Magic 8 Ballers: A Flip of the Script
As a Duke Blue Devil, Kyle Filipowski has seemed to follow a dream college basketball script. What has he done as a sophomore to set himself up for his NBA dreams?
First impressions are critical for more reasons than I have characters to type out. Sure, this is a universal lesson that could’ve saved me from a few unfortunate job interviews, but it also applies a great deal to how scouting for the NBA draft works.
It’s much more memorable for a prospect to come storming out of the gates with a hot first few months than to play well or steadily peak later in the season. The bright flashes from the beginning of the year can overshadow the notable drops and dips in a player’s game later in the year, even if the issues are relevant and more telling of what they’ll be like at the next level.
For many players, the label they receive about their future roles and ceilings is hard to shake. If a player looks like he has untapped potential, it’s rare to see that title lost, even if they never scratch that surface. Similarly, if a player is thought of as having a lower ceiling, it’s just as hard to shake off the negative perceptions about what they can be with the proper development.
Thus, while he’s fallen out of style as a top-rated NBA big man prospect, it was long overdue to give the Magic 8 Ball a few shakes about Kyle Filipowski. As a Duke Blue Devil, Filipowski’s never really been out of the public consciousness; instead, by staying an extra year at Duke, Filipowski followed a familiar script and became a classic persona in the college basketball world: the Duke villain.
Filipowski embraced that role this year but did much more than that as a player. He meaningfully improved different areas on both sides of the ball, further sharpened strengths that made him a draft prospect last season, and ultimately put himself in a position to be one of the safest prospects in a tumultuous draft class. It’s high time to take a peak into the 8 Ball and see what Filipowski has done to flip the script on his NBA future.
Quick Shakes of the 8 Ball
It’s been a steady rise for Filipowski, who spent most of his youth balling in New England before taking his talents to Durham, North Carolina. By the time he was a fifth-year senior, Filipowski was a consensus five-star talent, had played at the national level in 3-on-3 basketball, and had won the Gatorade Basketball Player of the Year award for Massachusetts.
Filipowski came to Duke with a sterling pedigree surrounding his polished play. He had a reputation as an automatic interior scorer, a refined player out of the post, and a burgeoning outside game player. While it didn’t get him as many laurels, Filipowski was also solidly regarded on the defensive end, as a passer, and as a player with solid intangibles.
In his freshman season for Duke in 2022-2023, Filipowski took little time to establish himself as a top-tier college basketball player. He averaged 15.1 points and 8.9 rebounds, all while starting every game for the Blue Devils. Filipowski captured the Kyle Macy D-I Freshman of the Year award, was named to the All-ACC Second Team, and was the ACC Tournament MVP while leading Duke back to March Madness.
Despite his immaculate college debut, Filipowski chose to return to college. He had some palpable draft buzz, as he was ranked #35 on V.6 of the No Ceilings 2023 Big Board, but Filipowski chose to return to school to develop his game and to bask in the limelight of the Duke fandom. Although the team didn’t win the NCAA title this year, there’s a lot of evidence to show that Filipowski made the right decision to return to college.
While he didn’t make the quantum leap in his stats that some may have predicted with his preseason accolades, Filipowski improved in several key areas. He improved his scoring to 16.4 points per game, almost doubled his assists per game, more than doubled his blocks per game, and reduced his turnovers per game.
In many ways, it’s more impressive that Filipowski played virtually the same minutes and games and had nigh-equivalent shot attempts as his freshman year but saw his efficiency increase. He went from 50.5% from two-point range to 55.9%, taking 12 fewer threes than last year but canning them at an improved 34.8% clip.
Although he didn’t fulfill many preseason anointments and often played the heel on and off the court, Filipowski improved enough to warrant further draft looks. In a draft class full of uncertainty, all Filipowski’s done in his sophomore season has solidified what roles he can fill at the NBA level.
Occult Offense
If you’ve been led to believe that most of Kyle Filipowski’s draft appeal comes on the offensive end, you’ve been led in the right direction. While he isn’t a one-dimensional player by any means, Filipowski’s upside is why he’ll succeed in the NBA early in his career. It comes from how versatile he’s made himself as a prospect and what he can do with or without the ball in his hands.
Let’s start at where he’ll spend most of his early time in the league: setting screens. Per Synergy, Filipowski served as the roller in the pick-and-roll more than 20% of his possessions, second only to post-ups. As a screen setter, Filipowski strikes a serene balance between making contact to get the ball-handler open and leaving early to get to the rim. As the roller in this play, Filipowski shot 55.6% on his rolls to the rim, blending a handful of crafty finishes to score efficiently for Duke.
We’ll get the obvious out of the way: there’s little to no chance that Kyle Filipowski will have anywhere close to the 27.7% usage he had this year at Duke in the NBA. Instead, he’ll have to pare down his game and pick his spots to succeed. As a roller, it’s easy to envision a team slotting Filipowski into their offense and letting him manipulate the downstream defensive coverage without the ball in his hands.
Filipowski also makes the same crafty moves when screening or cutting off the ball. He moves like a much smaller and lighter player for a legitimate seven-footer. He can change directions quickly, has a great first step to burst into space, and has good body mechanics to get up and down the court.
He uses all those physical traits, combined with his solid size, to duck into and carve himself space underneath the rim. This comes from off-ball screens or delayed actions, which are still common at the NBA level, and reveal another way that Filipowski can get easy buckets. Even though he only had 51 logged “Cut” possessions on Synergy, Filipowski shot a blistering 80.6% on his cuts and duck-ins under the hoop.
While rolling and cutting are more evident NBA-ready skills for Filipowski, those two play types, added together, just eclipsed the top type of play run for him at Duke this year: post-ups. There’s no need to rehash the nostalgic nature of a post-up play, but good post players still get their share of touches in modern NBA offenses. Although he won’t be an offensive focal point, Filipowski’s shown enough to warrant a few post-ups a game.
Per Synergy, Filipowski earned a “Very Good” rating for his post-ups, shooting 51.9% on 104 attempts as a sophomore. This was a jump from his freshman year; he only shot 47.8% on lower volume. It’s nothing fancy when Filipowski sets up on either block; instead, he methodically goes to work with a hook, a drop-step, or a short, hesitating drive that gets him right to the rim.
Outside of his post-finishing, Filipowski has started showing echoes of his ability to drive the basketball. He needs to become a better ball-handler and start taking these opportunities more often, but there are some burgeoning hints that in the future, Filipowski could be counted on to attack a bent defense by putting the ball on the floor.
When you account for what Filipowski does around the basket, there’s much more good than bad. He shot 59.5% at the rim this year, a massive jump from 54.8% in his freshman year. That near 5% leap is crucial because it establishes Filipowski as someone that NBA teams can truly count on to finish at the rim under any circumstances.
Finishing, cutting, and setting screens are all important, but without shooting to complement them, Filipowski would be a lower-ceiling player. While I’m not ready to call him a bona fide shooting threat, there are encouraging signs in his development and necessary brakes to tap on the hype train around his ability to be a stretch big.
To illustrate the juxtaposition, let’s go back and forth between good and bad for Filipowski’s shooting. On the plus side, he improved his three-point percentage from 28.2% to 34.8%. The downside is that he shot twelve fewer threes this year and made four more than last, meaning with just a few more misses, Filipowski would’ve been the same minus shooter as before.
As a counter, per Synergy, Filipowski shot 36.4% on 99 spot-up three-pointers this season, with a good portion coming from pick-and-pop shots. Spot-ups and pick-and-pop threes are precisely the shots that Filipowski should be taking if he wants a more significant role on offense. On the flip side, Filipowski’s free-throw attempts were again nearly the same as last year, but his percentage dropped to a more startling 67.1%.
Instead of simply evaluating Filipowski as a shooter in his sophomore year, it’s worth considering both of his years at Duke to get a more accurate representation of what he can do from deep. Across 326 threes taken, Filipowski shot 31.4% from deep, while he shot 337 free throws, earning 4.7 a game and making 71.8% of those attempts.
All that is to say that despite the other improvements he’s made, I can’t call Filipowski a stretch big man yet. He has solid shooting form that doesn’t take him too long to load into, and he looks more confident getting into his shot, but the numbers don’t lie. Filipowski is at best a theoretically good shooter right now and is more likely an average sniper who can demand some defensive attention in college but will need to earn that reputation in the NBA.
If Filipowski can’t shoot, he’s pigeonholed as a bench big man. He’d be a good one at that, but there’s no beating around the bush: in today’s NBA, even the tallest titans need to stroke shots from deep to deserve an extended run. The only counter that Filipowski has comes from his improvement as a passer, which has gone from a weakness to a strength for him this year.
As a freshman, Filipowski had a 0.64 assist-to-turnover ratio, which was ghastly and represented his limited playmaking nature. As a sophomore, Filipowski had a 1.24 ratio and almost had 100 total assists on the year. The boost came from his heightened ability to find cutters while driving or screening, alongside more accurate flicks from post-ups to shooters like Jared McCain out on the wing.
Not being a black hole ball-stopper is a major development for Filipowski, as he can now reliably keep an NBA offense humming with more than just paint scoring. However, the crux of his value as an offensive player will all come down to whether the slight improvements he made to his jumper are real or not.
If they are, Filipowski has the complete game that could elicit starter minutes for an NBA team. Big men who can shoot, finish, and pass are hard to come by and often earn lucrative second contracts. If Filipowski can’t shoot from deep, he’ll still have a solid role in a team’s frontcourt due to his versatile finishing, screening, driving, and passing. It’s all a matter of one skill for Filipowski, which may seem anticlimactic, but his floor as an offensive player shouldn’t be looked at as anything other than worthy of some NBA minutes.
Inside Scoring Package: Yes Definitely
Outside Scoring Package: Reply Hazy, Try Again
Passing/Ball-Handling Package: Outlook Good
Defensive Divination
Allow me to once again ascend today’s soapbox about NBA draft scouting in general to preface Kyle Filipowski’s defense. In the world of scouting, and honestly outside of it, too, one’s general observations are often biased by first impressions. Whether good or bad, it’s hard to forget the first glimpse of a player’s skills or shortcomings, even if they improve on them.
As a freshman, whether ultimately founded or not, Filipowski developed a mediocre reputation as a defender. It was never dubbed outright bad, but the vibe around Filipowski’s defense was not positive. Sure, the draw was always his offense, but there was little in the consensus for him to hang his hat on that end.
I’ll admit that I came into this article with similar wonderings about Filipowski, only to leave pleasantly surprised. That’s not to say he’s become an anchor on defense in just a season. Instead, I’d argue that Filipowski’s defense is similar to his offense due to its versatility and translatability to the NBA.
Filipowski has had block and steal percentages above 2% each year, with his block percentage just about doubling to 5.3% as a sophomore this year. We’ll get to his shot-blocking in a moment, but it’s worth mentioning that Filipowski has started to improve his hands-on defense in a similar way to Nikola Jokic.
Jokic was once a poor defender and hardly forced turnovers, but he’s improved his hands in pick-and-roll coverages to jar balls free and break up passes. Filipowski does the same, even though he’s nowhere near a reliable turnover generator. It’s more of found money when Filipowski steals the ball, but if he follows a positive developmental trajectory, there’ll be more money where that came from.
More important than his stealing, however, is Filipowski’s shot-blocking. As a player who mostly played center for the Blue Devils, Filipowski was rarely asked to play as a true switch big. He played mostly drop coverage in Duke’s system; Filipowski would park himself in the paint to dissuade drives, and he wasn’t always tasked with guarding smaller players on the perimeter.
That slight role realignment helped Filipowski blossom into a good shot-blocker for Duke. He refined his verticality and hand usage, going straight up more often without getting as many fouls on contests. He also showed better recovery instincts, sliding over to swat some shots from players who’d quickly broken down the Duke defense.
I wouldn’t say Filipowski is a surefire-positive defender in the NBA, but his rim protection skills are better than last year's. That makes him at least an average defender at the cup, and one who could still see some room for improvement. It’s much easier for Filipowski to see a defined NBA future if he can be a two-way player than if he’s an offense-only asset for a team.
Even when he doesn’t get blocks, Filipowski showed more grit on the inside with tough rebounding and defense. Per Synergy, opponents only shot 42.9% on their rim attempts, where Filipowski was the primary defender. That’s a significant mark of a big man, which, combined with his over 20% defensive rebounding percentage each year, paints a more flattering picture of Filipowski as a defender.
The more promising side of Filipowski came from his perimeter defense, however. Again, I wouldn’t call him a switch big, as he doesn’t quite have the footspeed or length to swamp guards on the perimeter legitimately, but Filipowski has one thing going in his favor: his effort. He never quit on tough reps, rarely lazily reached against smaller players, and even had some solid reps that indicated he could do the same at the next level.
While I rarely focus on one specific play in my Magic 8 Ballers articles, one sequence in the March 9th clash between Duke and UNC caught my eye. It flashed all of what Filipowski could be as a defender at the next level, and the best part was that most of it came down to effort.
Across this play, Filipowski is active in a press, hedges to double a pick-and-roll, recovers to the nail to dissuade a drive, then reacts on a dime to rotate down to block Armando Bacot twice at the rim. If Filipowski routinely made these plays, we’d discuss him in a different draft tier. Still, his grit and determination to stay fundamentally sound to multiple defensive concepts and effectively shut down a possession on his own is a sequence worth remembering.
It would be a major boon to flip the script on what many think about Filipowski’s defense so that he can make more plays like this. Sure, the shot-blocking was impressive. Beyond that, though, he can play higher on the pick-and-roll and clog up spots on defense before a player attacks, which makes this so impressive. While he still has some ways to go as a defender and may never have the rare athletic profile to be a switchable big, there’s enough positivity surrounding Filipowski’s defense that I forsee him being a solid NBA defender within a few years.
Perimeter Defense: Ask Again Later
Interior Defense: Most Likely
Team Tasseography
Like most college players who return for a second season over the draft, a good portion of Kyle Filipowski’s motivation was to win a championship with Duke. While the team ultimately wasn’t able to get over the hump against their 2024 arch-nemesis in NC State, it was an overall fruitful year for Filipowski as he coexisted and thrived with the rest of the Blue Devil’s roster.
Filipowski played primarily in Duke’s center position next to Jared McCain, Jeremy Roach, Mark Mitchell, and Tyrese Proctor. All of them gelled well to create one of the better starting fives in college basketball. What made the team so good and fatally top-heavy was how harmoniously those five played.
This year’s Blue Devil team was borderline elite on both ends by most metrics. Per BartTorvik, Duke ranked ninth in adjusted offensive efficiency and 20th in adjusted defensive efficiency, placing them in contender territory. They were a disciplined defensive team, but the immaculate spacing and marksmanship of the offense truly made the Blue Devils a contender until their date with Wolfpack Destiny.
McCain, Roach, Proctor, and Caleb Foster, who all started at various moments while Proctor was injured, all shot over 35.2% from deep, which was a massive boon for Duke’s spacing. It didn’t hurt that Filipowski shot 34.8%, as the wide-open spacing helped both McCain and Filipowski improve their draft stocks and put each in a comfortable position heading into the 2024 draft.
Still, curiously, not all of Duke’s seemingly endless stream of draft prospects benefitted as much as Filipowski. Sure, Jeremy Roach made himself a potential late-round prospect, but Mark Mitchell and Tyrese Proctor underperformed relative to the season. Neither played poorly, per se, but both had some first round grades they didn’t live up to, especially in Proctor’s near-consensus case.
Similarly, the sterling starting five buried the veritable crop of Duke freshmen outside Jared McCain. Cale Foster only played significant minutes as a starter due to Proctor’s injury, while Sean Stewart and TJ Power both languished on the bench behind Filipowski and Ryan Young. There’ve already been some reverberations, mainly with Mitchell leaving, but that’s as much a product of his diminished role as it is seeing the writing on the wall with the next recruiting class.
Jon Scheyer has brought in either the best or second-best recruiting class in his three years at Duke, but through the lens of Filipowski and Mitchell, some cracks are starting to emerge. While Filipowski benefitted from the positional hole at center and improved his standing as a player, Mitchell suffered from the pecking order reshuffling behind a hot shooting freshman like McCain.
With Cooper Flagg, Khaman Maluach, Isaiah Evans, Kon Knueppel, Darren Harris, and Patrick Ngonba en route to Duke next year, there’s no time to waste. Scheyer’s roster model has been solidified: get in, get good, then get out because the next crop of star players is right behind you. For some, like Mitchell, their exit is to the transfer portal instead of the draft.
For someone like Filipowski, who enhanced a few critical areas of his game, the results speak for themselves. Based on the strength of his play and incremental improvements, there’s almost no question that Filipowski will be a first round choice. That came in an idealized environment to support his play at center. Still, the context was also analogous to the NBA, which doubly encourages Filipowski to play better with NBA spacing and look better at skills that will win him more NBA minutes than he’d have earned as a freshman.
The Final Shake
Despite masterfully playing his part in Duke’s script as a hated heel, Kyle Filipowski made multiple changes behind the scenes that made him a more complete NBA prospect. He cemented himself as a proficient interior finisher, showed meaningful improvement as a passer, and looked good enough on defense to defuse any lingering rumors of his shortcomings.
So where does that leave Filipowski in a wonky draft class like 2024? He currently ranks #14 on the latest No Ceilings Big Board. The only true big men ranked above him are Alex Sarr and Donovan Clingan, both of whom have some arguable star upside. Filipowski doesn’t quite have that, but as the third-ranked big in this class, he certainly has appeal at the next level.
With the measurements of a true center, it’s easy to imagine many teams drafting Filipowski to play a low-usage plug-and-play role at the five. He wouldn’t be tasked with doing much more than rebounding, finishing, and defending the rim, but he could be counted on to do all those with gusto.
The real upside in drafting Kyle Filipowski comes not from his floor but his ceiling. He already looks like a deserving NBA player, but what if he’s more than he is now? A Filipowski who reliably knocks down 34% of his threes is not just a starting big; he’s an impactful starter. A Filipowski who can make plays in the flow of an offense or guard the rim at a better-than-expected clip are both players who demand more minutes. If he’s all of these? No team wouldn’t want a guy like him in their building.
Just like with every player, it’s unlikely that Filipowski will reach his ultimate ceiling. However, with a few key areas to improve, the likelihood that he will get better in the NBA is higher than that of other, riskier prospects. That safe upside alone should warrant more widespread faith in Filipowski. Still, whether people notice the flipped script or not, Kyle Filipowski has done enough to comfortably stay in the draft and play a clear role at the next level, all with some added potential upside to boot.