RealGM

Ranking the Top 100 Prospects

86. Johnny Furphy (Kansas, SF, Freshman)

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Size: 6'9", 202 lbs
Age: 19

It already feels like Furphy should be on breakout watch for the 2024-25 season. He's playing a limited role, almost exclusively out of spot-ups, but he's still standing out with his 6'9" size, athleticism and shooting stroke. He's made all four of his pull-ups and shown some touch in the lane, but maximizing his draft stock likely means returning to Kansas for more shots next season.

Johnny Furphy | 6-9 wing | 19 years old | Kansas

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Furphy is the big riser on the board, as he’s emerged over the last month into a critical cog on an excellent Kansas team. Playing for Bill Self, a coach who generally has an aversion to playing raw freshmen, Furphy is averaging 13.7 points and 7.0 rebounds while shooting 55.7 percent from the field and 42.6 percent from 3 in his last 10 games. Furphy has a lot of what NBA teams look for across the landscape when trying to identify interesting projects in whom to invest.

At 6-9 with legitimate athleticism in the open court, Furphy is a potential one-and-done who was not even really on the radar this time last year. Over the last 18 months, the Australian has exploded. At the Center of Excellence in Australia, he was always seen as an interesting upside swing due to his athleticism and shooting ability, but he didn’t always know how to impact the game when he was out there. Now, Furphy has earned serious minutes and consistently hits the score sheet with his rebounding, and he forces teams to run in transition with Kansas because of how much pressure he puts on the rim.[s] It’s hard to find guys who are this big, this athletic and can play on the wing.[/size] My bet is teams invest the developmental resources in Furphy in a big way.

2024 NBA Mock Draft

18. Atlanta Hawks (via Kings): Johnny Furphy

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Position: Small forward
Size: 6'9", 202 lbs
Age: 19
Pro comparison: Trey Murphy III

Teams looking to fill off-ball positions with efficient shotmaking, play-finishing and activity will be drawn to Johnny Furphy. While he hasn't flashed much creation or passing, his 37.3 three-point mark and 80.8 field-goal percentage at the rim feel ideal for a spot-up and transition-heavy role. He's the type of player whose off shooting nights won't hurt, given the automatic spacing and energy he brings.

The Case For Johnny Furphy

Johnny Furphy is a 19-year-old freshman who is currently starting for the 2023-24 Kansas Jayhawks. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, Furphy comes from an athletic family deeply rooted in sports.

At the height of the pandemic, things drastically changed for Furphy. He was a late bloomer, but the former 5’ 8” guard had grown to 6’ 8” in a short time, a massive growth spurt as reported by Shreyas Laddha of the Kansas City Star. However, due to the strict COVID restrictions in Melbourne, Furphy could not play organized basketball for nearly two years.

Spoiler:

Furphy was a relative unknown in basketball circles due to this development curve he’s been on, but he truly made his name in the summer of 2023 at the NBA Academy Games where he broke out in front of multiple pro scouts and college coaches. The college offers started pouring in, fast forward a couple of months and Furphy is a high-level contributor to a 21-8 Kansas team.

He may only be 19 today, but Furphy’s roller coaster ride of a start to hoops makes him pretty young in terms of high-level basketball experience. His ‘basketball age,’ is far lower when you compare him to the average 19-year-old. The growth spurt made his development curve steeper, and even with the lack of experience and time to grow into his body, he’s been extremely productive in a scaled role as a freshman. Similar to Jalen William’s late growth spurt, Furphy’s newfound size opened up far more pathways as a basketball player. This is one of the reasons why I believe Furphy is a false-ceiling prospect.


Standing at 6’8”, potentially reaching 6’9” in shoes, Johnny Furphy possesses prototypical NBA size and length for the forward-wing position, complemented by a long wingspan spanning between 6’11” and 7’0”. Still gaining strength and weight, Furphy weighs a reported 202 pounds. At 19, he has a skinny frame, but this has not deterred him from being aggressive and physical on the court.

Watching him play over the past couple of years, you can see Furphy has high levels of touch and that translates to his most bankable NBA skill: shooting. Furphy is a pretty advanced shooter considering his experience, shooting with high volume and versatility that includes shots off of movement, off the dribble, above the break in transition, and catch-and-shoot. His mechanics have developed over the years, oftentimes having to accommodate for his lack of lower-body strength with a wider base. Today, Furphy’s shot is a 1.5-motion jumper with a high point of release, even mixing in no dip threes when extremely hard closeouts come his way.

The strongest facet of his shooting has been catch-and-shoot, but the capability to add different shots to his arsenal in a short period is a massive sign that he could be a high-level shooter.

A 6’ 9” shooter with bounce and connective passing at 19 is a great baseline but to project even higher forms of creation, it requires an NBA player to be able to self-create half-court drives on volume. This is the weakest part of Furphy’s chain of skills on the offensive end, where a weak handle hampers his creation reps.

As a driver, Furphy does have one unique aspect: lower body flexibility. Although he’s a large player, Furphy is consistently able to get lower than players on drives and leverage his physicality. This is in part due to his shin angles, allowing him to get lower and use his shoulder as a lever to manufacture space.

Give Furphy an open lane to build up momentum and it becomes really difficult to stop him at the rim due to his physicality, functional strength, and leaping mechanics. This intersection of athletic traits and shooting touch gives Furphy a baseline as a high-level play finisher in the NBA, weaponizing it when given space and attacking defenses that are in scramble mode.

Due to his lack of strength, he’s unable to get low enough in defensive positioning and stay with players laterally. This also limits him in screen navigation as he’s unable to get low enough, turn the corner, and explode back into the play. Furphy is role-versatile when it comes to defense but I would not say he is malleable enough in this area. He can play a multitude of roles on this end, whether it’s at the point of attack, in gaps, or even some deterrence at the rim but he does not truly thrive in any of these roles outside of being a nail defender.

Conclusion
While I believe Furphy will be a good NBA player in most contexts, like most prospects, reaching his upper-end outcomes as a creator will need an optimal development environment. An NBA team with cemented creators and a DHO big will enable that team to leverage Furphy’s off-ball value early on. The creators can help his handle limitations stand out less, while a DHO big will find him on cuts and in handoffs as a shooter. Letting Furphy become comfortable at the NBA level will then open up his creation pathways. There is a case that Furphy’s intersection of skills will allow him to develop his handle as an off-the-catch scorer, attacking tilted defenses like Desmond Bane did with the Grizzlies early on. This should give him the time off the court and the space on the court to fix the weaker links in his chain of skills.

The skill intersection, the ability to play on and off the ball, and his current development curve give Furphy the ability to scale to most basketball contexts with the ability to take on more of a workload as a creator when experience builds up.

He’s a false ceiling prospect for these very reasons. In most draft classes, a young dribble-pass-shoot wing with the potential for above-average defense would justifiably be a top-10 pick. In a class, where that archetype is not only rare but the top of the draft is wide open, I believe it is justified to take Johnny Furphy with a top-5 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.

Johnny Furphy | Freshman | Wing

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A red-hot streak to close the season has made Johnny Furphy the top-ranked Kansas prospect on our board. He’s currently 13th on our board. The pitch is simply—he’s a 6’9” late blooming freshman who scored 11.4 PPG on 49.6/36.5/78.5 splits in Big-12 play. He’s got a great shooting stroke for someone his size, and he’s great at relocating into open spaces on the perimeter. Heck, he’s a great off-ball mover in general. He cuts well and makes a ton of hustle plays on the offensive glass. While he doesn’t get to operate much with the ball, he’s a solid decision-maker when chased off the line.

Personally, I’m a bit lower on Furphy than our consensus ranking. I’m not sold on his first step, and he doesn’t get all the way to the rim on his own accord very often. If he isn’t knocking down shots, I think there’s a real cap on how much value he can bring. Defensively, he’s got a ways to go. He competes, but his hands are low too often, and opponents get by him way more often than one might expect given his sheer size.

The NCAA Tournament will provide Furphy with one final springboard. Size and shooting will never go out of style. But if he can show more as a driver, passer, and defender, he could cement himself as a Top 20 prospect.

Johnny Furphy | 6-9 wing | 19 years old | Kansas



Furphy is one of the tougher evaluations in this draft class. It looked like he’d turned a significant corner a few weeks ago. Playing for Bill Self, a coach who is generally averse to playing raw freshmen, Furphy averaged 13.6 points and 7.3 rebounds while shooting 54.3 percent from the field and 39.6 percent from 3 during a 12-game stretch from Jan. 16 through the end of February. But in his last four games, with Kansas struggling with injuries and defenses gearing up for March Madness, Furphy hasn’t reached double figures once and has been much less efficient.

What should NBA teams make of this drop? It’s a fair question. His 12-game sample of strong play before this downturn is his only strong stretch so far; he averaged just 5.7 points and 2.7 rebounds in his first 15 games while playing 14 minutes per night.

Furphy has a lot of the attributes NBA teams seek when trying to identify the right projects in which to invest. It’s hard to find players with this much size and athleticism who can play on the wing. He’s come a long way in just 18 months to even get to this point. He was always seen as an interesting upside swing due to his athleticism and shooting ability, but at the Center of Excellence in Australia, he didn’t seem to know how to impact the game when he played.

This is the spot where this draft class becomes exceedingly difficult to project. I can’t say for sure that Furphy will even be in the 2024 draft, as he could choose to return to Kansas. If he is, based on my read of NBA teams and the intel I’ve received, my bet is that someone in this range will want to invest developmental resources in Furphy. His range is wide, though, and would really depend on his performance in pre-draft workouts.