This level of improvement is somewhat common for great players his age, but his base is so much higher that it's more shocking.

He did have one.but it was mistakenly called a foul.

You're not missing anything, people are just in love with the idea that Luka can destroy any big on the perimeter.

Yeah people quibble over their exact rankings within the 100 which are wrong a lot, but it does seem quite rare for a good NBA player not to have at least been ranked.

Beal shot 40% from three on 4.5 3PA/game his first two seasons. Obviously Shae's second season was cut short, but I feel like that's a pretty important difference.

Scouting is hard, especially when you're looking at younger prospects facing very inconsistent levels of competition.

There are a lot of other teams with good trios in small minutes, it's not even really cherrypicking because there are such an overwhelming number and you're not going to know what the pet trios for the team are without being a fan. Trying to just account for all the lineups somehow pretty much just leads you to RAPM.

33% from three for their opponents is driving a lot of that and is almost certainly unsustainable (frankly, 42% for their own threes might also be a SSS artifact considering Curry is the only one of those three who can shoot, though obviously lineups with him are always really high on 3P%).

In general, it's also possible to find trios on really bad teams that have weirdly high on/off like this in < 1000 minutes, for example Devin Vassell/Tre Jones/Victor Wembanyama were +10.37 in 806 minutes, Dunn/Quickley/Barnes were +9 in 309 minutes, and Markkanen/Dunn/Fontecchio were +7.6 in 361 minutes. You need to integrate information about other lineups, past history, box score stats, etc. in order to figure out who (if anyone!) is primarily responsible for these kinds of results.

There is no world where Devin can be the second best player on a championship team.

Dude is going to be 25 next season, he's not likely to have massive leaps at this point which is what would be required for him to be anywhere close to the top SG in the league conversation.

the 2025 draft is THE draft to tank

That was 2023 (though to be fair Ainge did actually attempt to tank that year).

You've clearly only watched highlights if you think he has a prayer of playing in the modern NBA lol. Dude can barely move, he's nearly blind, and he can't even lift his arms up above his head. He's a walking offensive foul (why do you think he got cut from the UK national team?) and you're literally playing 4 on 5 on defense. Not every insanely athletically tall guy is destined for the league.

Read up on Kawhi's childhood situation sometime... he wasn't even on an HS basketball team until his junior year for reasons that had nothing to do with talent. But yeah he was also way less raw than people remember him being.

Paolo is the best in his class

Chet is very, very clearly going to be much better than Paolo, considering how much better he already is in a low usage role.

Cade has a good chance to be the best in his class

Very unlikely at this point.

Yeah basically with guys you're expecting outlier development from you minimally have to answer the question "if they had the capability to be that good at basketball, why are they so far behind their peers?" If you can't really answer that (e.g. what exactly is the reason Salaün is still raw?), you should usually cut off that whole line of reasoning IMO. If you can answer that (like with Kawhi, Embiid, Giannis, or Edey a few years back), it still doesn't mean they'll have outlier development paths, but it's at least a possibility.

Seems fair to me as long as he's guaranteed to resign. I would probably try to keep one of those Hawks picks (preferably 2027), but Lauri is really good (better than Bridges IMO), there's a good chance none of those picks are high lottery, and I don't think the Jazz actually want to give him up in the first place. Ultimately you've gotta give up something of value if you want a player like that.

Being a good enough athlete that you can use it to casually dominate adults as an 18 year old is a pretty good sign. It would be one thing if he were athletic but inefficient, but he's not... he's converting it into winning basketball. I know skill vs. athleticism is an endless debate around here but IMO it doesn't matter how you create advantages as long as you can convert them.

I have absolutely no idea!

They see that Mike James is one of the all time great EuroLeague players and look up his NBA stats and just assume that the whole league is scrubs and that's kind of where their research ends, lol. Like yes it's nowhere near the NBA, but it's still closer than college. Reed Sheppard literally had the same BPM as prime Michael Jordan last year.

AD wasn't very efficient when actually going against Wemby, most of his points were with him off the court or when Wemby was already out of position. He wasn't just bullying him. Embiid was actively hunting him and Victor literally couldn't do anything about it, every time he tried to contest he ended up fouling.

People tried to gaslight us all season into thinking these passes were super difficult to execute and that's why the Spurs kept missing him... no dude you can literally just throw it up whenever, lol.

This game was about as close as we're going to get since it was the Turkish B team... though they're probably still a fair bit better than college kids from all but the best programs, they probably aren't better than like, UConn last year. But I think it's enough to get the gist, most college kids just literally wouldn't be able to score lol.

People don't understand that a 300 lb big 7' big wingspan elite free throw merchant with a deadly midrange game is pretty much built in a lab to give Wemby problems lol. Only guy I've ever seen truly bully him the way people acted like everyone would pre-draft.

As far as I can tell from Turkish Twitter, they're actually burning an effigy of their coach (for allowing this to happen) as well as whoever even scheduled this match in the first place.

Giddey was inefficient from all three levels and sucked at everything but passing. They're literally just both big white international guards. You might as well say Giddey = Luka, Luka shot under 31% from three his pre-draft year just like Topic (something everyone has memory holed).