CPops57 wrote::reporter: Just wanted to give my draft thoughts.
I’m a casual fan and not a professional scout. I could be very wrong about these players. Given Morey’s great draft track record, I hope I’m humble enough to accept his decision and give my full support to whoever they decide on even if I have my sincere doubts about them. Between some of his picks like Maxey and McCain and others, he’s earned that respect.
But personally, who would I hope to get, whether at #3 or a trade down?
I’m extremely excited by both Kon Kneuppel’s immediate impact and potential upside down the road.
Why Kon?
1. Shooting is the most valuable skill in the modern NBA, and he’s at worst the second best shooter in his class.
2. He's much more more than a shooter. His court vision and handle are legitimately good and fits in positively with any conceivable team or lineup. This secondary ball-handling and passing capability really matters in the modern NBA, and particularly on this team that sometimes has trouble feeding the post and making smart passes and decisions. We saw in his one year here that Batum being able to make a few simple passes provided a major positive impact that was sorely needed. I honestly didn’t even know what the ability to feed the post looked like before he got here.
3. His basketball IQ is really underrated. That one play where he grabbed his teammate’s leg and pulled him back from falling out of bounds is one of the funnier examples of that you'll ever see, but when you watch him play you always see him making smart plays. IMO, we’ve been lacking many smart players for a long time and sorely need this quality. And whether or not the Sixers end up as contenders or are rebuilding, I want high IQ to be part of the team’s identity going forward.
4. Despite not being a great run/jump athlete, he was able to get to the rim and finish at a very solid rate compared to much of the rest of his draft class, including far superior athletes also mentioned as in the mix at the Sixers range. He’s going to be a crafty scorer who subtly bumps a guy off in the lane at the right moment and lands a boring layup or floater, not an explosive scorer who beats guys off with a quick first step and explodes over them for the dunk.
5. Unlike other slower guys who raise some questions about their defense translating to the pros, he was actually a good defender in college and has a clear route to being solid in the NBA, described below.
6. His upside is considerably underrated. The combination of great all-around skills and a good basketball IQ gives him a crystal clear path towards scaling up his offensive output in the pros, also described below.
Here are some responses to common criticisms I’ve seen about him.
Kon is too slow to play the 2, and too small to play the 3. Offensively, he’d struggle to get shots off successfully at the rim against NBA athletes, and defensively he’d just be physically overmatched by almost everybody.
Personally, I see him primarily as a 3. He is admittedly a tad shorter with a slightly shorter wingspan than is ideal as an NBA SF and he is obviously not an explosive athlete. On paper, wondering if his physical profile translating to the pros is a totally valid question mark. But I think there's reason to be very hopeful due to some of these factors.
In contrast to many freshmen college players, his body frame starts out great in his rookie year. If you look at his body, words you can use to describe him are terms like stout and thick. He's also reportedly very strong and his weight was really good. If there’s somebody who can stand his ground against bigger players and not get pushed around, it’s a thicc boi like that. There are far superior athletes in this draft that look like twigs in comparison and will be pushed around for years until their body fills out.
Unlike many players you’d characterize as snipers, he genuinely doesn’t shy away from physical contact. If you watch him play, he is absolutely willing and able to mix it up in the trenches and finish through contact. (By the numbers, he’s surprisingly good at that). I’m very excited by some of his recent interviews where he mentioned wanting to play like Klay, and particularly mentioned watching film and seeing how Jimmy Butler operates. Kon has the chance to maybe end up as what I’d label a “bully ball, connective sniper”. He’s not going to beat a lot of guys to the rim with his first step, but I could see him doing things like using his physicality to bump guys off him while relocating and making good decisions on whether to take the shot, drive, or pass.
His mental processing speed and basketball IQ is not at a Jokic or Bird savant level, but is still very good. There will be faster athletes that will be look slower on the court just because he’s better at anticipating where to go and makes decisions faster. He’s also very smart with his defensive risk taking: he’s rarely out of position because he falls asleep defensively or is leaping through the passing lane gambling on an improbable deflection. I think he’ll be a better team defender faster than a lot of superior athletes. If you watch him defending off the ball, he stays very engaged defensively.
If you’ve heard some of Kon’s interviews, he’s made some very intelligent comments about his finishing around the rim and how he can’t always get off all of those same kinds of shots in the NBA that he made in college, particularly jumping off of both feet, and how he’s practicing other shots off of one foot and floaters. He’s a crafty guy: guys like that will find a way to get their shot off. Seeing some real intelligence and self-awareness like that is a breath of fresh air and gives me confidence that he is going to overcome his physical limitations.
Professional trainers will be able to get more out of him. His body fat percentage isn’t good right now by NBA standards. I’m certain that a guy like that in a pro training program will have some low hanging fruit he can improve athletically to get even faster and stronger. He’s already pretty good at shooting through contact, and as he gets stronger, I think he can be even better at this.
I like Kon a lot, but his defense is a question mark. The Sixers already have some perimeter defensive question marks between Maxey and McCain. Would adding Kon to the mix be the right approach for building a playoff team here now and in the future?
I’m optimistic about Kon ultimately being at least around an average NBA defender due to what I said above about his thicker frame and smarts, but it’s true that just an average defender probably wouldn’t be ideal next to Maxey and McCain. In this league, at least one of your perimeter guys must be a very good defensive presence who can take on the toughest challenges and Maxey and McCain are both probably subpar. With Kon in the mix, if those 3 are the featured guys, you can probably envision the Sixers having a subpar defensive perimeter.
Here’s the thing though. A lot of people won’t like to hear this, but it’s nearly guaranteed that the team is going to look significantly different even 1 or 2 years from now. Change is a constant in the NBA. It would defy almost all NBA history for the Sixers to figure out how to make 2 smallish combo guards who aren’t good defenders work together. As much as I like both of them and hope that somehow they can work, it’s close to a certainty that at least one of McCain and Maxey will not be here for very long. Making draft decisions banking on McCain and Maxey being your guys for the next 5+ years is just a misuse of draft capital.
Kon had a great college career, but only looked so good playing in Duke's system next to other great NBA caliber talent like Flagg and Malauch that covered up his offensive limitations and defensive weaknesses.
Though the sample size is small, it should be noted that Flagg went down very early in the first game of the ACC tournament and Kon was the MVP of the tournament and got them a championship. He was way better than expected. Over the three games, he averaged 21.0 points per game on 48.6% field goal shooting, with 5.0 rebounds, 4.7 assists, and 1.3 steals per game. That is not good production: that is elite production in difficult circumstances against good competition. That’s the kind of indicator that you can look at to see that yeah, he can scale up his usage and take on a bigger role.
Kneuppel’s offensive role and stats were also growing as the season went on, which is amazing on a team that had one of the better college basketball prospects in recent memory. A lot of people think that Duke didn’t win the tourney because they didn’t go enough to Kon at the end. If Duke didn’t have a true generational talent in Flagg, Kneuppel would have been the total offensive engine of that team as a freshman. Think about how remarkable that is for a program like Duke for a freshman to do.
Malauch is a fine prospect of course, but if you go and look at his highlight reel, you’ll see that it was Kon who contributed to a lot of his offensive success. The spacing of course, and the pick and rolls and throwing up great passes that Malauch could dunk was oftentimes initiated by Kon.
Kon’s rebounding is questionable as a SF. For some reason, this team already has trouble rebounding the ball, and his lack of rebounding numbers might not work at this team.
To me, this is the closest thing to a point that gives me some pause. Kon’s individual rebounding numbers are underwhelming, and might be a limiting issue on this team that already struggles with rebounding timely shots. With his underwhelming length and athleticism, you have to wonder if he’d ever be able to average a solid 6-7 rebounds a game as a full-time starting SF.
I’m just not sure how much his specific perimeter role at Duke, as well as playing with Malauch and Flagg, impacted his rebounding numbers in college. He played a lot of a guard’s role in college partly due to necessity with Proctor taking a step back and having a disappointing year, and he of course had some elite rebounding teammates who gobbled up boards.
Like the classic tropes say, Kon is a fundamentally sound player. Fundamentally sound players who aren’t explosive athletes don’t sky for boards or try and chase down every loose ball, but focus on boxing out or playing their assigned role (trying to shadow runners defensively leaking out for potential outlet passes) these are things that might impact team success positively, but don’t necessarily help individual rebounding stats.
So is he a bad individual rebounder but a good team rebounder? That would be my guess, but I don’t know where to really find all of this data with all kinds of on/off splits to put his real team rebounding contribution in context. It just wouldn’t surprise me if a fundamentally sound player like Kon was great at boxing out and he contributed to Duke having better rebounding rates with him on court versus off. If anybody knows how to look that up, that would be useful for all of us.
The best available on/off splits I found here seems to indicate that the team was about the same on the boards whether or not he was on the court for what it’s worth, with the team being slightly better on the offensive boards with Kon on, but slightly better on the defensive glass with him off. What that means exactly needs more of a deep dive into the numbers.
https://databallr.com/NBADraft/profile/Kon_Knueppel/126925
I get liking Kon and agree that he’s a very safe pick who has a solid floor at least as a high-end role player for maybe the next 10-15 years, but with the #3 pick, you have to try and hit a home run and grab a star, especially with Paul George's age and Embiid's health. Kon’s limited athleticism means his upside is limited.
Pure athleticism is overrated in discussions about upside and success, particularly in the modern NBA. The best player in the league today is a slow fat man who can barely jump over a phone book.
There are amazing raw athletes drafted every year that just don’t know how to play and never sniff 20% of their lofty theoretical max upside. Go look at some of the draft profiles of older generations of players whose entire careers have played out. Brief Sixer legend Jerome Moiso was a physical athletic marvel who actually had some skills and the draft profiles described as potentially Kevin Garnett. But he was out of the league in a few years and never averaged more than a couple of points. His otherworldly athleticism accounted for nothing since he couldn’t figure out how to use it. Stromile Switft was another one of that ilk. The draft profiles liked to compare him to Shawn Kemp. His career was a little better and he actually got on the court semi-regularly as mostly a backup for a few years. But despite a handful of thunderous dunks, Swift’s career was incredibly underwhelming and it’s probably the first time you’ve thought of Stromile Swift in 10+ years.
The league is a lot more about skill than athleticism today. You have to look at the how players can impact team success. Kon has a very clear path to being a big time offensive contributor in multiple ways. And he’s proven that in college, albeit with a small sample size.
A lot of people like to compare Kon to another shooter like maybe a Kyle Korver who of course had a fine NBA career, but you might be underwhelmed drafting Kyle Korver’s career so early. Nobody can predict the future with certainty, but they’re in different stratospheres as prospects. Korver couldn’t start at Creighton as a Freshman, meanwhile Kneuppel earned a starting role at Duke as a freshman and won the ACC MVP. They’re leagues apart as prospects. As a sort of an aside, some of the draft sites like to give Desmond Bane as the high end NBA comparison for Kneuppel, but Bane also played 4 years in college. That’s again, a really big plus side in Kon’s favor that he achieved what he did as a freshman and he has 3 years of development to go through before he even gets to where Bane was as a rookie. Kon is reportedly a hard worker and comes from a great basketball family background: there’s no chance he isn’t busting his butt working to get even better.
If not Kon, then who do I like?
Barring something fairly unexpected, VJ Edgecombe might be my second favorite option that’s speculated to be in the Sixers range.
Why do I also like Edgecombe?
His athleticism looks elite and he plays fast. Right away, you can see his floor being useful and an immediate contribution as a point of attack defender who can play with any of the current guards on the team. I think he’ll take some time to be a better team defender because he does have a tendency to fall asleep and seem lost sometimes, but the path to him eventually being an absolute “dawg” in the playoffs is clear, and he has the athleticism to make up for some defensive lapses. As an additional plus, while it also was a small sample size, he also proved his ability to hang with NBA level players and fully grown men with his Olympics Qualifying role with the Bahamas and that’s another factor that leads one to believe that he’ll end up at least decent. If his shot is good and he improves his ball skills (which are very much big areas he has to improve) the theoretical max upside is incredibly high.
Why do I not like Ace Bailey?
I really wish I could like him. Despite measuring a bit smaller than the anticipated elite size of 6-10, Ace has still got a lot of solid physical attributes. I can see why he’s so polarizing, because the things he’s good at like hitting tough shots is a big indication of stardom, and the things he’s bad at like passing are big indicators of bust. It's just that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that you can rarely fix stupid. Beyond just the arguably low basketball IQ (< 1.0 AST/TO ratio), he continuously says some of the dumbest things a prospect in his position could say in every single interview I’ve come across. I fully recognize that my impression could be wrong, but I think the odds of him reaching his lofty ceiling are lower than other prospects. It would be perfect if he was the pick and worked out because you can easily see how he could plug a gaping hole in this lineup and his theoretical max upside is indeed high, but I think the odds of him reaching the absolute best case are smaller than other prospects. I’d hope that the team has really dived into his personality and history because the interviews and intangible factors matter a lot more for Ace than other prospects IMO. Also, even in the questionable good case outcome for Ace, I think it’s going to take very long to get there. Combine measurements had him barely clearing 200 pounds at his height: that’s something that’s fixable, but will take years for him to fill his body out and not get pushed around by NBA players as easily.
Why not Tre?
The overall shooting is arguably as good or better than Kneuppel due to the proven off the dribble shooting that Kon, in his small sample size, didn’t get as much of at Duke. I’m just sort of worried about him fitting in on any team team where he’s not having the ball in his hands full-time, because I think he’s not as valuable when he’s not being ball-dominant. Also defense and getting to the rim are abysmal by the numbers, despite his physical potential and skills. He has a real chance to be really good by fixing his flaws, but he might be somewhat unplayable right away, and fit no niche on this team in particular. Right away, I just don’t see a path to him playing much if the plan is to go with Maxey and McCain this year because they can both already shoot, and they’re both questionable defenders. I can see a small chance why Morey might like him despite this, because if you squint really freaking hard, you can sort of see like a younger James Harden emerging if his development goes perfectly with the absolute best case outcome where he fixes all of his flaws.
Who else do I like in the Top 10-ish range?
Some of the commentary I’ve seen on Noa Essengue seems very intriguing, maybe not at 3, but if drafting closer to 10-ish.
There’s reason to believe that Kasparas Jakucionis’ injury affected his game this season and that he could be a hidden gem as a big PG who’s a good creator.
There’s a few other guys I like.
What are some unknowns about this team?
There are 3 big variables here that are unknowable from outsiders’ perspectives that will impact the Sixers’ draft decision regardless of their claim to solely focus on the best available player.
1. Using the information that they actually have from the doctors, what do the Sixers genuinely think is Embiid’s likelihood of resuming his career successfully? If they secretly think that the odds are closer to 95% likely that Embiid will be fine next year rather than 5%, then that probably impacts their thought process with this draft significantly. If they’re very worried about Embiid being finished, I could see them taking a chance on a big.
2. What do they genuinely intend to do with the Maxey/McCain pairing? On paper, having 2 smallish combo guards who aren’t stud defenders just doesn’t work in the playoffs. Maybe they think they can somehow make it work, but that’s a long-shot based on all of NBA history, and especially what we saw in this year’s playoffs where demonic defensive guards were some of the bigger impact players on the 2 Finals teams.
3. How hot is Morey’s seat feeling? If Morey thinks that he’s very likely to be fired with another depressing year, that might impact their draft selection more towards a high-floor immediate contributor rather than taking a high-ceiling project that won’t pan out for 5 years.
Would I look to trade down for Kon or take him at #3?
I hope the team is doing their research on who other teams are lusting after and figures things out. I’d take him at #3, but would love to pick up another asset or two if possible and still get him.
One variable is financial. Trading the #3 for #5 and #21, and then moving #21 for the best available pick next year in a possibly even better class where the Sixers don’t have a first round pick would be a move I’d try and get if I was certain to get Kon at #5. Taking him at #5 rather than #3 saves ~$2 million over the guaranteed rookie scale maximum. That could be the difference between resigning Yabu or not, who could be a key depth piece this year.
Note that I’m assuming that Flagg and Harper are the top 2 picks, but there’s a small chance of a wildcard by San Antonio given they are already a guard-heavy roster.
What does Morey’s history say he will do?
Nobody can read minds, and like everybody I’m biased of course, but I can make some guesses. It seems like Morey has put a premium on skilled players in the past who have some good analytics, which is an arguable major point in Kon’s favor. That said, Morey has never drafted earlier than #12 before and might have a different draft calculus drafting this early. The Sixers are also in an unusual position where they’re drafting in the top 3, and are sort of straddling the line between theoretical contender and rebuilding lottery team, depending on Embiid’s and George’s health. Personally, I might be biased as I like his skills, but I think Kon’s analytics are superb (rated #2 in Pelton’s model for instance: https://archive.ph/u0iCf) and he has a lot of the solid stats in things that feel like Moreyball (good 3 point shooting and surprisingly solid numbers at getting to the rim, finishing, and making free throws). To me, he seems exactly like the type of player that Morey would covet, particularly if he’s hopeful that Embiid returns successfully (Kon is a great shooter to play off of his gravity), and particularly if he feels like his job is on the heat seat because Kon is fairly certain to at least have a safe floor and has a path to contributing right away.
Gave an and 1 for the WELL thought out post
