Austin Reaves vs 2021 Draft Peers

In previous write-ups, we have shown how Austin Reaves’s shooting and defense are stronger than they might seem from just a cursory glance. In this piece, we aim to compare Reaves directly to his peers, mostly guards and smaller wings projected in the late first round or the second round. We hope that this can be a reliable resource for comparing Reaves to any players in his draft range who project to fit even a remotely similar archetype and provide a persuasive argument for why you should pick our client. You do not need to read this entire document at once. Instead, you can treat it as an encyclopedia, and you can look for a specific guy who you are directly comparing with Reaves at a particular moment or browse a few entries if left with just a few minutes of open time.

We will be presenting various Excel charts at points in this write-up. These are based on queries assembled from Bart Torvik’s incredible website but with my own color coding, with red cells denoting the worst figure in that category among the player seasons in that query and green cells denoting the best figure to allow for better direct comparisons among these cohorts, something which is especially useful when the players generally play the same position. However, we have deliberately not color-coded any statistics directly related to the query search terms simply because these stats already have a hard ceiling and/or floor. Players in italics are in this year’s draft class while players in bold are players who I have (somewhat arbitrarily) acknowledged have been “good” players at some point in their NBA career. Even when I am not organizing this information into queries, these stats are generally pulled from Bart Torvik. It is worth noting that Torvik’s data excludes games playing against non-Division I competition.

Brandon Boston Jr.

While fully aware that the team context at Kentucky was ill-suited for him, Boston faces a disturbing historical precedent. 30 times since the 2007-08 season has an eventually-drafted D-I athlete played in at least 40% of his team’s minutes and recorded a True Shooting Percentage below 48%, covering 28 distinct players. Boston’s True Shooting Percentage actually fell quite short of this mark at 44.7%. (Among key prospects this season, Ziaire Williams technically qualified this year with a much higher Turnover Percentage while Tre Mann qualified with a bit of space between his value and the maximum threshold in his Freshman season.) Of this list, the only player we feel comfortable calling a solid NBA player would be Buddy Hield, a notoriously raw player who stayed in college for three more years after the season in question. If you reduce the minutes threshold to 20%, you can find 18 more players, including the positive outcomes of Caris LeVert, Josh Richardson, and Reggie Bullock (Expanded Query Link). While most of these players were second-round picks, not all of them were, and this ratio would be extremely poor even if every last one of them had been a late second-round pick. Reaves existed at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, recording a 64.1% True Shooting in his Freshman year.

Besides the unfriendly team context, the other mitigating factor for Boston is that he recorded a much lower Turnover Percentage than most of his peers on this list, with only JaJuan Johnson’s Freshman season resulting in a lower mark among these seasons. This means that Boston’s overall inefficiency is not as dire as it may have first appeared. Boston’s youth and high school tape make him an intriguing prospect, but this context remains worrisome.

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Tre Mann

There is one other prospect relevant to Austin Reaves whose numbers would be captured by the low True Shooting Percentage query: Tre Mann in his freshman season. Besides qualifying for this list, he would join 8 other players in making this list and recording a BPM below -1.0; the best pro of those 8 has been Abdel Nader, someone who recorded those numbers playing for two Northern Illinois teams that had a combined record of 8-51. Even compared to previous players who meet this query, Mann did not have any standout positive statistical indicators despite not even being especially high Usage. He also did not demonstrate Boston’s level of care with the ball with a Turnover Rate of about 19, something which is not necessarily negative in and of itself but which pulls his terrible inefficiency from that season even lower. When you consider that Mann, who theoretically has some upside as a point guard, had an Assist Percentage of 7.5 that season, you really start to question his instinctual decision-making baseline. That last figure becomes even more galling when you realize that only 31.6% of Mann’s made Field Goals were assisted, indicating that he was creating most of his own offense. His shot profile being so heavily tilted toward unassisted shots also does present questions about his comfort and capability playing off-ball. Mann improved significantly this season, and his most recent numbers do not have any glaring holes in them, but his opening season still presents considerable concern. 

Austin Reaves had a relatively limited role as a freshman at Wichita State, but he was extremely effective and extremely efficient in it. Buoyed by incredible three-point shooting, Reaves recorded a True Shooting Percentage of 64.1 as a shooter off the bench. His lowest True Shooting Percentage was 52.0 in his Junior Year, his first season as a High-Usage on-ball player, and his next lowest was an eminently solid 57.9. Reaves also comfortably clears the benchmarks for decision-making at every point in his career while Mann requires significant projection in this area.

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Nah’Shon Hyland

Given his size (6’2” without shoes and 169 pounds), Hyland either needs to become a full-time point guard or reach an extremely high-level shooting outcome. Hyland improved both his rim volume and his Free Throw Rate between his freshman and sophomore seasons, but he remains merely solid in the latter category at 32.1. That being said, Hyland’s Freshman year Free Throw Rate was an outlier low 10.4, and given that that comprises slightly more than half of his college sample, it remains an extremely concerning data point. Reaves has an extensive track record of getting to the rim and to the free throw line. In his freshman year, when 63.2% of his Field Goal Attempts were three-pointers, Austin recorded a Free Throw Rate of 42.5. His lowest college Free Throw Rate was 27.5 in his Sophomore Year, an entirely respectable number on its own and amazing considering that 67.2% of his Field Goal Attempts that year were three-pointers and the fact that he played more minutes than in his Freshman year. In his senior season, Reaves had the fifth-highest Free Throw Rate among High-Major players 6’6” or shorter; all four players above him were freshmen, and Reaves took more three-pointers than all four of them combined. (Note. These four players averaged a total of 19 Games Played while Austin played in 25.) 

Despite more than half of his made Field Goals being unassisted and a Usage Rate of 28.7, Hyland only had an Assist Percentage of 15.1. While Hyland shared 77.9% of his minutes with pass-first point guard (and non-scoring threat) Adrian Baldwin Jr. and most of the rest with pass-first non-shooter Jimmy Clark III, Hyland clearly had the ball in his hands a great deal, being the clear secondary ballhandler at essentially all times. His Assist Percentage is good for an off-ball shooter but is far off the mark for a point guard. Even then you would hope Hyland would have a higher Assist Percentage than, for example, fellow Atlantic-10 elite shooter Hyunjung Lee, but he actually does not; Lee’s is 16.7. Lee is 6’7” and clearly an off-ball wing, yet Lee still has a higher Assist Percentage than Hyland despite also having a much lower Usage Rate, which also makes it slightly harder to boost one’s Assist Percentage. Sure, Lee’s figure is as high as you will see for this archetype, but Lee also handled the ball far less while playing in the same mid-major conference. 

Hyland also had a Turnover Percentage of 19.2, an extremely high value for a guy who got so much of his offense from behind the arc and who wasn’t necessarily initiating sets (to continue the comparison from earlier, Hyunjung Lee’s was 16.6). Turnovers can be a good problem to have, but only if the player is making high-leverage passes. If Hyland transfers even further into a complementary role at the next level beside other initiators, this tendency could prove problematic. While Hyland had both a higher Assist Percentage and a lower Turnover Percentage his Freshman year, he also had a much smaller role playing on a team with generally more diffuse playmaking responsibilities overall, and even that Assist Percentage was slightly below par for a point guard. Transitioning to the NBA can be difficult for even the most prepared point guard prospects, and Hyland is clearly off that pace. 

There is one more mild complication with Hyland. While his overall three-point volume jumped significantly this year to practically absurd levels, his ratio of unassisted makes from distance actually slightly decreased from 39.7% to 33.3%. This would not be at all concerning except that his three-point Percentage dropped significantly from 43.4% to 37.1%, and an increase in on-ball looks is the most obvious explanation besides mere random chance. Because of his weaknesses as a passer and foul-drawer, much of Hyland’s value will hinge on his three-point shot. Hyland must be a great shooter, not merely a good one, to provide real NBA value. The fact that this lower percentage is still good and Hyland shot an incredible 86.2% from the Free Throw Line indicates that there is little chance that he is a bad shooter in the NBA, but he may need to be a great shooter in order to match what Reaves can contribute.

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Quentin Grimes

We have here assembled a search finding all of the drafted players who have recorded an Assist Percentage below 15%, a Two-Point Percentage below 45%, and a Free Throw Rate below 30% while attempting fewer than 100 Attempts at the rim in a season since 2007-08. To qualify, these players must have also played at least 40% of their team’s minutes. This query seeks to identify players who lacked apparent on-ball equity (at least at the NBA level) and were highly dependent on their jumpshots to provide offensive value.

Besides Norman Powell (a relatively late bloomer who shows up in a lot of this type of query), the best players are elite shooters Joe Harris and Gary Trent, Jr., defensive superstar Matisse Thybulle, and emerging prospect Cameron Reddish who will probably need to be a mishmash of both in order to approach his full potential. Quentin Grimes is relatively strong compared to the rest of this cohort, having the highest BPM by a tangible margin, which is an encouraging sign for him. On the other hand, all of the successful players listed recorded these numbers in their freshman seasons; Grimes’s results are coming in his Junior season, indicating less developmental leeway than many of the other members of this cohort, successful or otherwise. In short, it seems that him having a strong NBA career is largely contingent upon him maintaining his elite three-point shooting, which is totally plausible but far from certain—Grimes made 48 out of 54 free throw attempts, 88.9%, between November 25th and January 5th of this past season. Outside that 40 day period, he is shooting 144-220, 65.5%, over the course of his college career. If he cannot maintain his outside shooting bump from this season, Grimes may have difficulties matching a NBA team’s perimeter role expectations.

Conversely, Reaves has reached higher heights than Grimes both as an off-ball player at Wichita St. and as an on-ball player at Oklahoma than Grimes has in each of these capacities. Reaves would exceed this query through passing alone, as he has never had an Assist Percentage below 15%. While Grimes made his shots at the rim when he took them, he also took was fewer of them, and fewer of his makes were self-created so his rim field goal shooting profile ends up more comparable to Reaves’s Junior year when Reaves shared ballhandling responsibilities with Kristian Doolittle. (Grimes shot 42-71 at the rim this season, notching a Field Goal Percentage of 59.2%; 26.2% of his makes were assisted.) Reaves’s overall volume and his relative unassisted volume both made modest jumps this year, and none of this accounts for Reaves’s superlative foul drawing. This track record offers Reaves a more reliable as well as a higher upside path to consistently producing in a NBA rotation.

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David Johnson

Statistically speaking, David Johnson presents concerns because he has not been able to generate efficient offense. He has been inefficient both as a shooter and scorer and has also had a high Turnover Rate each of his two seasons at Louisville. In concert with his extremely low Free Throw Rate of 18.3, Johnson only averaged 1.50 unassisted makes at the rim per 40 Minutes; Reaves averaged 2.45, which is to say 63.4% more per-minute. We have designed a query to capture Johnson’s difficulties with the ball in his hands by selecting all drafted players with a True Shooting Percentage below 53%, a Free Throw Rate below 30, and a Turnover Percentage above 20% while playing at least 20% of their team’s minutes since 2007-08. While Johnson sits nowhere near any of these thresholds this season, we chose them because Johnson also missed them in his freshman season despite playing fewer minutes on a better team with much better shooters (Jordan Nwora, Ryan McMahon, Darius Perry, and even Dwayne Sutton were all vastly better from deep range than any of Johnson’s supporting cast members in 2020-21). 

The only other player remotely relevant to this year’s draft who would meet the thresholds of this query is D.J. Stewart, who isn’t really in the same conversation as the players listed here. Essentially, all of the good players in this query were either very strong perimeter defensive players (Thybulle, Mbah a Moute, and Shumpert) or spent more time in college further honing their skills (Barton, Richardson, and Thybulle)—Reddish is still a bit of a work in progress and is bolded a bit speculatively. While Barton and Richardson would be quite good outcomes for Johnson, they actually had the opportunity to approximate their NBA roles effectively at the college level first, with the big keys being improved ability to score inside the arc (both finishing at the rim and drawing fouls). Barton also took a while to mature in the NBA.

Context certainly has dampened Johnson’s numbers this year—Johnson himself was Louisville’s only shooter above 33% from three on at least 3 attempts per 100 possessions, and he was much more efficient from the field than the team’s other major scorer, Carlik Jones—but it is unclear just how much effect this context has, and there remains some airspace between Johnson’s numbers fell and the point where this concern would not exist. Johnson also had the lowest Free Throw Rate among Louisville’s 6 main rotation players. 

In some regards Johnson provides an interesting mirror to Reaves as his on-ball role was actually substantially reduced as he got older and garnered more minutes, albeit without having to transfer first. While committing turnovers as a young player is not always the worst problem to have, Johnson did so at an extreme level, accumulating a Turnover Percentage of 25.4, a level Reaves never remotely approached either as a young player or as a newly minted on-ball creator; Reaves’s highest-ever Turnover Percentage was 18.2 in his sophomore season. This season, Louisville might have benefitted from a surer hand at the wheel this season given Carlik Jones’s propensity for firing aimlessly from mid-range, making only 31.6% of his Long 2’s.

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McKinley Wright

Austin Reaves has a major height advantage over McKinley Wright (6’4.75” without inches versus 5’11.25”), and Reaves’s prodigious foul-drawing carries more weight than Wright’s exceptional Assist numbers. Wright ranks 4^th among high-major players in Assist percentage behind Kendric Davis, Xavier Johnson, and Sahvir Wheeler. Reaves manages to rank 33^rd in this category, clearly in the top half of starting point guards in this category, while having about 5 inches on Colorado’s star player. Meanwhile, Wright is a good foul-drawer on his terms—with a Free Throw Rate between 32.9 and 36.5 in all four of his seasons, all of them in a heavy on-ball role—these figures fall short of Reaves’s numbers in both of his years as a featured on-ball player.

In something of a statistical oddity, Wright’s number of unassisted makes at the rim per 40 minutes has declined every year he has been in college despite relatively consistent roles both in terms of on-ball presence, Usage Rate, and even minutes played. This figure fell from 3.15 his freshman year to 2.75 his Sophomore year to 2.37 his Junior year to 2.04 his Senior year. Some of this may be purely attributable to the inconsistencies inherent in play-by-play data, and Wright being highly floater-dependent is especially likely to confound these numbers, but one would hope to see a marked increase in his percentage at one of the three levels of scoring, either indicating increased selectivity at the rim or improvement elsewhere allowing Wright to save his body a little more. This was not the case.

The big problem with Wright is that he is significantly smaller than Reaves while not exceeding him in the major athleticism indicators: Free Throw Rate, where he falls clearly behind, and Steal Rate, where he is about level. When comparing across a height difference of five inches, you would hope to see some separation in terms of athleticism or skill, and Wright cannot provide that. His combine athleticism numbers weren’t notably better either, with Wright only 2% faster on the lane agility drill and shuttle run.

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Cameron Thomas

Cam Thomas is a pro prospect unlike possibly any we have ever seen. Often, this is a positive trait, but in Thomas’s case, the positives and negatives are more balanced. Of all of the drafted players who have had a season with a Usage Rate above 26% and an Assist Percentage below 10% since 2007-08, the overwhelming majority of them have been bigs, and Kim English is basically the only player who cannot at least be categorized as a “big wing.” Even considering the bias toward positions where passing is less crucial, a surprising number of these players notably struggled to improve at the level expected of their high draft position, including as passers: Michael Beasley, Derrick Williams, and Jahlil Okafor are the highest-profile, but there are also lottery picks such as Anthony Randolph and Jordan Hill who failed to meet expectations in the NBA. If we exchange the drafted qualifier for one seeking players 6’4” or shorter, Thomas is literally the only high-major player to meet these thresholds since the 2007-08 season. These indicators point to Thomas’s exceptional skill as a scorer but call into question his ability to make decisions and play within an offensive scheme. (Among plausibly draftable players, only Derek Culver hit these thresholds this season and remains in the draft since Hunter Dickinson, Kofi Cockburn, and Kevin Obanor all returned to school; we have included Culver’s statistics for the sake of comparison.)

Thomas is able to generate offense by himself at a high rate, including getting fouled frequently and avoiding turnovers. However, it is worrying that his weakness as a passer is so extreme, especially given that his scoring prowess relies on him having the ball and how often the bigs on this list failed to meet expectations in the NBA. Passing is much more important for guards than it is for bigs, only amplifying this concern further . And it is not as though Thomas did not have effective offensive teammates as he played alongside Trendon Watford, Javonte Smart, and Darius Days; moreover, Watford and Smart played heavy minutes. Thomas’s current skill set presents a very narrow path to NBA success whereas Reaves has multiple clear avenues which lead to NBA effectiveness.

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Jason Preston

Looking at the raw numbers, Jason Preston compares well to Austin Reaves in some areas. Despite not being the only on-ball point guard in the rotation for much of the year—freshman Mark Sears entered the rotation when Preston missed some games early in conference play and never relinquished his spot—Preston recorded an Assist Percentage of a whopping 37.6, a number that was actually slightly below his mark from last year. He made 68.6% of his shots around the rim, compared to 61.5% for Reaves. While guard rebounding has an especially large amount of noise baked into it, Preston recorded a Defensive Rebounding Percentage of 21.3, an impressive number for any player let alone a skinny 6’4” point guard. However, as we look under the hood, some of the shine rubs off of Preston’s statistics. 

The biggest difference is in their strength of schedule. Despite playing at Illinois and earning a second NCAA Tournament game, Jason Preston’s average Strength of Schedule this season was 0.57 points per game below the NCAA average while Reaves’s was 8.86 points above the NCAA average according to Sports Reference; that’s a difference of 9.41 points per game. (Note. This does not exclude games these players missed, and both Reaves and Preston missed conference games this season.)

Jason Preston’s low Free Throw Rate against mid-major competition presents serious questions about how his game translates against NBA competition. In 2019-20, despite not having a rival point guard and on a team with only one relative non-shooter in their 6-man primary rotation (and even then, 6’10” Senior Center Sylvester Ogbonda went 8-29 from three over the course of the year), Preston only recorded a Free Throw Rate of 33.5, by far his career high but also a figure which pales in comparison to Reaves’s level this season, 54.1, and Preston’s 2.56 unassisted makes at the rim per 40 minutes is more than this year (2.13) but barely above Reaves’s current season (2.45) despite playing against worse competition. This year, sharing ballhandling responsibilities with Sears but also surrounded by many capable shooters, Preston’s Free Throw Rate cratered to 20.3. Preston’s deliberate ballhandling and driving style often prevents him from putting much pressure or causing much rotation for the defense, hence his low free throw rate and high Turnover Percentage, which has never been lower than 18.3 percent for a season. 

Preston’s relative paucity of free throws becomes especially concerning when paired with his relatively low free throw percentages, shooting 59.6% from the line and declining with each successive year of his college career. Reaves’s free throw percentages were truly awesome as a career 84.4% shooter from the charity stripe with his percentages increasing every year, topping out at 86.5% Preston made a much higher percentage of his shots at the rim, but a substantially larger proportion of Preston’s makes were assisted than Reaves’s this season, 40.7 percent versus 10.2 percent. From deep range, Preston did make 39.8% of his threes on largely self-created looks in his Sophomore year, surpassing Reaves’s percentages under similar circumstances, but he also only took 88 three-pointers in 1152 minutes against D-I competition. This year, he made 38.5% of his threes with 83.3% of his makes being assisted, a level of self-creation more in line with Reaves’s time at Wichita St. that falls short of Reaves’s gaudy percentages in that role while also taking them on less volume than Reaves, both overall and relative to overall shot profile. This, paired with the career 70.5% free throw percentage, casts doubt on his long-range shooting overall. In his two years as a heavily on-ball player, Preston did make 44.7% of his long 2’s with only 23.6% of his makes being unassisted, but Reaves made 37.8% of his attempts from that range with only 8.3% of his makes being unassisted on higher volume from that range, giving Preston only a slight advantage overall. As good as his passing is, Preston will probably have to get to the rim and shoot threes effectively in order to be a sustainable NBA point guard, and there are concerns about both aspects of his game. 

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Joel Ayayi

When it comes to Joel Ayayi, it is difficult to disentangle his skill from his incredible team context. Ayayi is remarkable at the rim, making 76.5% of his shots at the rim this year and 66.3% of them under still-excellent but not nearly as absurdly good conditions last year. That context boost is reflected in the ratio of Ayayi’s makes at the rim that were assisted, 60.4% this year versus 33.3% last year. However, not every player could even make 66.3% of their shots at the rim with 33.3% of them assisted. Ayayi also attempted 5.27 shots at the rim per 40 minutes this year, which is pretty good for a guard with a Usage Rate of 16.4. And Ayayi has still been a functional shooter, making 38.9% of his threes while attempting 5.1 of them per 100 possessions. No matter how open they were, that is solid at the college level, but the question is if he can sustain that at the next level.

While it is harder to accumulate a high Assist Percentage with a relatively low Usage Rate (not only are your teammates making more shots, but you probably handle the ball less as well), Ayayi’s Assist Percentage of 12.6 does seem awfully low for a guard. Even last season, before Jalen Suggs and Andrew Nembhard arrived, Ayayi’s Assist Percentage was only 16.6, a figure which points more toward an off-ball wing than a guard, let alone a potential primary ballhandler. For comparison, Reaves’s Assist Percentage hovered around 16 in his two years as a nearly exclusively off-ball shooter at Wichita St., and this year his was 27.0. There is very little question that Ayayi is not a point guard.

Ayayi also rarely gets fouled, recording a free throw percentage around 24 both years he has been in Gonzaga’s rotation. Finally, Ayayi’s Steals and Blocks numbers are not exceptional, especially for a prospect whose value hinges on his defense; it is difficult for an off-ball player of his size to stick in the league without being at least respectable defensively, and Ayayi has struggled with his decision-making on the defensive end. Plays like the one shown below, where he takes himself too far out of position and never recovers, were far too common.

All of these numbers are generally useful indicators of functional athleticism, and even considering his excellent context, it is disquieting that Ayayi ranks so low in all of them, especially since lower-Usage players, even ones who are not of Ayayi’s caliber as a cutter, often can have extremely high Free Throw Rates. Low Usage players actually have a surprisingly strong record when they have been drafted, but they need to demonstrate high-level skills in the other aspects of their game which demand inclusion on an NBA floor. Furthermore, those high-level skills are usual off-ball shooting and/or defense. Ayayi has been an otherworldly finisher and cutter while playing in a phenomenal system with phenomenal teammates, but is that enough to make a legitimate NBA rotation player? Ayayi has a unique archetype that makes him hard to bet on.

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Chris Duarte

Chris Duarte has an excellent statistical profile, a fact made most obvious by his incredible scoring efficiency, but he is firmly in the camp of a wing. A relatively large portion of Duarte’s made shots at the rim, 39.7%, were assisted, and Reaves’s makes were more likely to be unassisted than Duarte’s at all three levels of scoring. Duarte’s Assist Percentage, 14.9, lags far behind his Usage Rate, 22.5, itself not particularly high for a draft prospect. That Assist Percentage is good for someone who projects as an off-ball wing but not for anyone expected to absorb significant ballhandling responsibilities, and it is slightly below Reaves’s Assist Percentage from when Reaves was tasked almost strictly as an offball shooter at Wichita St. Duarte also has a relatively low Free Throw Rate of 26.2. None of these figures damages Duarte on its own, and even together they absolutely do not sink him, but they all but rule out the possibility of significant on-ball equity, something which distinguishes him from Reaves, who spent his time at Oklahoma as a true college point guard. Also, while Duarte shot 42.4% from three this year, he shot 33.6% last year, and while these two seasons of data combine for an entirely solid 38.0%, a number which is supported by 80.3% career free throw shooting, they also illuminate some wiggle room in what is supposed to be Duarte’s most marketable statistical strength. Reaves has a career 84.4% free throw percentage, a number that jumps to 85.7% when you make a one-to-one comparison to Duarte and look just at the past two seasons.

Duarte had a Block Percentage of 2.8 and a Steal Rate of 3.3, both excellent numbers, but these numbers overstate his defensive instincts. Duarte benefits greatly from freelancing in Oregon’s zone defense and pouncing on loose balls and trapped ballhandlers.

This in concert with his relatively low Free Throw Rate of 26.2 elicits questions about Duarte’s functional athleticism. If a wing is specifically what you need, Duarte is a fully commendable choice, but Reaves is a more complete and dynamic player who can still cover much of what Duarte can on the floor. Duarte was an incredibly efficient scorer on a reasonably easy diet of shots; Reaves was a very efficient scorer on a difficult diet of shots.

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Aaron Henry

Austin Reaves is a better shooting prospect than Aaron Henry. Even given Reaves’s struggles with his percentages at Oklahoma, Reaves’s career three-point percentage was 1.4% higher than Henry’s career percentage (34.7% vs. 33.3%). In addition, even in his mostly off-ball role at Wichita St., a higher percentage of Reaves’s three-point makes were unassisted than in any of Aaron Henry’s three seasons at Michigan St., including this most recent year when Henry played much more on the ball. Moreover, while Henry made over 40% of his long 2’s every year in college, he also had an unusually high proportion of assisted baskets from this range, most notably 61.0% of them during his sophomore season. Henry is also only a career 72.9% free throw shooter, with significant improvement this past season still only bringing him to 76.2%. If Henry becomes an effective shooter, that both unlocks possibilities for him on the ball and provides slack in his skillset in case the on-ball ability does not translate, but Henry being able to shoot the ball at an NBA level is far from a certainty. Between his elite free throw percentages, excellent shooting numbers at Wichita St., and his unbelievably self-created jump shot profile at Oklahoma, Reaves is a clearly better shooting prospect.

Henry’s on-ball offense is not certain to translate. Reaves and Henry both had similar roles as their team’s clear primary initiators, and Reaves outperformed Henry in almost every category. Henry only made 1.32 unassisted shots at the rim per 40 minutes this past season, barely over half of Reaves’s total. Overall, Henry only made 54.8% of his shots at the rim this season despite 47.4% of his makes being assisted while Reaves made 61.5% of his rim attempts while only 10.2% of them were assisted. Reaves also got to the free throw line significantly more than Henry, with Reaves having an outlier Free Throw Rate of 54.1 and Henry producing a merely solid 28.9, barely higher than Reaves’s career-low. To his credit, his efficiency barely changed from his Sophomore year, when he had average Usage, to his Junior year, when he had a Usage Rate of 26.9, but Reaves had a much higher True Shooting Percentage, 57.9, on an even higher Usage Rate this season. Reaves not only shows more promise than Henry as a scorer at all three levels but also as a passer. Henry is a very good passer for a wing, but Reaves is a good passer outright. Statistically, Reaves has subtle but meaningful advantages in Assist Percentage (27.0 for Reaves and 25.2 for Henry) and Turnover Percentage (17.7 for Reaves and 19.0 for Henry), and the gap is even wider on film.

The main appeal to Henry is his on-ball defense. Henry is likely the best on-ball defender in this class between his combination of physical tools and matchup versatility. If you want to prioritize the on-ball defense over everything else, Henry is the player to take. But we believe we’ve shown in a prior write-up that Reaves should be respectable as both an on and off-ball defender. Often in the NBA, good offense wins out over better defense, especially when there’s only one ball for the on-ball defenders to guard, and it’s unclear for how many teams Henry will be the best 1-on-1 defender for.

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Joshua Primo

It is difficult to contrive a statistically compelling argument for drafting Joshua Primo besides his raw youth. Many of his numbers are pedestrian not only compared to his fellow draft prospects but to D-I players overall. Bart Torvik’s website compares players to the NCAA as a whole and color-codes them on a scale from red to green.

Primo’s only season-level figure for Primo that is better than the palest of pale greens is his Effective Field Goal Percentage—and the fact that his True Shooting Percentage does not hold pace is itself an indictment of Primo’s weakness in drawing fouls even relative to his low-Usage role. To be fair, this color scheme does not discriminate by position, and Primo’s 4.7% Offensive Rebounding Percentage is probably a relative strength given his size. Surprisingly for a perceived ceiling prospect and/or a project player, he doesn’t even dunk that much, recording only 3 Dunks in 671 minutes. Finally, there is not even a late-season surge in productivity; his game-by-game BPM numbers indicate that Primo peaked in late January. The main point in Primo’s favor is his youth, but young prospects have failed before—look no further than Kevin Knox, a mere 4.5 months ahead of Primo in age upon entering the league and still one of the worst players in the league according to many analytical measures after three NBA seasons. As for his shooting, Primo’s percentage is good but not otherworldly, and there is no indication that his attempts were especially difficult, as he took catch-and-shoots to off-the-dribble jumpers in a nearly 5:1 ratio. In addition, three point attempts constitute more than half of his true shooting possessions, something which does not speak favorably to his ability to be more than just a generic spot-up shooter in the NBA. Drafting a younger player means that you are able to mold the steeper points on his development curve and may fit certain teams’ timelines, but the gap between Reaves and Primo as current basketball players is significant. 

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Josh Christopher

Playing with Remy Martin and Alonzo Verge while being a score-first wing yourself must be a frustrating experience, and it certainly limited Christopher’s number of easy looks. Not having the ball in his hands probably suppressed his assist numbers and his rim shooting volume as well, as he generated only 1.79 unassisted makes at the rim per 40 minutes despite carrying a relatively high usage, possessing excellent physical tools, and being classified as a quality self-creator. Christopher should have been able to get to the rim with a high degree of consistency, but instead he ended up taking 41.8% of his total field goal attempts as long 2’s. In addition, even a certain amount of assist suppression is not enough on its own to drop a player’s Assist Percentage below 10 percent, a threshold Reaves cleared by miles even as a relatively low-Usage spot-up shooter at Wichita State.

As dubious as Christopher’s passing and attacking the rim may be, his three-point shooting is even more concerning. Reaves and Christopher both made 30.5% of their three-pointers this season, but Reaves self-created 56.2% of his makes while Christopher only self-created less than half of that proportion, 22.2%, while shooting almost identical volume relative to play time (7.1 Attempts Per 100 Possessions for Reaves, 7.3 Attempts Per 100 Possessions for Christopher). Christopher’s free throw percentage, 80.0%, is very good but still falls short of Reaves’s, and Christopher also does lacks the precedent of two seasons of elite shooting like Reaves did at Wichita St. While Christopher was prolific in the mid-range, and on almost entirely unassisted volume, Reaves’s mid-range volume was also basically all unassisted, and Reaves shot a higher percentage (42.5% versus 35.6%) on a slightly higher volume per minute.

There is also precedent for one-and-done players who did not receive a tremendous amount of playing time being drafted and demonstrating the merits of that decision. This is especially acceptable when placing a freshman scorer on a team with two effective ball-dominant senior guards. However, Christopher’s lack of otherworldly production even relative to his age and circumstances implies that he is further away from contributing than the battle-tested and flexible Reaves. If Christopher can channel his physical tools into a consistent attacking mentality, he will be an extremely effective offensive player, but that is not guaranteed, and Reaves already possesses that attacking mentality.

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David Duke

Even by the standards of poor finishers, David Duke is a poor finisher. Duke has shot below 50% at the rim each of the past two seasons despite having at least 30.0% of his makes there assisted both years. If you exclude Dunk attempts, Duke only shot 40.3% at the rim this season, an astonishing number. While Duke is not afraid of contact, having a career Free Throw Rate of 36.8 and of 33.6 this year, the fact that his Field Goal Percentage around the rim is so much lower than Reaves while also falling a clear tier below the latter’s foul-drawing when comparing their seasons as on-ball players makes Duke a clearly worse finisher than Reaves. 

Duke’s supreme inefficiency at the basket has also hurt his overall efficiency. He has a career True Shooting Percentage of 51.2 despite only one of his three college seasons being in a high-Usage role. In his freshman year, his True Shooting Percentage was an egregious 47.8%. As you can see in the B.J. Boston section, the track record for players with a True Shooting level that low, even as freshman in relatively large roles, have a pretty poor track record of development. Duke has also never shot above 43.4% from two-point range overall and has made a higher percentage of his three-point attempts than his two-point attempts in each of the last two seasons. This season, Duke shot below 40% from two-point range; if he is drafted, his season would be only the fourth time someone who had shot that low in their Junior season or later had been picked since 2007-08 while playing at least 40% of their team’s minutes; the other players were Devonte’ Graham, Xavier Thames, and Kim English.

The track record for players with this history developing well regardless of when they shot that poorly inside the arc is poor. The only truly good players to develop from this point are Graham (an outlier shooter and game-managing point guard), Spencer Dinwiddie (outlier at drawing fouls and still managed a True Shooting Percentage of 57.4 that season), and Reddish (still very much a work in progress). 

In order to justify these poor finishing numbers, Duke would need to be an outlier-level shooter, but he is not. This year, Duke made 38.9% of his threes while attempting 8.0 of them per 100 possessions and with 47.1% of his makes being unassisted, and he converted 79.2% of his free throws. Those are really good numbers, but they cannot quite be classified as elite, and the fact that he only shot 30.3% from mid-range, even while almost all of these looks were self-created, does not help his case. By contrast, Reaves made 42.5% of his mid-range looks this year with only 8.3% of his makes being unassisted, and he also knocked down 86.5% of his free throws while being a significantly better scorer at the rim. Duke’s weaknesses as a finisher make him extremely dependent on his three-point shot in order to score at the next level.

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Joe Wieskamp

Wieskamp’s biggest statistical weakness is his extremely low Assist Rate. It is pretty standard for a shooter with his general role to have an Assist Percentage around 15, at least by the time he hits the NBA’s radar; Wieskamp’s has only hit 10.4% after three years of steady improvement. Moreover, while his overall rim frequency is solid and has remained largely steady throughout his career, the proportion of his makes that were assisted has increased significantly each year without increases in his efficiency. This year, Wieskamp only made 0.88 unassisted shots at the rim per 40 minutes, a desultory figure no matter what the context. And while Luka Garza certainly had a commanding presence at the rim and absorbed a lot of efficient shots and real estate down there, Iowa was not lacking shooters whatsoever; there was space for anyone to maneuver toward the rim. In short, Wieskamp probably cannot be used as a guard offensively, and he certainly does not project to be even a secondary handler whereas you can expect Reaves to be at least capable of running an offense in a pinch.

The other major concern is that Wieskamp’s free throw percentages have pinged all over the place during his time in college. He is a career 77% shooter from the line, but this includes an 85.6% mark last year and a 67.7% mark this year. While he has shot enough three-pointers while making 41.2% of them that he is almost certainly going to be a good shooter, a more stable free throw percentage would be valuable; if nothing else, Wieskamp draws enough fouls that you would expect him to do so at the NBA level as well.

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Ayo Dosunmu

The Illinois offense this year was designed with spacing in mind, with five of their six most-used line-ups employing four guards around one of their talented offensive centers, either Kofi Cockburn or Giorgi Bezhanishvili. The one forward in the rotation, Jacob Grandison, was also a quality shooter. Of this guard cohort, Dosunmu was the tallest, and in those lineups, he often played like a wing. Dosunmu has improved several categories from statistical weaknesses to respectable in his Junior season, in part because of that improved context. His Free Throw Rate, Steal Rate, three point percentage, and Assist Percentage were all of varying levels of concern and all improved significantly in his Junior season. The arrival of talented freshman point guard Andre Curbelo gave Illinois a second high-quality primary initiator alongside Dosunmu, and they shared the floor for almost half of Dosunmu’s minutes. Dosunmu’s three-point Shooting Percentage jumped from 29.0% to 38.6% this year, but Dosunmu also had a higher percentage of assisted makes this season. 74.1% of Dosunmu’s makes last season were already assisted before this increase, and this year, it was 87.5%. Moreover, when not playing alongside Curbelo, Dosunmu shot a meager 30.6% from long range, very much in line with his numbers from the previous year. For comparison, the higher assisted rate for Reaves between his two seasons at Oklahoma was 54.8%, and Reaves still shot better this year at 30.5% than Dosunmu did last year. Something similar happened with Dosunmu’s Assist Percentage, which jumped from 21.5 to 29.2 as an overall figure this year but was 19.2 when Curbelo was on the floor with Dosunmu.  This extreme split indicates that Dosunmu is much more effective playing off the ball than on it and projects to play mostly off the ball in the NBA whereas Reaves has more NBA on-ball equity. There is also some question about how much Dosunmu improved as a passer even when he was on the ball. Kofi Cockburn’s ability to catch and finish cannot be overstated, allowing Dosunmu to rack up assists by passing into cathedral-size windows.

Despite his extreme effectiveness getting to the rim and finishing, Dosunmu is not an outlier-efficient scorer because of his proclivity for taking mid-range shots that he hits at about an average rate. He has also never been an especially prolific three-point shooter nor hit a particularly high point of efficiency like Reaves did both years at Wichita St. This is another place where Dosunmu fared much better with Curbelo on the court; his finishing at the rim shot up from 57.1% when Curbelo was not playing to 75.3% when he was despite only an extremely modest drop in rim volume. All of these considerations point to Dosunmu being a very small wing rather than a true guard, limiting his NBA versatility; such concerns are far more muted for Reaves. 

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Miles McBride

McBride has very concerning rim volume. This year, McBride only made 1.33 unassisted shots at the rim per 40 minutes while having a solid but far from outlier Free Throw Rate of 33.9. This is not a one-year blip as both of these numbers are only very slightly down from last season. 49.6% of McBride’s field goal attempts were classified as long 2’s this season, and the fact that McBride only shot 43.7% from inside the arc indicates that this tendency is excessive. Reaves is an outlier foul-drawer, this year compared to any player and for most of his career when accounting for role, with a much healthier balance between lay-ups and mid-range pull-ups; 36.0% of his field goal attempts were marked as long 2’s. While McBride was by far the best primary initiator for West Virginia, he was also only third on the team in Usage Rate. He did not have to do everything himself, making his mid-range fixation even more concerning. By contrast, no one besides Reaves on Oklahoma’s roster had a Usage Rate above 21 or an Assist Percentage above 15. Reaves also made a higher percentage of his long 2’s this season despite his makes being assisted just over one-third as often as McBride’s. In addition to being much stronger as a driver, Reaves is also significantly taller than McBride which helps with Reaves’s versatility, allowing him to play in a wider array of line-ups. McBride has his clear strengths defensively, but Reaves has his own skills and advantages at that end, and Reaves does not have to spend most of his court time as the smallest player in his line-up.

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Jaden Springer

Something that Reaves can never be accused of is not having confidence in his jump shot, even when it was not falling. You would certainly expect Springer to attempt more than 4.1 three-pointers Per 100 Possessions, especially given his 81.0% free throw percentage and the fact that Springer did in fact make 3 unassisted Threes this season. Even this season when he was the most selective firing from three-point range, Reaves attempted 7.1 threes per 100 possessions, indicating significantly greater confidence in his long-range jumper. Instead, Springer often opted for mid-range looks, as long 2’s consisted of 46.7% of his field goal attempts, and he was not especially efficient from that range, converting only 34.9% of them despite having nearly three times as high a proportion of his makes from that range being assisted as Reaves. It also causes one to muse about whether Springer is always able to get all the way to the rim on his own, as many of those midrange looks were the result of his limited handle being contained as shown below. 

While his Free Throw Rate of 44.1 is excellent, albeit not as high as Reaves’s, a surprising amount of his makes at the rim were assisted, and Springer only averaged 1.79 unassisted makes at the rim per 40 minutes. Springer’s 65.8% conversion rate at the rim when not getting fouled is pretty good, but it is not drastically higher than Reaves’s despite 42.0% of Springer’s made shots there being assisted. This may also contribute to a statistical oddity of Springer’s: in his 16 games that Bart Torvik coded as Top-100 (accounting for opponent strength and location), Springer shot a wretched 41.0% from 2 point range while making 61.0% of his shots inside the arc in his other 9 games. This points to Springer overwhelming inferior competition but lacking adequate counters against tougher foes. While plausibly just the result of youthful growing pains, Springer is also very turnover-prone, recording a Turnover Percentage of 20.6 compared to 17.7% for Reaves despite Reaves also having a higher Assist Percentage (24.1% for Springer, 27.0% for Reaves) and a higher Usage Rate (26.2% for Springer, 28.4% for Reaves). At minimum, Springer may need time to develop into a point guard, and Reaves is a better bet to man this position at least in the short term.

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