2024 NBA Draft Editor's Notes: Volume Three
2024 NBA Draft Editor's Notes: Volume Three
A look at five more prospects in the 2024 NBA Draft who have not gotten much No Ceilings spotlight this season: Juan Nuñez, Trey Alexander, Oso Ighodaro, Jonathan Mogbo, and KJ Simpson.
Spring has sprung, the NBA playoffs are in full swing, and the Madness of March is beginning to fade into the rearview mirror. For a few select NBA fanbases, the excitement levels are at a fever pitch.
For the rest of the NBA fanbases, as well as the draft fanatics, the month of June is less about the NBA Finals and more about the 2024 NBA Draft. We here at No Ceilings have been covering the draft all year long, and we’re kicking into an even higher gear as draft night gets closer and closer.
While we’ve covered prospects from the top of the draft to the sickest of Draft Sicko deep cuts, there are always going to be a few players who don’t get enough time in our written spotlight. With that in mind, I figured it was time for another edition of Editor’s Notes. Today, I’ll be breaking down five prospects who we haven’t written about as much as others, starting with an international prospect who’s been quieter on the draft scene than I would have expected at the start of the season. So…let’s dive deep!
Juan Nuñez
Juan Nuñez has been one of the most hyped international prospects for a few years now. For some reason, though, he seems to be flying under the radar despite a solid season as Ulm’s starting point guard as a teenager.
The place to start with Nuñez is his brilliance as a passer and pick-and-roll orchestrator. As our own Ignacio Rissotto noted briefly in his brilliant article yesterday on Alex Sarr, Real Madrid has a long history of training some of the best passers in the world, and Nuñez is a part of that legacy. He controls the offense with a maturity and efficiency that belies his age, and it’s easy to see why when you watch him sling passes all over the court:
The numbers back up the tale of the tape: Nuñez ranks in the 93rd percentile in offensive possessions plus assists, per Synergy. Most of that jump comes from his halfcourt offense; he’s effective in transition both as a scorer (70th percentile) and as a passer (88th percentile), but the vast majority of his offensive possessions were in the halfcourt, where he jumped up from the 44th percentile to the 90th percentile in possessions plus assists.
Nuñez manages the difficult double duty of keeping control of the ball (with a 1.99-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio) while also attempting the kinds of audacious passes that few guards are willing to risk. Nuñez is accurate when slinging passes with either hand, and makes plays off a live dribble as well as from a standstill.
His ability to pass off a live dribble pairs well with his best attributes as a scorer. Nuñez is an adept finisher at the rim against pros, ranking in the 67th percentile in at-rim offense. He’s not a big leaper (having registered just five dunks on the season), but he leverages his excellent handle and great body control to work his way into buckets around the basket.
In addition to his finishing, Nuñez is also quite comfortable as an off-the-dribble scorer. Modern-day NBA point guards need to be able to make defenses pay when they can’t get all the way to the rim or create a look for someone else, and Nuñez already excels in that regard. His overall three-point percentage is pedestrian at best (33.1% from deep this past season), but it belies the difficulty of the attempts that he was taking. The vast majority (108-of-135, for a whopping 80%) of his jump shots came off the dribble, and he ranked in the 63rd percentile on those off-the-bounce looks. The shot can look a bit awkward at times, but it’s hard to argue with his success:
The offensive skill set for Nuñez is enticing and in line with what almost any team would hope to see from a young point guard. We do have to discuss the elephant in the room with Nuñez’s game, though. While his offensive contributions are spectacular, his defense leaves a lot to be desired. He’s not the greatest athlete in the world and is on the smaller side for a modern NBA guard at 6’3”; that combination certainly limits his defensive upside.
If those were the only concerns with his defense, I might be more willing to write off those issues and file them away under “well, he does the best that he can with what he’s got.” Sadly, that isn’t exactly the case. Nuñez rarely fights to get around screens and often gets caught ball-watching. He frequently catches up to his man after the ball has swung their way and then frantically tries to recover when it’s already too late.
Strangely enough, though (given the size concerns), Nuñez does some of his best work defensively near the basket. He’s surprisingly stout when posted up, and he’s a decent contributor on the glass, which plays well into him kickstarting transition plays.
That’s all well and good, but his defense is almost a mirror of his offense in that he struggles in the areas that are most important to his game while being solid in the less critical areas. He will need to be at least comfortably below average on the perimeter to earn consistent NBA minutes, and I’m not confident that he’ll get there quickly enough.
With the defensive discussion out of the way, I still have Nuñez as a late first round pick on my board. The hit rate for prospects taken in the 25-30 range of the draft is not as high as many people think it is, and I am comfortable with the notion that Juan Nuñez can be a rotation guard for a team that needs point guard help off the bench. I’m not ruling him out as an NBA starter by any means—especially since he’s already a starting point guard in a high-caliber professional league as a 19-year-old. In today’s NBA, an offense-first point guard who makes everyone around him better is valuable as long as the defense isn’t too atrocious. Given how his professional career has gone so far, I’m willing to bet on Nuñez figuring out enough defensively to work his way into a rotation and let his passing wizardry shine.
Trey Alexander
This season started out so well for Trey Alexander. After being a popular breakout pick before the season began, Alexander put up 20 points in each of his first four games on blistering 56/38/100 shooting splits. Alexander ranked 20th on our first No Ceilings BIG Board of the season, and his success early on made it easy to buy into him working his way into the lottery.
The rest of the season was an up-and-down affair for Alexander, even as Creighton made another Sweet Sixteen run before being bounced by Tennessee. Alexander’s performance in that game was almost his season in microcosm—a solid 13-7-6 game on the surface but with rough shooting splits (3-of-12 overall), and with six of those points coming on late triples after the game had already been decided.
It’s easy to get caught up in the ways that this season was a disappointment for Alexander. His three-point percentage took a sizable step back, from 41% last year to 34% this year. He also started the season off strong and then faded down the stretch—always a recipe for tanking your draft stock.
However, just looking at the negatives for Alexander belies the positive improvements to his game. He took crucial strides forward as a playmaker for others, nearly doubling his assist totals while also improving his assist-to-turnover ratio (2.6 APG against 1.5 TOV last season, 4.7 APG against 2.5 TOV this season). He upped his scoring to 17.6 points per game while also being asked to create much more of his own offense than he did last season; the majority of his jumpers last season were catch-and-shoot looks, but this year he took 57.5% of his jumpers off the dribble. His free-throw percentage held steady (to an almost disturbing degree-82.4% last season and 82.4% again this year), and I’ve long been a believer in the importance of free-throw shooting as an indicator of touch, given that there’s less variance there than on long-range shots and often a larger sample size as well.
Look, I’m not here to argue that this season was an unqualified success for Trey Alexander: it was not. However, I think that too many scouts have soured too much on his game after the sky-high early-season expectations. I would be willing to bet on Trey Alexander for a team in need of guard depth in the early second round (or even late in the first) over some of the guard prospects who appeared to have passed him in terms of their draft stocks this season.
Oso Ighodaro
I have been confused for a couple of years now about why I’m not more bought in on Oso Ighodaro. Big men who can pass are one of my greatest draft weaknesses; I almost always believe way too much on those kinds of prospects. With that in mind, I figured that now might be a good time to dive back into the Ighodaro tape to see if a fresh look might help me either buy in more or (at the very least) better understand and define my previous position.
Let’s start with the positives. Ighodaro isn’t just the best passing big man in this class; he’s one of the best passers in the class point blank, regardless of position. He hits cutters at an insane rate when passing out of the post, he can execute a dribble hand-off as well as anyone, and he even dimes guys up as the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll. I knew what kind of a passer he was before I began this latest deep dive, and if anything, I’m even more bought-in now than I was before after watching him dish out gems left and right:
The problem for me with Ighodaro is the rest of his offensive game. Given that he’s a complete non-shooter (he took a grand total of seven jump shots this season, per Synergy, and went 2-of-7), he’ll have to be surrounded by four shooters to really be effective. I don’t exactly buy into him becoming a shooter in the longer term, either, given his 62.3% mark from the charity stripe.
That lack of shooting essentially boxes him in as a small-ball center, and at 6’9”, he’ll be losing the size battle pretty much every time he steps on the floor. For a small-ball big, he’s nowhere near effective enough in transition—Ighodaro ranks in the 31st percentile in transition, and he still grades out as below-average (45th percentile) on transition possessions plus assists. Part of that was admittedly by design—the Marquette offense with Ighodaro and Tyler Kolek running the show was at its best in the halfcourt. However, I worry about Ighodaro’s ability to contribute offensively when opponents give him space, which will certainly happen more consistently at the NBA level.
I ultimately came away from this latest film dive slightly higher on Ighodaro, mostly due to his defense. Despite his relative lack of size at center, he’s a solid help defender who moves his feet well and holds up well when forced to defend one-on-one (68th percentile on post-up defense and 58th percentile on isos, per Synergy). He’s also a good defensive playmaker, racking up 1.1 steals and 1.3 blocks per game, with a 5.0% block percentage over his four years at Marquette and a 1.8% steal percentage that both bode well for his ability to make plays defensively at the next level. Still, I can’t quite get there with the notion of Ighodaro as a first round pick—his offensive holes concern me too much, even if his exceptional passing makes me constantly want to move him up my board.
Jonathan Mogbo
It’s been a long college journey for Jonathan Mogbo to get to this point. He worked his way up the college ranks, from Independence Community College in Kansas to a JuCo season at Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College to Missouri State last season. He finally had his big breakout year for San Francisco this year, where he dominated the West Coast Conference.
Mogbo’s basic box score stats are astounding enough on their own—14.2 points per game, 10.1 rebounds per game, 3.6 assists per game, and 1.6 steals per game in just under 29 minutes a night. His advanced numbers are somehow even more staggering. Mogbo ranked in the 94th percentile in overall offense, the 97th percentile in possessions plus assists, the 98th percentile in both transition and transition possessions plus assists, the 84th percentile on cuts, the 88th percentile on post-ups, the 83rd percentile on putbacks, the 74th percentile as a pick-and-roll roll man, and the 94th percentile in at-rim scoring. He can keep the ball humming when he doesn’t have a chance to score, and he fully capitalizes when he can:
Some of the issues with Mogbo’s potential NBA translation are the same as Ighodaro’s—his lack of a jump shot and lack of center size at 6’8” pigeonholes him a bit as a small-ball center or situational power forward alongside a shooting big. Ultimately, though, I’m more willing to buy in on Mogbo, given what he does without the ball in his hands—even if he’s a cut below Ighodaro as a passer. His insanely efficient transition play and activity as a cutter give me more faith in Mogbo’s ability to fit into an NBA scheme. Given the gap in perception between the two as well—Ighodaro was 45th in the latest $DRFT rankings while Mogbo failed to crack the Top 60—I’d be much more willing to bet on Mogbo late in the draft (and on him continuing his upward trajectory) rather than taking an earlier swing on Ighodaro.
KJ Simpson
Cody Williams is likely to be selected in the Top 10 of the 2024 NBA Draft, and Tristan da Silva is all but a lock to go in the first round.
The leading scorer for the Colorado Buffaloes this past season also more than doubled the assist numbers of the second-place player, led the team in steals, and was third on the squad in rebounding.
Scouts and Colorado fans probably know the answer, but would casual fans have expected the first sentence above to have no bearing on the second one?
KJ Simpson hasn’t gotten the same hype as the other two, mostly because Williams and da Silva are big wings who have been on draft radars for a while, and Simpson is a 6’2” junior guard who wasn’t really getting much hype before the season started. However, he’s taken huge strides forward as a shooter in a way that makes it easy to buy into his NBA translation.
Simpson averaged 19.7 PPG this season on sparkling 48/43/88 shooting splits, in addition to his 4.9 APG and his somewhat shocking 5.8 RPG. He shined offensively overall and in a number of key areas; Simpson ranked in the 87th percentile offensively overall, in the 67th percentile in transition, in the 71st percentile as the pick-and-roll ball-handler, and in the 91st percentile on spot-ups.
Simpson wasn’t just elite as a spot-up shooter around Williams and da Silva, though; he was a top-flight shooter off the dribble as well:
Simpson ranked in the 92nd percentile overall on jump shots, in the 92nd percentile on catch-and-shoot looks, and in the 91st percentile on off-the-dribble jumpers.
There’s admittedly reason for concern about the shooting being a mirage, given that he shot just 27.6% from deep last season on a similar number of attempts (4.6 3PA per game last year against 4.9 attempts per game this season). However, there’s also reason to buy into both his improvement this season and the notion that this season is closer to the true KJ Simpson shooting-wise than last year.
For starters, the shot is way too smooth both off the dribble and off the catch for me to believe that he’ll be a sub-30% shooter, even when shooting from the NBA line. Also, he showed touch last season from the charity stripe, knocking down 81.7% of his attempts—and he’s gotten even better from the line this year. I don’t think he’ll be a 43% three-point shooter again next year, but I’d be surprised if his three-point percentage next season is closer to his sophomore season mark than his mark from this past season.
Simpson ended up 34th on the latest $DRFT rankings referenced earlier, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a combination of workouts and re-reviewing of the tape by NBA front offices led to him making a leap into the first round. He might not have the size that teams might look for these days in a primary initiator, but it’s hard to argue with his mix of offensive efficiency, on-ball success, and high-volume shooting off and on the ball.