2024 NBA Draft Editor's Notes Volume Two
A look at five more prospects in the 2024 NBA Draft who have not gotten much No Ceilings spotlight this season: Ja'Kobe Walter, Tidjane Salaun, Zvonimir Ivisic, Tyrese Proctor, and Izan Almansa.
With the calendar now turning over to February, the home stretch of the season is in sight for most of the basketball world. March Madness is just a few weeks away, and the looming NBA trade deadline and All-Star break indicate that crunch time is approaching in the professional ranks as well.
All of that leads to the draft talk continuing to bubble for the elite prospects and their potential future NBA teams alike. We here at No Ceilings have been preparing for this crunch time for months, and we’ve covered most of the key prospects and many of the potential sleepers in the 2024 NBA Draft class at length. However, due to the nature of the beast, some important prospects have not had as much light shone on them in our written work.
Last month, I covered some prospects who haven’t gotten much time in that No Ceilings written spotlight this season with Volume One of this year’s Editor’s Notes. For today’s edition, I’ll be discussing five more prospects who we haven’t written about as much this season, starting with one of the top prospects in college basketball.
Ja’Kobe Walter
Ja’Kobe Walter started off the season scorching hot, with a 28-point outing in his college basketball debut against an excellent Auburn squad that has only lost three times since then. Walter has been one of the best prospects in this class since he hit the ground running in his first game.
He’s currently averaging 14.5 points, 4.6 rebounds, 1.7 assists, and 1.2 steals per game; while his 39/35/85 splits are not spectacular, those numbers don’t tell the tale of the difficulty of those attempts. Walter has been no stranger to double teams this season, and he’s had to handle plenty of grenade passes late in the shot clock. His excellent free-throw percentage and smooth shooting stroke both make it easy to buy into Walter as an elite shooter down the road, even if the three-point percentage is a bit lower than expected.
The advanced numbers are more kind to him than the raw shooting splits; Walter ranks in the 82nd percentile this season in overall offense, per Synergy. He’s been particularly efficient in the halfcourt, where he ranks in the 89th percentile.
Our own Tyler Metcalf wrote at length about Walter before the season started, but I wanted to circle back now that the college basketball regular season is nearing the finish line. His ability to play both with and without the ball in his hands makes it easy to project his fit at the next level; he ranks in the 90th percentile on spot-ups and in the 83rd percentile on isolations. He’s been solid, if not spectacular, as a pick-and-roll ball-handler; I expect him to be at least a tertiary playmaker sooner rather than later.
The defense has been…not as great. His decent steals rate is nice on the surface, but it hides the true tale of his play on that end of the floor. He gets caught ball-watching on a regular basis, and he often looks lost trying to recover when defenders do lose him. He doesn’t really fight over screens either; while some of that is excusable due to his skinny frame, he could certainly stand to put in more effort on that end of the floor.
Walter has also struggled to finish around the basket, but I’m much more willing to buy that being a strength concern than the defense. He has gotten to the line just under five times a game, which is a huge factor for him given his free-throw shooting prowess. Still, he is only shooting 53.4% at the rim this season; at the very least, that is worth pointing out.
I have had Ja’Kobe Walter in the top half of my lottery for most of the season, and I’d be surprised if he falls out of my Top 10 before the draft. Even with his defensive warts and struggles with finishing around the basket, the rest of his offensive arsenal warrants a spot near the top of the draft.
Tidjane Salaun
Pretty much every draft class has at least one mystery box player. Whether it be due to injury, limited playing time, NCAA sanctions, level of competition concerns, or some combination of the above, there’s almost always at least one player who has a much wider range of expected outcomes than most. These players might go later than expected in drafts with a lot of talent at the top, or they might go earlier than expected if one team fully buys into what they might become. The draft is such a crapshoot even in the best of circumstances, so a group with such little certainty like the 2024 NBA Draft class could lead to wilder swings than usual.
There are a few potential candidates for this role, including the player in the next section. However, Tidjane Salaun might be the biggest mystery box prospect in this draft class.
The place to start with Salaun is his size. At 6’10”, he has the kind of forward size that NBA teams love to have these days. He’s still growing into his frame, which is more obvious in some areas of his game than others, but the occasional baby giraffe-esque moments from him should go away in time.
While a lot of his game is still TBD, his shooting has been a clear asset this season. Salaun has taken the vast majority of his jump shots from beyond the arc, and he’s knocked them down at a very solid 37.3% clip. He has a high, quick release that makes it nearly impossible for defenders to bother his shot. His ability to create his own looks off the dribble is still a work in progress—many of the baby giraffe-iest (definitely not even close to a word, but I’m going with it anyway) moments for him have been when he attempts to take guys off the dribble. Still, he’s shown enough this season to where I think the shot is a viable weapon:
The defensive side of the ball is a bit of a different story. While Salaun has the size and mobility to guard either forward spot, his hips are very stiff, and his footwork leaves a lot to be desired. He’s a poor finisher around the rim when he can’t flush it home; Salaun ranks in just the eighth percentile on layups this season, per Synergy. He ranks in the 45th percentile at the basket overall due to his high dunk rate (his 26 dunks this season are certainly encouraging), but a little more craft on those non-dunk looks would go a long way.
Ultimately, I buy into Salaun being a good, if not quite elite, shooter at the NBA level. The mystery box part of the deal is…well, everything else. If most of the awkwardness with his handle and his finishing turns out to just be growing pains, he could end up being one of the best prospects in the draft. If he can’t do enough outside of spotting up, he might end up being a bust if a team drafts him too high. Even with the wide range of potential outcomes in the 2024 NBA Draft, Salaun’s range might be bigger than anyone’s.
The 2024 NBA Draft is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. In a draft class with precious little certainty, opting for the mystery box of Tidjane Salaun might be the best choice that a team could make.
Zvonimir Ivisic
It has been quite a season for Zvonimir Ivisic. After a long saga of the NCAA refusing to provide a ruling on his eligibility, Ivisic was finally deemed to be eligible prior to Kentucky’s game against Georgia two weeks ago. He came roaring out of the gates in that one, stuffing the stat sheet with 13 points, five rebounds, two assists, two steals, and three blocks in just 16 minutes of playing time. The 7’2” big man also drilled 3-of-4 three-point attempts, showcasing the stretch factor to his game from minute one.
Just as when I wrote about Baba Miller for one of last year’s editions of Editor’s Notes, the simple truth is that we haven’t written much about Ivisic yet because there hasn’t been anything to evaluate other than the perpetual factor of NCAA intransigence. Even with Ivisic now being cleared to play, he still has to adjust to being airdropped into the middle of the college basketball season with limited practice time. That backdrop does make the Georgia game more impressive, but it also makes it easier to understand his minimal playing time since then; Ivisic played 19 minutes over the course of Kentucky’s next three games and put up four total shots across those contests, and he also didn’t play for the Wildcats on February 3rd against Tennessee.
Ivisic certainly still has the potential to be a top-tier player from this draft class. That doesn’t make it any easier to project his NBA future on the basis of 35 minutes of playing time thus far. It will be very interesting to see if he gets more minutes down the stretch; however, his biggest game so far in terms of both minutes and production was in his first game, which isn’t exactly the best sign on that front.
In a draft class full of question marks, Ivisic might be the most confounding. It’s hard to take much of anything away from his Kentucky tape, especially given the circumstances surrounding him getting onto the court at all. I don’t imagine him declaring for the draft after this lost season, but I also wouldn’t blame him at all for declaring for the draft and taking his chances at the pro level instead of running it back at Kentucky.
If a team offers him a first round promise based on his past tape and his play in workouts, it might be best for Zvonimir Ivisic to make the leap now and not have to worry about college basketball again. Barring that, though, I would expect him to return to Kentucky for another year—either way, next season should be smoother for Ivisic than this one was.
Tyrese Proctor
Tyrese Proctor was subject to quite a lot of preseason hype heading into last year’s draft cycle. His play for Duke over the first few months made it unlikely that he would be a one-and-done prospect, but he closed the season out with a very strong start to 2023. On the heels of his final few months of the season, Proctor once again shot up to the lottery range in the preseason hype meter.
However, Proctor has not put together a breakout season for Duke this year. On top of that, an ankle sprain kept him out for almost all of December. He came off the bench for his first four games after the injury, and while he had quite a solid January, the overall numbers look pretty similar on the surface—he’s averaging 10.7 points, 2.7 rebounds, and 3.8 assists in 28.9 minutes per game after averaging 9.4 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 3.3 assists in 29.4 minutes per game last season.
Look a bit under the hood, though, and there are plenty of reasons to be encouraged by his play this year. For starters, his 45/39/75 shooting splits are much more appealing than his 38/32/87 splits last year. The three-point percentage jump on a virtually identical volume of attempts (4.1 3PA per game last year, 4.3 per game this year), combined with Proctor shooting 36.8% from deep last season after the calendar turned over to 2023, makes it seem to me as if his poor shooting from distance to start last season was the exception, rather than what’s happened since.
What stands out to me more, though, has been his turnaround with his scoring inside the arc. Proctor has knocked down 52.2% of his two-pointers this season—a far cry from his 43.9% mark last season. Interestingly, his numbers right at the rim are quite similar to last year. Instead of making hay around the basket, Proctor has been making it rain in the midrange game. He’s cut down significantly on his floater and instead has made more of a point of getting to his pull-up jumper, picking his spots that way in the in-between game:
With Proctor’s remarkable craft as a pick-and-roll ball-handler and solid positional size at 6’5”, his ability to make teams pay with his pull-up jumpers will be critical to his success going forward. His lack of elite athleticism makes it difficult to blow by guys, so it’s even more important for Proctor to have a good midrange game than it is for guys who can get to the rim at will.
That being said, his efficiency in the midrange this season has been outstanding, and it seems to me as if his success there has flown a bit under the radar. The ship has probably sailed on the notion of him being a lottery pick. However, there are plenty of teams picking late in the first round who would love to have a dependable game-managing point guard with a good three-point shot and the ability to punish teams who leave him open in the midrange to try to shut down passing lanes.
Izan Almansa
The G League Ignite team as a whole has fallen well short of expectations this season, leading many to sour on the futures of some of the prospects on that squad. For the last edition of Editor’s Notes, I wrote about Tyler Smith, who has been the pleasant surprise among the top-tier prospects for the Ignite this season.
If one had to key in on the biggest-name prospects for the Ignite heading into the year, the obvious first two names would have been Ron Holland and Matas Buzelis. Holland has put points up on the board but has struggled massively with his efficiency and his overall game outside of his scoring, while Buzelis has had a much more positive season overall but has still struggled with his three-point shooting. If there were a third member of the top of the prospect class for the Ignite heading into the year, though, it would have been Izan Almansa.
Almansa has mostly been quietly plugging away on a struggling team, but there have been some great underlying signs. His offensive rebounding rate, in particular, is a huge plus in my mind; his activity on the boards and success at getting second chances inside as an 18-year-old (who won’t even turn 19 until a few weeks before the draft) playing against grown men is incredibly impressive.
Furthermore, it’s admittedly a small sample size Almansa has really stepped it up in his last three games and played arguably his best basketball of the season after being benched and playing just 13 minutes against the Oklahoma City Blue on January 29th. He put up 20 points on just 11 shots in the Ignite’s first win this season over the Iowa Wolves on January 31st, and he followed that up with 17 points on eight shots in his next game against the Memphis Hustle.
There are certainly still questions; Almansa has been absolutely brutal as a shooter. He ranks in the third percentile on all jump shots and (astonishingly) has gone just 2-for-22 on catch-and-shoot looks. His 52.9% mark from the free-throw line across 32 Showcase and regular season games doesn’t exactly do him any favors either in terms of projecting his shot. He’s been effective on the interior, but his complete lack of shooting gravity is a serious issue.
The shooting is a real problem, but it doesn’t negate the successes Izan Almansa has had this season. He might not be having the season that his biggest believers might have hoped for before the campaign kicked off, but he’s been solid for a team in need of that solidity. His NBA role is not as easy to project as Tyler Smith’s, but Almansa’s playmaking potential, touch around the rim (currently in the 89th percentile in at-rim scoring, per Synergy), and ferocity on the boards will play somewhere. It will be interesting to see just how much NBA teams believe in his upside; his decently solid floor probably ensures that he won’t fall that far, but it only takes one team betting on his potential to expand his game for Almansa to end up going much earlier in the draft than the consensus expectations.