The Complex Simplicity of Koby Brea | The Prospect Overview
Kentucky wing Koby Brea is a uniquely special shooter, but questions remain about the rest of his game. Maxwell dives into what that means for his NBA chances. PLUS: Quick Hits across the draft world!
“If you can’t tell me why someone is an NBA player in one sentence, they’re probably not an NBA player.”
Different versions of this adage have floated around in scouting circles for a long time, and it’s one I hold near and dear. The pitch doesn’t necessarily always equate to success. For example, “Lengthy defensive wing with offensive feel and solid three-point volume/efficiency” sounds great, but Jarrett Culver didn’t pan out. Still, the importance of the pitch matters. If you can’t come close to convincing yourself that a player can get there in one sentence, how realistic of a chance does said prospect realistically have at a meaningful NBA future? Now, tell me how this pitch sounds:
“He’s one of the greatest shooters in the world, he’s 6’6”, and he’s a smart connective passer.”
That sounds incredible, right? Well, that’s Koby Brea, a Kentucky super senior who spent the past four seasons setting the nets on fire at Dayton. When you put it that simply and concisely, it sounds like an NBA future for Brea should be an open-and-shut case, right? Well, I’m not so sure. It’s actually quite complex. Let’s get into it.
The Shooting is Special
I hate how loose we can get with certain words in the draft community, but it is what it is. It happens in every facet of life. Think about how often the word “literally” gets used incorrectly. That’s just how language evolves! We’re powerless against it. But I want you to understand this—when I say Koby Brea is a special shooter, I genuinely mean that he is a special shooter. His combination of efficiency, volume, and physical size isn’t something we come across too often. Last year, Brea launched 12.9 threes per 100 possessions and drained 49.8% of them. Obviously, that percentage is an elite mark, but so is the volume. He took more threes on a per possession basis than snipers like Sam Hauser, Corey Kispert, and Cam Johnson during their pre-draft seasons. Dive into the film, and it only gets better.
The functionality of Brea’s three is what stands out the most. For starters, he has clean, repeatable mechanics and gets his shot off in a hurry. That consistency bears itself out statistically, too. Brea didn’t just have one outlier hot year as a shooter. While he’s had his ups and downs, he’s never shot lower than 35.5% from deep, which came during his freshman year. In the three years and change since, he’s at 44.9%. Additionally, Brea is a dynamic shooter. He can run off screens or handoffs, quickly set his feet, and then fire. He’s also comfortable pulling up out of ball screens, going 20-for-40 on pick-and-roll threes last season, per Synergy. If he gets an inch of space, he’s going to shoot it. Because he’s been such a potent threat from deep, he’s also learned how to respond to hard closeouts. He has a lethal shot fake to beat fly-bys, and a bag of sidestep footwork to maintain the advantage he’s created. This helps him to generate clean looks from deep more consistently than one might expect. Even still, his height, release point, and quick shooting motion helped him to convert 48.7% of his guarded catch-and-shoot triples last year. No matter how you want to slice it, Koby Brea is truly special from three-point range.
You Can Trust Him
Brea’s next best skill is moving the ball. He’s not bursty, twitchy, or slithery creating offense, but he has a rock-solid baseline of ball skills. Brea is comfortable putting the ball on the deck. He’ll play ball screens in a variety of ways to keep defenders on their toes, and he has an excellent understanding of his own gravity. He can quickly react to help when he goes downhill and reward open teammates while on the move. On the perimeter, he’s able to keep the ball moving. Rarely will Brea fruitlessly bring the offense to a screeching halt. He’s a low-mistake, low-maintenance player who knows how to maximize his talents while operating within the flow of the offense. As a result, he averaged 1.4 APG to only 0.8 TOV over the past three seasons.
What About the Other Stuff?
Here, my friends, is where the complexity begins.
There are worse skills a player could have than elite shooting and intelligent ball movement. It’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture. Most sixth-through-eighth men are asked to hit shots, move the ball, and not screw up. Brea does that stuff. However, he does worryingly little else. He’s never had a usage rate above 20, which we’ll talk more about later. And while his value is undeniably high behind the three-point line, he rarely goes inside the arc. Per Synergy, Brea only took 30 total halfcourt shots at the rim last season. For context, that’s 1/3rd of Baylor Scheierman’s 91 from last season. It’s a weirdly low number, even for a marksman. The big picture stuff might be good, but Brea has yet to prove he can take on more than that, which is concerning given the level of competition he’s faced for most of his college career.
Defensively, Brea is nothing to write home about. He’s going to be behind the athletic curve at the NBA level. He’s not bouncy, nor does he have a quick lateral first step. He often cedes a lot of space to his opponent while guarding at the point of attack. His subpar footspeed will make guards a tough cover, and I’m not sure he has the physical strength to contain NBA forwards. Off-ball, he’s limited as a playmaker. He’s not going to fly over from the weak side to reject someone at the rim, nor does he have the speed to dart into passing lanes on a consistent basis. His ground coverage can leave a lot to be desired. His career 1.0 STL% and 1.0 BLK% are both very poor by NBA prospect standards.
What Does It All Mean?
I think it’s important to look at Brea’s red and green flags and see how they weigh each other out.
Let’s start by circling back to Brea’s low usage rate. Boris Beric wrote a tremendous article over the summer researching players who’ve managed to stick in the NBA after entering the league on a two-way contract. In that column, the successful group of non-point guards had a usage rate over 23 during their final college season a hefty majority of the time. Brea’s usage rate peaked at 19.8 during his sophomore season at Dayton. Given the spread-the-wealth nature of Kentucky’s offense, it’s difficult for me to imagine him getting over that hump this year. This doesn’t bode particularly well for him.
It doesn’t end there, though. The other offensive red flag here is Brea’s poor finishing. I mentioned earlier how rarely he got the rim, but the other issue is that Brea’s poor athleticism limits his results when he gets there, too. Last season, he converted only 43.3% of his shots at the basket in the halfcourt, per Synergy. His 50% the season before that is still poor by the standards of an NBA prospect. Additionally, he registered only one dunk last season, which is exceedingly uncommon for non-point guards who stick around the NBA. The defensive stuff is pretty scary, too. His 1.1 STL%, 1.2 BLK%, and 1.5 DBPM between last year and this season are all far from ideal.
But here’s the thing—guys have made it work with these flaws in the past. Below, you’ll find groups of wing players who stuck in the NBA to various degrees despite having similar red flags. This isn’t a complete list, but it’s about as complete of one as I’ve been able to compile in my spare time based on data based on the pre-draft data of college players from the past eight years or so. For a more direct comparison, I limited the definition of “wings” to guys who primarily play the two and three, as that is where Brea would most likely play in the NBA.
Longterm NBA wings with a usage rate below 20% in their pre-draft season:
Gary Trent Jr.
Terance Mann
Cody Martin
Matisse Thybulle
Keon Ellis
Duncan Robinson
Longterm NBA wings who shot below 50% at the rim in the halfcourt in their pre-draft season:
Luke Kennard
Cam Thomas
Cam Reddish
Gary Trent Jr.
Lu Dort
Moses Moody
Josh Green
Josh Okogie
Longterm NBA pros who registered five dunks or less in their pre-draft season:
Denzel Valentine
Duncan Robinson
Isaiah Joe
Austin Reaves
Luke Kennard
Cam Thomas
Desmond Bane
Sam Merrill
Gary Trent Jr.
Longterm NBA pros with a STL% + BLK% below 2.5 during their pre-draft season:
Terance Mann
Cam Thomas
Luke Kennard
Sam Merrill
Amir Coffey
Bennedict Mathurin
Malik Beasley
Gary Trent Jr.
Longterm NBA pros with a DBPM below 1.5 during their pre-draft season:
John Konchar
Austin Reaves
Isaiah Joe
Jalen Williams
Malik Beasley
Anthony Edwards
Max Strus
Cam Thomas
Evaluating prospects would be a whole lot easier if players had red or green flags across the board. But statistically, if you dig deep enough, you can usually find something wrong with everybody. I’m not going to say that Koby Brea has the greatest, cleanest statistical claim to an NBA future. Stacking all of these issues on top of one another certainly isn’t a good thing. But with that being said, I found encouragement among the player types who struggled in similar areas. This query resulted in a lot of Gary Trent Jr., Luke Kennard, and Sam Merrill. Those three may not be the greatest athletes, but they can all reliably space the floor and make good enough decisions to hang on an NBA floor. That’s what Koby Brea is going to try to be. Even if you want to hold Brea’s age against him (he’ll turn 23 early in his rookie year), Merrill came into the league even older than him. I believe this indicates that even in the case of his flaws, Brea does indeed have a fighting chance.
The reason he has that chance, again, is because Brea is a special shooter. I went to the BartTorvik database to see if anyone else over 6’5” had ever made as many threes as Brea on such high accuracy over the course of their college career. Only one other player joined him—Doug McDermott.
Obviously, there are differences between the two. McDermott was a far more prolific scorer inside the arc. He was also bigger, stronger, a better rebounder, and carried a larger creation burden. But the bottom line is that shooters like this don’t come around very often.
In general, I’ve shifted my draft philosophy a bit in recent years. Watching the NBA playoffs year after year has caused me to move on from standstill shooters who lack dynamism in the rest of their game. They tend to get chased off the line and see their value plummet when opponents are able to lock in and scheme against them on a consistent basis. For that reason, I’m more drawn to a Nique Clifford type than a Koby Brea. But so far this regular season, teams have continued to lean into the approach of launching more and more threes. The median three-point attempt rate for NBA teams is up from 39.0% to 42.25%. In my article about subpar shooters, I discussed how few role players exist who are sub-6’8” and attempt threes at a rate below the league average. Generally speaking, twos are for stars and bigs. If you’re a non-big role player, a lot of your offensive value is going to stem from how well you shoot threes. I’m not suddenly going to rocket “pure shooters” up my draft board as a result of this. But part of me wonders if we might be undervaluing players who can really, really shoot it, even if they’re not the most well-rounded producers otherwise. Maybe it’s just Jaylen Wells living rent-free in my head. But if we know that role players, at least during the regular season, are predominantly asked to shoot and move the ball, I can’t help but think I may have undervalued Brea coming into the season. As simple as his game is, his singular greatness in one specific area makes his evaluation quite complex.
Conclusion
Look, I know this site is called No Ceilings. But Koby Brea’s pro career does likely have a pretty firm ceiling on it. He’s only started 18% of his career college games, and he’s never posted a usage rate over 20%. He’s not fast, he can’t jump out of the gym, and he’s unlikely to stuff the stat sheet. There are a bunch of different statistical red flags you can point to here. For those reasons, Brea is unlikely to ever be a superstar. The question here is, “Is he worthy of draftable consideration, and is there a path to him sticking in the NBA?”
I think he is worthy of draftable consideration, and I think he does have a chance to make it work in the NBA. I’ll be the first to tell you that his data case is far from perfect. He doesn’t have a bag that puts the eye test over the top, either. But here’s the thing—if everyone had a perfect data case, and everyone popped on film, the draft would be one hell of a lot easier. At a certain point, if you’re on the clock, you’re swinging at an unlikely outcome. I’m open to a myriad of philosophies depending on team context at that point. If a team leans toward a more well-rounded producer who needs to work on his jump shot, I get it. If they want to swing on refining a toolsy project, I get it. But if a team looks at Koby Brea and thinks, “this is a cost-effective way to add a guy to our bench who can help us offensively, and we’re just going to have to pray he survives on defense,” I can rock with that, too.
With more and more teams launching more and more threes, there’s a world in which Brea sticks around for years to come. The “pure shooter” archetype isn’t particularly valuable. There’s a reason that guys like Gary Trent Jr. were available on a minimum this past off-season. Still, though, there’s a reason Gary Trent Jr. has a job, and it’s because “low maintenance guy who shoots” is a plug-and-play as it gets when rounding out a roster. Undoubtedly, many teams will want to aim higher than that on draft night, and I think in many cases, they will be right to do so. But for the right team, he could make sense. At worst, Brea should be in line for a two-way come July, an outcome that sharpshooters Blake Hinson and Alex Ducas achieved this past summer. Koby Brea isn’t perfect, but he is an outlier. And that makes him one of the most interesting bets a front office could take in the NBA’s 2025 draft class.
Quick Hits
-We’re going to open up Quick Hits with a tip of the hat to Money Williams. The 6’4” Montana guard had a big outing against Tennessee, registering an efficient 30 points on 15 shots. He has a strong frame and knows how to manipulate a defense with his handle. Williams has an active counter game, utilizing speed changes and pivots to get defenders off balance. The lefty has a smooth stroke from deep. His strength and awareness go a long way defensively, as he’s not a mismatch target, and he knows where to be off the ball. He’s also rebounded at a high clip as a freshman, which I always like from a guard. After posting strong all-in-one metrics as a freshman and having this type of game against a high-major opponent, Williams has put himself on the radar as a long-term prospect. Perhaps most impressively, Money is accomplishing all of this in the face of tremendous adversity. He lost both of his parents in the last year. Currently, he and his sister are responsible for their three younger siblings. The family has a GoFundMe page, and we here at No Ceilings would like to encourage you to donate if possible.
-It might finally all be clicking for Adou Thiero. The 6’6” Arkansas junior has long been on radars due to his athleticism and high-flying playstyle. Now, his game seems more cohesive. He’s been shooting the ball more often, displaying greater confidence and consistent mechanics. Through three games, his volume is up to 6.6 attempts per 100 possessions, which more than doubles his mark from a year ago. That’s long been his swing skill. He’s a disruptive defender who can jump passing lanes and reject opponents at the rim. He has excellent downhill burst and has shown some savvy as a downhill passer. And lastly, he’s one of the most explosive dunkers you can find. Thiero has always been up to the task physically, and now his skill level is starting to match.
-No Stone Unturned prospect Yaxel Lendeborg is COOKING. The 6’9” UAB grad is stuffing the stat sheet to a comical degree. Through three games, he’s averaging 20.5 PPG, 10.8 RPG, 3.0 APG, 2.3 SPG, and 2.3 BPG. Even better, he’s been letting it fly from three. Last season, he shot 80% at the charity stripe, but was gunshy from beyond the arc. While his 33.3% from deep is the same mark he ended with last year, he’s tripled his attempts per game. It’s early, but his smooth mechanics and willingness to launch are exceptionally encouraging. I don’t see any reason why he should be outside of the Top 60 at this point. He’s the quintessential modern four with excellent positional size.
-Another No Stone name who has been making waves is Rasheer Fleming. The 6’9” junior big man out of Saint Joseph’s posted 19 points and 16 rebounds against Central Connecticut, then followed that up with another 19-point outing in a win over Villanova. His 7’3”+ wingspan allows him to make plays in a variety of ways on defense. He can pick off passes and swat shots around the basket. His ground coverage and balance are impressive for someone his size, and he always gives a second effort even if he can’t contain the ball against a quicker opponent. He also seems to have gotten a bit sharper with regard to his off-ball positioning and help instincts. He’s been plagued by foul trouble throughout the year, and I’m still curious as to how much offensive playmaking he has at his disposal. But even on a team where he’s surrounded with high-end talent, Fleming has made himself stand out.
-Add Jacob Cofie to the list of potential surprise one-and-done candidates. Virginia’s 6’10” freshman checks a lot of boxes. He’s a confident shooter who can hit threes from comfortably behind the college line. He knows how to keep the ball moving and rarely halts the flow of the offense. Cofie also times his cuts well, and his shooting gravity makes that skill all the more valuable. His timing and length have allowed him to rack up stocks at a high clip (six steals and five blocks through three games). He covers ground well and can pester opponents at the point of attack. I’m curious to see how much of a usage burden he can take on, and how much he’ll be able to create as the year progresses.
-I’ve really enjoyed getting to watch Brandon Garrison in a new role at Kentucky. I’d enjoyed Garrison’s prep tape, and I also highlighted his play in a Spreadsheet Sleepers column last season. The 6’11” sophomore is an outstanding passer, and he always has been. His game is perfectly tailored to this era of basketball, where he can use his ball skills to orchestrate offense from the top of the key. He’s a quick thinker who can execute creative deliveries. Additionally, Garrison is a versatile defender who is comfortable guarding on the perimeter. His motor runs hot, and he’s always reliable for a good hustle play. His physical strength and rebounding need to come along, but I’m bullish on an eventual NBA future for him.
-Keep an eye out for Fresno State junior Amar Augillard, who I covered in my More Stones Unturned column. He’s already posted two 20-point scoring games, and he’s sitting at a 61.4 TS%. The 6’4” wing has a big, strong frame that enables him to finish through contact and get to the rim on a consistent basis. And while he may only be shooting 26.1% from three so far this year, he went 42.5% from deep on 7.8 threes per game at the JuCo level last year. He’s excellent off movement and gets his shot off in a hurry. So while he may cool down inside the arc, he’s bound to heat up outside of it. Defensively, he can be frustrating and inconsistent. Still, I’m hopeful, as he can showcase impressive power at the point of attack and cover ground well. I’m convinced he’ll enter the greater draft discussion by the time it’s all said and done.
-One last No Stone shoutout for Jacksen Moni. The 6’10” graduate played a crucial role in North Dakota State’s upset of Santa Clara, ending the game with 19 points and seven rebounds. He had a big block and connected with a dagger three in the closing minutes of overtime. Moni’s savvy and skill have scaled up wonderfully from the D-II level. He’s got some Dario Saric/Jaylin Williams to him. Moni is a stellar passer (3.7 APG to 1.3 TOV) who looks smooth putting it on the deck. His eyes are always up, and he’s ready to punish help at the drop of a hat. He’s also continuing to launch threes at a high clip. While I worried about his D-I translation athletically, I was encouraged by how his movement looked against a great mid-major team like the Broncos. He still needs to get stronger, and he can be a bit clunky laterally, but his length goes a long way defensively. Moni is definitely a name who should be in the Portsmouth/Summer League mix, and he has room to climb from there.
-Here’s a name to monitor—Yanic Konan Niederhauser. The 6’10” junior big man from Penn State previously played at Northern Illinois, where he posted gaudy block numbers but little else. So far with the Nittany Lions, he’s looked like a different dude. He’s scored more than ever (11.3 PPG), showcasing great hands and soft touch. He also looks much more composed with the ball, running some DHOs and putting the ball on the deck more often. He’s still slender, and more fluid than bouncy, so I’m not sold on him as a prospect at this stage. But if he continues to showcase ball skills, rim protection, and rebounding during Big Ten play, he could be a name to monitor for 2026.
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