13 F-Noa Essengue-Germany 4/25/2025
SCOUTING REPORT BY Danny Chau
Essengue will have his zealots. At 18 years old, he is one of the youngest prospects in the class, only three days older than Cooper Flagg. He has the straight-line speed and overall range of motion of a wing but the standing reach of an NBA center. He is about 80 percent limbs, long levered with a high center of gravity. Unlike many projects of his ilk, Essengue has been extremely productive at the professional level, playing on one of the great incubators in the global web of professional basketball. First impressions count for a lot, and there were plenty of folks who caught their first glimpse of Essengue back in October of last year, during an NBA preseason game between Ratiopharm Ulm and the Portland Trail Blazers. It was an ideal showcase for Essengue, who scored 20 points (and hit three 3-pointers) and logged eight rebounds. He showed he belonged, and he hadn’t even turned 18 yet.
But carving out a space in the NBA often requires finding a specialty. It’s not yet clear what that is for Essengue. He has a nose for the ball and a keen sense of when to flash into open space. He’s predictably excellent in transition. His length affords him uncommon angles as a defensive playmaker, and he can cover an immense distance just off two long strides, but he’s as prone to ball watching and zoning out as any teenager. He’s unselfish and often has the correct vision on his reads, but his passes sometimes lack touch or conviction. He shoots, just not very well at all. His rudimentary handle prevents him from being a more effective shot creator, and his frail figure and high center of gravity narrow his pathways to winning mismatches in the post.
Essengue’s most outlier skill at the professional level seems randomly assigned by the basketball gods. For a player lacking much in the way of functional play strength, Essengue invites contact and uses it to his advantage. He has proved to be a foul-drawing machine in the Bundesliga with his obscenely high free throw rate, roughly the same as Julius Randle’s in his lone season at Kentucky back in 2013-14. It made sense for Randle, who has always been a tank—even as a teenager, he was nearly 60 pounds heavier than the Frenchman. For Essengue, who weaponizes his speed in his collisions with the defense, getting to the line entails emulating the kind of rag doll physics popularized in PlayStation games of the early aughts.
None of this is particularly damning. Every concern about his game has a positive upshot in its range of outcomes. In the aggregate, Essengue’s profile could be seen as a huge green flag given his age. But his development will take a patient front office with a clear road map. Essengue certainly looks the part while also demonstrating enough of a framework of skills to leave teams daydreaming. For draftniks of a certain vintage, Essengue’s evaluation is its own kind of comfort food. He is an archetypal prototype.
