production will be something like: “able to make things happen almost by accident through presence and skill.” The “by accident” part works to strip away feel from the equation, which will be the next article. “Through presence and skill” aims to remove the athletic component, the third prong.

While grading prospects based on expectations of future production is impossible with 100% accuracy, the hope is we can land close enough to separate our views from consensus. Rather than spend a long article describing how production can play out on a basketball court, I illustrate how production occurs through five examples.

Tier 1: Dominance

Primary Example: Zach Edey

How does he produce on the court?

Zach Edey is the pinnacle of production, as shown by his NCAA-leading Box Plus-Minus of 14.3. This is the 12th highest mark in the barttorvik.com database, after posting the 13th highest mark the season prior. Edey is a beast.

His production is far from hidden, either. At 7’4”, 300 pounds with a 7’10.5” wingspan, Edey is gargantuan. His movement ability has improved every year, too. With his combined size and movement abiliy, Edey creates events on the floor almost on accident. Add in nimble footwork and elite spatial awareness and you have a player not just lumbering around but dodging and flipping hips as well at his size.

It would be miserable to be screened by Edey or have to box him out. That physical dominance earns Edey a 10 out of 10 for production, but not just for current rather than expectations in the pros.

How easily does he produce?

The margins Edey wins by are astronomical. It is tough to scratch the ceiling above rebounding 26% of defensive opportunities or 17% of offensive ones. When he posts up, he is capable of holding that position for many seconds awaiting an entry pass, and then is able to convert that into a hook, drop step, or just straight dunking right over his opponent. There is more scoring versatility than meets the eye with Edey, simply through the variety of angles he has access to at his size.

In addition, Edey is a vigilant screener and passer. It is easy to imagine him as an NBA-level screener at his size and movement ability, and likely a very good one. He has figured out how to double-hand kick-out pass above all opponents’ heads, more difficult in the NBA with swarming long-wingspanned defenders, but Edey’s size to find better angles won’t go away.

How will this get harder in the NBA and how can he adapt?

My counter-intuitive take is it might, in fact, get easier in the NBA. At the college level Edey has to deal with a double or triple team every single time he touches the ball. This has likely boosted his assist rate (again, the biggest area of production concern), but raised the degree of difficulty on his finishes (not that it mattered). The ease with which Edey can navigate multiple surrounding defenders swiping at the ball to still turn and finish should not go unnoticed, and might indeed lead to continued easy buckets in the pros.

Edey’s weakness is defending away from the basket, but as a likely drop defender that should have little impact on his overall production. His steals will be low but blocks high (he has swatted 8% of opponent attempts) and rebounding should continue to be above average for a big, if not flat out excellent.

Edey has improved his movement ability and fitness quality every year with Purdue. This provides a lot of encouragement to his ability to adapt to the pros. However, it is possible (if not likely) that his opponent will have to do more of the adapting, to Edey’s size and skill. Edey has put up historic usage and rebounding rates while shooting a spectacular 67% true shooting (84% at the rim, 41% midrange, 72% from the line) to the point that even a standard deviation drop would still be excellent. He makes things happen on the court constantly and will at the next level, too.

The question of whether the speed of the game is too much for Edey ignores the major strides he’s made in his fitness and also his dominance per minute. He might need to make additional improvements to physique to play over 30 minutes per game but he has shown the ability to do that the past two seasons at Purdue. Advanced training in the NBA (Zach has not yet turned 22) can help that along. However, Edey’s talent is worth slowing down for, and that would only likely be a little.

Examples of others in this tier?

None

Tier 2: Conditional Dominance

Primary Example: Reed Sheppard

How does he produce on the court?

Reed is on the opposite end compared to Edey’s stature: at 6’3” and 187 pounds, Sheppard faces an uphill battle for his production. He compensates with everything else.

To be a productive player you have to make unlikely events possible, and that’s exactly what Reed does. His greatest strength is his positioning and hand placement, as one thinks themselves open to only be surprised by a last second Sheppard. Sheppard’s production is difficult to separate from his feel, as he moves across the court almost automatically in optimal position. The production is real and significant all over the court, as Sheppard’s 12.4 Box Plus-Minus is the highest for all freshmen by a long shot. Indeed, he only trails Zion Williamson, Anthony Davis, Chet Holmgren, Michael Beasley, Evan Mobley, Karl-Anthony Towns and Kevin Love in the all-in-one box score statistic. The height hasn’t mattered to reach historic production already compared to his age group.

This means Sheppard’s production is all-encompassing, from stocks to rebounds to assists and points. By being in the right position and having the skill to capitalize, Sheppard looks like one of the most productive college players of all time.

How easily does he produce?

What prevents Sheppard from landing in the first tier is his stature at only 6’3” (and that might be generous). Simply by that fact the margins for him to overcome are more significant than for someone like Zach Edey who will always be a foot taller than Sheppard. His handle is also more functional than masterful, limiting his roaming with the ball and thus blocking off an area of potential production. Neither has mattered in the least for Sheppard, but he may find himself struggling to have an impact inside the arc against a trying matchup here and there in the pros.

The production on defense, however, is undeniable. Sheppard feels omnipresent on the court, rotating faster than one can process watching him. He is very strong, capable of banging in the post and stonewalling drives, but more importantly knows how to leverage that strength. This will give him a lynchpin on defense, not being attacked physically, to then make things happen with his rapid, accurate hand movements or by popping out of nowhere.

The distance shooting is bankable, too. He has taken 8 threes per 100 possessions and made over half of them. His release is lightning fast with little load time and good release point. That volume shooting will help space the court at any level, making closeouts easier to reduce the burden on his handle, and also open up passing lanes. Reed is not the most manipulative passer but, similar to his handle, is excellent at making it functional nonetheless.

How will this get harder in the NBA and how can he adapt?

Sheppard is so masterful in what he does well and versatile across the court it is highly likely he will produce at a high level in the NBA. The biggest challenge is the longer wingspans blocking off his passing lanes on offense and making his contests more difficult on defense. But Reed has already found ways to compensate for both. He gets off the floor very quickly with good ‘instant vertical.’ His hand placement often shows awareness to exactly where an opponent’s release point will be, or where they will gather before the attempt.

Sheppard’s feel for the game hints at future improvements, but that is for the next article. Sheppard is capable of producing (and likely very well) at an NBA level today with his activity, physicality and versatility of skillset. He creates events almost automatically as he gets into an opponent’s body or lets it fly in a split second from deep. Despite his stature, he is imposing physically in his own way.

While there can be knits to pick for his athletic tools, getting blown by or shot over here and there, he has used those opportunistically to reposition and make something happen even so.

Examples of others in this tier?

Jonathan Mogbo, Ron Holland

Tier 3: Omnipresence

Primary Example: PJ Hall

How does he produce on the court?

Post ups, spot ups, rolling to the basket. Cuts, transition looks, putbacks. PJ Hall does all of those things at least once per game. He also does that while vacuuming up rebounds, blocking shots and getting some assists and steals. His 30% usage for Clemson is top 10 in the country.

PJ Hall is active. Although not the quickest laterally (steals his weakest stat), Hall is a bruising big, listed at 6’10” and 238 pounds, who is physical all over the court. His front line speed and explosion is better than the mobility otherwise would suggest.

And yes, he scores from all over. While not the most difficult of looks – he only has five made shots off the dribble – it points to his variety of usage. By being strong and physical and constantly in place, Hall is ready.

How easily does he produce?

Hall is only in the third tier for this reason: the margins are often thin, especially for his scoring. His rebounding is likely the most ironclad contribution: Hall has a decent wingspan and can get off his feet quickly. Contested boards become clean ones often, with PJ claiming his with fervor.

The blocks come next, again benefitting from his interior strength and above average leaping. While far from a primary rim protector, an opponent would at least not be able to lose track of Hall’s location.

Hall has plenty of scoring versatility in college, which works for him in some ways but against in others. To start with the bad news, there is no obvious easy day one offensive specialty. His outside shot is okay (33% from deep, 79% from the line) with better luck inside the arc (57% from two). His primary scoring output comes from post ups, at 7.4 per game.

The good news is the breadth of skill means you don’t have to choose any single way to use him. Hall can fill in admirably in many spots. His post ups are not slow and plodding but decisive and featuring many drop step dunks. Posting up might not be his sweet spot but rather a means to an end.

How will this get harder in the NBA and how can he adapt?

The biggest difficulty for Hall on an NBA floor will be sticking to his man. While likely quick enough to guard your average big, he would often be faced with an athletic gap when defending in space. His fitness and physicality will counter that, a locked in facet of his game regardless of competition.

The biggest question is his willingness to let it fly, a major source of production in itself. Should he continue to let it fly with little hesitation, perhaps bolstered by a little more improvement in his percentages, Hall being in Tier 3 means he has more than enough stuff to stick around.

Examples of others in this tier?

Cody Williams, Matas Buzelis

Tier 4: Consistent Presence

Primary Example: KJ Simpson

How does he produce on the court?

Playing against KJ Simpson must feel like whack-a-mole: wherever you snuff out his movement, a moment later he’s popping up elsewhere. At just 6’2”, Simpson overcomes his stature a few ways: his strength, his instincts, his vertical pop, his quickness. These all make Simpson difficult to screen and difficult to keep out of the paint.

Let’s return to our definition of production, “how many things does he make happen by accident?” As he’s #13 in the NCAA for Box Plus-Minus, it seems a lot. He rebounds (16% rate), assists (26%) and gets plenty of steals (3.4%). He leads his team in usage at 27%. The statistical case for Simpson is very strong.

Simpson is capable of no-load threes as well as skying in for the occasional dunk (9 so far this season). He gets into his pull-up smoothly with four self-created perimeter points per game. He may not be a traditional tank knocking people around to cause chaos, but he can do it surgically while powerfully.

How easily does he produce?

The visual evidence is murkier than the stellar statistical resume. KJ Simpson wins often by small margins, but is intentional enough in his application that he gives just enough effort to win. This hints at Simpson being able to scale up or down at the NBA level as he can deliberately focus his efforts onto different roles. Need an on-ball initiator? An off-ball catch and shooter? A closeout attacker? A ball-moving connector? Simpson can effectively do any of these.

On defense, the steals come by activity and physicality. Simpson can bully weaker NCAA guards, even at only 189 pounds. He hits screeners when he is screened and boxes out hard. These might not all create events but it does carve out space on the court, and more than all but a few NCAA guards.

How will this get harder in the NBA and how will he adapt?

The NBA is not kind to small guards. But how small does Simpson play, really? There will be many plays that simply sail over his head which would not at the NCAA level, with the NBA full of big and wing creators. But Simpson’s role and athletic versatility will ease the adjustment.

While small guards still survive in the league, the margins are very thin. Simpson needs to continue refining his toolset to ensure an NBA impact. Already built and quick and a good leaper, Simpson is not far off from the median point guard’s athleticism, and may be greater than. But the easy victories will stop, only tough ones from here. This is why I ultimately knocked him down to an 8.5, in spite of a stellar of a statistical resume as nearly anyone in the NCAA.

Simpson is a good bet to find a way to contribute, but the degree is highly uncertain. Regardless, that’s a bet I’d be comfortable making in the first round.

Examples of others in this tier?

Tyler Kolek, Baylor Scheierman

Tier 5: Selective Presence

Primary Example: Milan Momcilovic

How does he produce on the court?

Milan Momcilovic is not convincing as an NBA-level athlete, but has the tools and skill to succeed regardless. His production is the most siloed of any we’ve described so far: he takes (and makes) a ton of threes. Despite this narrow avenue of contribution, Momcilovic still ranks in the top 10 for high major freshman by Box Plus-Minus. This is because Milan is 6’8” and has a quick, high release. Sometimes the analysis doesn’t need a second question: Momcilovic produces by hitting unblockable shots.

The rest of his game is middling, dragged down by his poor foot speed, limited burst and stiffness. A 12% defensive rebound rate and 2.1% block rate are closer to the stats of a 6’5” prospect than a 6’8” one, but there is a baseline of production nonetheless. And while Milan is not very mobile, he is still enough to be a consistent presence guarding fours.

How easily does he produce?

Momcilovic’s production is tilted towards three point volume, and that’s where he’s winning by large margins. The effective release height on his shot is more like a 6’10” player than a 6’8” one, releasing above his head with great arc. When we’re talking about projectable production, it is difficult to get more bankable than a release point that high going in at a 40% rate on very good volume. But that’s what we have with Milan.

His size comes in handy, even if not snagging down rebounds or skying for blocks. At his size he can set effective screens and generally be a big body on the court. Even when he’s not adding to his stat total, he’s taking up more space than the average NBA player.

How will this get harder in the NBA and how will he adapt?

He will be attacked on defense. Finding the right player to park Milan on will be essential for his early career success. Milan has little chance of hanging in with either 3s or 5s, relegated to the non-explosive 4s. That makes the margins tighter on offense where he has to be successful with his strengths. This is why Momcilovic is in Tier 5, as there is little guarantee he can hang in enough to capitalize on his strengths.

But the bedrock of high volume, high accuracy three point shooting is a function needed by every team, and Momcilovic is convincing as almost anyone in the class for that role.

Examples of others at this grade?

Wooga Poplar, Tre Mitchell

The post How Prospects Make Things Happen appeared first on Swish Theory.