Where People Miss: Breaking Down Archetypes, Players, and Process and How They Bring NBA Teams Value
I love draft season. I love seeing people’s boards, either loving it or staring at it for nearly an hour trying to understand it, and most importantly, I think there is often a lack of understanding of how a player’s skills work. And that is ok, I am by no means perfect as an evaluator, and you can absolutely poke holes in my previous rankings (Leonard Miller is jumping up and down and saying hello). But in all honesty, I don’t think that is the point of media draft evaluation. The point of evaluation is to have a good process. Players don’t end up working out in the NBA due to a lack of talent. They often fail due to a lack of work ethic, poor coaching, or something that I think is underrated in general: their skill as a learner.
There are some people in every walk of life who are simply good learners. People who can learn a concept, either mental or physical, and just apply it quicker than someone else. I’d love to truly understand this, but I will leave that to the neuroscientists who know a lot more than me, but this is something you can tangibly see on the basketball court. Think of players who can adapt to any situation, like Al Horford. Some could say that Horford simply has a higher basketball IQ, and while that may be part of it, why does Al Horford have a higher basketball IQ, and why does he have that but also can develop unorthodox skills for his position? I tend to believe that people who display that level of talent are good learners, and while this is something as media we can’t do to the same level as NBA teams who get to interact with these players and understand them as humans, it gives more value to understanding a player’s entire journey of the past two seasons, rather than just their film and stats in isolation.
For example, I tend to greatly value when a player is on a true upward trajectory. Usually, most draftable prospects are on some kind of upward trajectory, as they have recently moved up a level from high school to college, transferred up, or simply put a better season on tape than their last ones. But what about players who clearly improve and deal with adversity in the middle of the season? Joan Beringer is someone who is a clear example of this. He isn’t just a late arrival to basketball; he is a late arrival who has improved drastically as a player in the last 12 months, which I find incredibly valuable.
Understanding Draft Slots
I love analytics. I rely on analytics as an identifier for trends, it helps me find underrated players whose film I then feel the need to jump into, and it helps me understand players so much more than it would without it. But we all know those people who use analytics as law rather than sitting down and truly understanding a player, and that tends to annoy me.
I know that sounds petty, and maybe I am petty, but so much of Draft Twitter is amplified by having a take and that take blowing up, rather than a good process. Thankfully, I am not very concerned with “having a take” and that is ok. But I often find people who use analytics as law to misunderstand draft slots and how to apply analytics to the NBA.
In Burak Can Koc’s piece from 2020, the now Dallas Mavericks employee outlined what the odds are of each draft pick becoming an All-Star:
If you are drafting in roughly the top 10, it is not unreasonable to expect your team to have the ability to draft an All-Star, but this logic particularly applies to the top 5, where at each slot in that range, you have at least a 30% chance of drafting an All-Star
Ok, so these are analytics, but every number is analytics. What does this have to do with other people’s big boards and how they misvalue players? I went into this piece not wanting to subtweet someone, but I decided I will. I saw a big board the other day on which Dylan Cardwell was ranked in the top 10. I want to say up front, I really like Dylan Cardwell, I have talked on my podcast numerous times about how I believe I like Cardwell as a two-way prospect much more than your average person, and as I flesh out my big board and finalize everything, there is a non-zero chance he ends up in the top 60, which would be higher than most.
All that being said, there is a zero percent chance Dylan Cardwell ever returns true All-Star value. A career 45% free-throw shooter over 5 college seasons will never be able to play true starter minutes in an NBA Playoff game, let alone his low chances of playing real backup minutes in general. That is one of the many flaws with Cardwell’s game that I love, but we have to be realistic about how we rank players and how they return value.
How I rank my tiers on my board reflects the playoff value I think a player is going to bring. I was much lower on someone like Zach Edey, who I thought would be an incredibly valuable regular-season player, because I wasn’t sure he was ever going to be a successful playoff player due to a lack of footspeed. I still had a 1st round grade on Edey, and I was pleasantly surprised by some improved footspeed he showed in the regular season this year. However, I still didn’t find him particularly inspiring in the Thunder’s ass-kicking of the Grizzlies in the first round this year. With this criteria laid out, I rank players in these tiers on my board:
TIER 1: Projectable All-NBA
TIER 2: Projectable All-Star
TIER 3: High-Level Projectable Starters With Upside
TIER 4: Projectable Starters/Tools Swings
TIER 5: Rotation Players/Upside Swing
TIER 6: Second-Round Picks Guaranteed Contract/Stashes
TIER 7: Two-Way Contracts/Priority Camp Invites
Tier 8: Priority G League Roster Bets/Multi-Year Two-Ways/Elite Summer League Vibes
Now that I have yapped for way longer than I should have, how does this apply to the 2025 Draft, and who are the players I think are being misidentified not in their skills, but in the value they are going to bring?
Jase Richardson
Michigan State’s Jase Richardson is someone who I think has been talked about very irresponsibly this entire draft cycle. I absolutely have a draftable grade on Jase, but I am much lower on him than most, and while this isn’t due to the skills he has, but rather the skills he lacks.
Measuring at 6’0.5” barefoot, Jase isn’t very big, and you can see that on tape, and it is incredibly rare to find successful players of that size who aren’t alpha dog NBA scorers. Jalen Brunson, Allen Iverson, Chris Paul, Kyle Lowry, and Mark Price have all been great players similarly sized to Jase, but the thing they all have in common is that they scored either 20+ points per game or averaged at least 8+ assists in multiple seasons around their prime. Add to the fact that CP3 and Lowry were borderline elite defenders, and Iverson at least generated turnovers at an elite rate and had a level of offensive separation skills perhaps the best in the history of the league, we are left with Jalen Brunson and Mark Price as higher-end outcomes for Jase. I think it is reasonable to throw out Price as a player of a bygone era, where switchhunting wasn’t prevalent, schemes were much simpler, and smaller guards were less of an issue, so that leaves us with Brunson.
Jalen Brunson has defied all odds to turn into an elite NBA creator. While he is the son of the former pro-turned-coach and a top recruit who grew up playing for Team USA, it never seemed like Brunson had true juice as a starter in the NBA, and was seen that way on draft night despite being one of the best college players of his generation, going to the Mavericks at the 33rd pick, with scouting reports being littered of the phrase backup PG.
So the NBA missed on Brunson turning into an elite creator, why can’t they with Jase? There’s one huge flaw Jase has that Brunson doesn’t: the passing. Jalen Brunson was a point guard his entire life, going back to high school, where he was a consensus top 5 PG in his class. Jase Richardson has never been a point guard, and being pigeonholed as a scoring 2 guard who isn’t an elite defender standing at 6’2” in shoes is an incredibly narrow pathway to true starter value, with Collin Sexton being the only NBA player with a positive EPM the past season to do this, the last nail in the coffin being Sexton was a better passer than Jase at the same age.
I could look stupid in the next few years, and I still have Richardson inside my top 30, and that is based on him potentially developing into a much better passer, and he has shown flashes of good passing, but doesn't go to it at a high level. That is where the side of understanding Jase as a learner is vital for an NBA team, and betting on him to develop this could lead to him potentially turning into an NBA starter, but in reality, I think Richardson goes a lot lower than people would expect on draft night.
Maxime Raynaud
Maxime Raynaud is fun. A lot of people I respect are very high on his game, and it is easy to see why. He is a very skilled 7-footer who shot 35% on his last 250 threes and can put the ball on the deck is intriguing to say the least, and as someone who was very high on Kyle Filipowski last cycle, it is an easy comparison to make.
The place where I struggle with Raynaud is the defense. He often gets labeled as a rim-protecting 5 who also spaces the floor, but I think the former of these labels isn’t true. He could return value as a bench big man who brings a different look on the offensive end, and that keeps him inside my top 40. I even think that despite my labeling of him as a poor defender, he could play real bench playoff minutes despite his poor defense.
Stanford was significantly better on the defensive end this season with Raynaud OFF the floor. In order to extend out this sample size I checked his 2024 season, and that was also the case.
This is not the profile of a productive rim protector at the college level, and Raynaud’s tape also isn’t particularly promising either, often showing off poor footspeed, questionable awareness, and even despite his large size, a weaker chest that defenders can drive into with ease.
This significantly limits his draftability, and as I said with Jase Richardson, there is absolutely a chance that Raynaud overcomes this deficiency with NBA coaching to become a productive NBA player who starts, but right now, I don’t see that development for the team that drafts him. I see him closer to a Luka Garza or Filip Petrušev, who will be a pro somewhere, but the NBA route is much harder.
Closing Time
What I hoped to illustrate was the different types of value that different players bring and the process that I use when evaluating players. I am by no means perfect, and I would love to hear counterarguments for any of this in the comments or on Twitter. Part of the “being a good learner” I preach for players is something I also apply to myself, and part of that is listening and being someone who takes in information from different perspectives, and while I may not agree, there are nuggets of knowledge that can be taken away from different perspectives. That is ultimately how NBA Front Offices are constructed, with different scouts and executives valuing different things. Even in my time talking to some college coaches, it is clear that some members of staff value things differently, having had coaches tell me they were glad to be wrong about a player they brought in via the portal, thinking that player wasn’t going to be as successful as the rest of the staff did. Happy scouting, and please use some of these things I may have taught you ethically. There is nothing quite like an unethical Barttorvik Query.
Really enjoyed this!