Brennan: Five sleepers I like in the NBA Draft

For college hoops people, the NBA Draft process can occasionally be a bit bewildering. Sure, sometimes the best players are just the best players, and the Wooden Award winner is the guy who should go No. 1 overall, or whatever; sometimes Anthony Davis dominates en route to a national title, and then joins the draft pool and makes life simple. Just as often, though, NBA mock drafts can bear only a passing resemblance to what the top of the college game looked like in the previous season.

There are plenty of good reasons for this. Young players develop at different speeds; elite freshman prospects often don’t show everything they have at age 19; juniors and seniors tend to wind up staying — and excelling — at the college level precisely because they aren’t quite good enough for the NBA. Stylistically, the two levels are different, the attributes required are diffuse, the profiles of player divergent. It makes sense.

Still, sometimes the college game can give you a good reason to like a player beyond raw talent or developmental projection. Sometimes, the college performances of players offer real insight into what they might be as pros. The classic example, to anyone who watched him turn into a dominant college player who didn’t quite fit into any one position, was Michigan State’s Draymond Green, who played all four years in East Lansing before being drafted in the second round and going on to revolutionize positionality in the modern NBA. Malcolm Brogdon had a stellar college career, never got much NBA love, entered the draft after his senior season and became the Rookie of the Year. Sometimes, really good college players, even aged ones, have more to offer than they get credit for.

Which brings us to this, our first piece in a series that asks national college hoops writers at The Athletic a simple question: Who are some guys you like? Below is a list of five players — ranked in rough projected draft order, based primarily on what we’ve seen and learned about them as college players — who I think might end up being a bit better than the consensus.

Devin Vassell

6-foot-5 wing | 19 years old, sophomore | Florida State

Projection: Lottery pick

Sometimes, you see a player — particularly in person — and immediately realize he is the best player on the floor. So it was with Vassell as early as mid-January, when Florida State hosted Virginia. For two months I watched as Virginia’s defense, perhaps the best of Tony Bennett’s extremely defensive tenure at the school, ground its opponents into dust, and ground out wins despite its own inability to score. Then, suddenly, arrived Vassell, who seemed to glide effortlessly above the fray. He was as good as any of UVa’s wings defensively, a hugely gifted, athletic, long-armed wing, who also (unlike a lot of college players with his physical talents) had a smoothness to his offensive game. He floated around the floor against Virginia; the rest of his team got bogged down, but Vassell looked like he was playing another game.

It is a testament to the depth of talent Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton is now routinely bringing to Tallahassee that Vassell wasn’t unleashed on the ACC a year earlier, when he put up similarly good numbers in a much smaller sample size. But last season he was a very good Florida State team’s very best player: an elite wing defender who blocked shots and created steals (which very few players do) who also averaged 41.5 percent from 3 and posted a 124.8 offensive rating. He wasn’t just impressive looking, a collection of physical traits upon which you could project future skills; he was already really, really good.

It’s no surprise Vassell found his way to the higher end of mock drafts; he’s projected to be taken safely within the lottery, and rightly so. Even then, though, there is an undercurrent of “well, he looks all right, but we don’t think he’ll be a star” to many draft projections — a feeling that Vassell is in that territory mostly because this draft class is weak. Maybe so. But also maybe a 6-foot-5 wing who can guard and handle the ball and make 3s at a high clip and was a total killer (to the tune of 1.41 points per trip) in transition and almost always looked like the best player on the floor in the same way some prodigious middle schoolers don’t look like they should be playing with other middle schoolers because they’re getting kind of bored is a player who might just excel in today’s NBA. Just a thought.

Achiuwa’s versatility will play well in the NBA. (Aaron Doster / USA Today)

Precious Achiuwa

6-9 forward/center | 20 years old, freshman | Memphis

Projection: Middle of the first round

James Wiseman was, in many ways, the story of the Memphis season — the main cause of Penny Hardaway’s preseason desire for all of the smoke, and the player whose absence ultimately kept the Tigers from fulfilling their potential. In just a couple of games, Wiseman showcased the sort of talent that made him the bona fide No. 1 pick before his college-year debacle, the kind of talent who has people writing these sorts of breathless scouting reports about him even after he spent most of the past year playing against foam pads and folding chairs.

What was left when Wiseman dipped was a team that needed Precious Achiuwa to be more than what Precious Achiuwa was immediately ready to be. Wiseman would have given Memphis a dominant interior player to build an offense around. Achiuwa wasn’t that, the rest of the team turned it over constantly, the Tigers finished 210th in adjusted offensive efficiency, and ended the season on track to miss the NCAA Tournament.

All of which had a way of obscuring just how fascinating Achiuwa was in his own right. He was one of the more interesting viewing experiences in the college game, for one thing, a helter-skelter, off-kilter, downhill-running forward who liked to grab a defensive rebound, sprint the length of the floor and just see what happened. He lacked a certain amount of polish — he was one of those guys who must be infuriating to play against, because he doesn’t do things the way years of camps and practices have prepared you to expect other players to play — and his turnover rate and ugly perimeter shooting were symptomatic of the Tigers’ main offensive flaws. And yet Memphis wound up being a really good defensive team, like top-five in the country good, and Achiuwa deserves a ton of the credit for why. He was a hyperactive, always-bouncing defender, a great rim protector, and the kind of player you can imagine switching to just about any NBA player the modern league wants to ball-screen him into. He’s fast enough and big enough to do it all, and in a league that wants to push the pace, he’s already pretty good at that too.

He’s the kind of player whom, if you didn’t watch a ton of Memphis basketball, you might look at statistically and wonder what all the fuss was about. But if you dialed in on him, and you see what the NBA is now, he makes total sense.

Azubuike might not fit the profile of an NBA big, but there will be a spot for him. (Jamie Squire / Getty)

Udoka Azubuike

7-foot center | 21 years old, senior | Kansas

Projection: Middle of the second round

If Achiuwa’s chaotic game makes a certain kind of intuitive sense in the NBA of 2020, Azubuike’s absolutely does not. He is the classical NBA center, the conventional big man of 30 years ago, a relic of a bygone age. In the times of yore, Azubuike would be locked in to, at minimum, an Olden Polynice sort of career, and probably a lot more than that. In the modern NBA — without the ability to shoot — a lot of coaches just straight up won’t be interested.

Still, his name is on this list for two reasons:

1) The NBA big isn’t totally dead, and

2) The things Azubuike does, he does really well

As to the first, sure, the game is no longer tailored around back-to-the-basket centers playing between five and 10 feet from the rim. But specialist bigs are still very much a part of NBA rosters; guys who can do one or two jobs in particular lineup configurations can still be vital parts of really good teams. (Not every NBA center has to play like P.J. Tucker. Some just play like centers.) If you’re looking for someone who can pin a defender to the space directly beneath the rim, turn and dunk on their head, Azubuike is probably the best player in the draft at doing exactly that. He is also an elite offensive rebounder, a skill that remains very much in the NBA vogue. He is also better at moving off the ball than he gets credit for, on both ends of the floor; he blocks a ton of shots and controls the paint, and his size also allows him to get out away from the rim in a way that Kansas’ opponents were rarely able to exploit.

Azubuike was hugely efficient last season finishing both as a cutter and as the setter in pick-and-roll plays. He shot 74.4 percent from the field; he made 41 percent from the free-throw line and still finished with a top-five true shooting percentage. It was nutty stuff.

Azubuike’s college career felt star-crossed: For various reasons, from injury to pandemic, he never played in a Big 12 tournament. It feels like his NBA career could go that way too; he could be yet another elite big man who falls by the wayside in the post-revolutionary Association. But there are teams that need a center to do some center things, and it wouldn’t surprise us if you read an NBA writer in a year or two rhapsodizing the genius of the GM who drafted Azubuike deciding to zig when other teams zagged.

There’s plenty to like about Winston’s game. (Mike Carter / USA Today)

Cassius Winston

6-1 guard | 22 years old, senior | Michigan State

Projection: Early second round

Hands up here. What can I say? I write about college basketball for a living. I like Winston. I know, I know. It’s practically a cliché. But clichés are often clichés because they’re true, and in this case, it is very hard to have spent any time covering this player over the past four years and not come away with the impression he would be an asset for almost any team to have. It’s just how it goes.

A lot of personal angles go into this: Winston is a real-deal leader, a sage old head in a young person’s body, one of Tom Izzo’s most beloved players ever, in a list that goes back decades. There is the maturity and perspective with which Winston approached unthinkable familial tragedy, the way he impacted so many people he came in contact with. This is the story of stuff NBA front offices want to know too: They want to know who they’re adding to their organization, the real stories of these people beyond their box scores, and Winston’s character is good enough that it makes you want to overlook any deficiencies in his game. He’s that kind of guy.

But there aren’t that many deficiencies to overlook. That’s the thing: Winston was a really good point guard. From Day 1, he was one of the best passers in college basketball, a genius at seeing geometrically original passing angles and delivering the ball on time. At age 18, he already looked like the canny old 50-year-old at the pickup run. As he grew, he also developed into a lead scoring guard, the kind of player who could carry the offense through crucial late-bracket March games and finish his career having shot 43 percent from 3.

There are plenty of flaws in Winston’s draft prospectus. As a defender, he improved, but was never lockdown-level; as an athlete, it’s not hard to imagine him having a tough time with the (for example) Tyler Herros of the NBA. Long-ish guards and constant ball screens will be an issue. But these bits have been discussed at length, and they don’t seem to be turning NBA teams off altogether, nor should they. There’s too much else to like about Winston for that.

Riller offers everything you’d want in a lead point guard. (Mitchell Layton / Getty)

Grant Riller

6-3 guard | 23 years old, senior | Charleston

Projection: Late second round

Statistically speaking, there’s not much you can say about Riller that his pages at Basketball Prospectus and KenPom.com don’t already say, which is that for four years at Charleston he pretty much did everything, and did it extremely well. The fact that a player of Riller’s quality and numbers lasted all four years at the same mid-major school in the late-aughts — in an era of almost constant transfers, and up-transfers especially — is perhaps the real miracle.

In any case, it is going to be fascinating to see what Riller can do at a higher-than-mid-major sort of level. With all due respect to the CAA — a solid mid-major league — Riller had his way with it for so long that it’s hard not to feel like a huge chunk of his productivity happened in a comfortably enclosed bubble. Riller’s statistics showcase a player who shoots it well, handles it well (despite an uptick in turnover rate last season, in what was a minor off year), scores at all three levels, gets to the free-throw line, assists teammates at a high rate — basically everything you’d want from an ostensible lead scoring point guard type. Late in the second round, having seen him play a lot, he feels like a steal. But how well will his production translate? There’s only one way to find out. Let’s hope he — and we — get the chance.