Fanbo Zeng's playing for the G League ignite, likely the next Chinese player drafted.
I like his game a lot, probably the best prospect out of China since at least Yi Jianlian, especially considering the fit (Zhou Qi had higher profile, but the fit was questionable, Zeng's skill set look like it should fit almost anywhere if it works out) the game makes a lot of sense for the modern game.
Though unknown how he scales up to the physicality, that's an unknown for most prospects, he's not uber thin pole, but obviously still relatively on the thinner side.
The profile at least offensively looks quite good, a bouncy 6'8~6'9 lefty but pretty ambidextrous (finishes really well both ways.) , rise up well off one or two feet (quite a bit of putback dunks in traffic etc.), the shot especially looks clean and he gets up high for his release. Looks like he has a good feel for the game in terms of passing and getting offensive rebounds too.
The problem is that I'm not quite sure who he defends (assuming he scale up physically ok obviously.) he's kind of a upright straight 4 type, probably not fast enough side to side to guard wings and clearly too thin to guard bigs (his shoulder is on the thiner side suggest he would never get super buffed), he has enough hops that you can probably hide him ok and not be a total disaster, but obviously then the offense needs to be worth it.
The problem is that while he played in Windemere Florida for Highschool for his sophomore year I didn't seem to see much in terms of high-level competition in his tapes, so it's unknown how he really do against better players, everything from how the shot looks and how much it goes in (47% from 3 and 84% from the line.) suggest he should really be able to shoot it, and that alone combine with his size and hop probably already suggest he's a serious rotation player (and that's also a skill set that's a lot easier to fit into almost any team's rotation. so the floor looks high.) but he needs to obviously be able to actually hit those shots when the physicality scales up. His general skill set also looks more likely to be an off-ball guy but the problem is we've also never seen him play with a real better PG/initiator so a lot of things are unknown, I am projecting that he should be able to do a lot of offball play pretty well, but we'll see.
What to look for him in the G League is probably that
1. can he hold up physically, i saw a decent amount of his play over the last year in China but that's a hard barometer to judge, he looks more built which you'd guess would be the case anyway for most kids at that age.
2. can he defend anyone? and not just the occasional weak side shot block, he's pretty sure to get some of those. I'm concerned other teams would just try to post him up and put him in a goal (granted the whole Ignite team is suspect to that heh) or he just generally gets destroyed on ball and in pick and roll, he gets blocks but a lot of that is over eager help rotations (but then again, this is really hard to judge for highschoolers.)
3. can he hit shots consistently against stronger defenders? well, the G league isn't exactly the pinnacle of defense, so if he can't even do that...
4. can he fit into an offball role well? that's probably in line with his ability to hit shots though.
(his game yesterday in China's domestic U19 tournament, obviously not the greatest competition ever but you can see him flash a lot of the skills I talked about, shot looks good to me in terms of balance / consistency / release speed and point and it went in too. the bounce is obvious, especially the second jump is really impressive. he showed a lot better handle here than a year ago with some pretty good shake and behind the back moves etc, I doubt that's a serious part of his game in the NBA but there's an outside chance of that. he was getting all sorts of blocks here and with his second jump etc I'm pretty sure he'll get some in higher level too but obviously not to this degree. )
