Noah Clowney: 2023 NBA Draft Scouting Report
Freshmen big who can defend and shoot don't grow on trees. Will Clowney be a first round pick based on his tools and long-term upside?
After the conclusion of the first round of the NBA Playoffs, I sat down and penned a somewhat-rambling treatise on the value of rim-bound big men in today’s NBA. The link to that piece is below, and grapples with the challenges that come from playing a 5-man who cannot provide offensive impact for his team away from the basket.
The idea isn’t new, just getting played out in real-time during the NBA Playoffs. Versatility is a buzz word, and many of these screen-and-roll big men don’t provide any versatility on the offensive end.
When determining value, the matrix I tend to rely on discusses the intersection of versatility and impact. The most impactful big men end up in the top right quadrant, where they’re both versatile and impactful. That versatility comes in their role on offense, where they play on the floor, and how many different schemes they can unlock on defense.
Those guys aren’t necessarily easy to spot — they’re really rare and often take time to develop at the next level. But they’re not very controversial in terms of roster construction. I’m thinking of guys like Anthony Davis and Pascal Siakam here, who can play either the 4 or the 5 at an All-Star level and fit in different types of defensive schemes.
The real debate comes in on the top left or bottom right quadrants. What is better: a big man who can have a positive impact in one specific way, or a versatile piece who really blends in and isn’t incredibly good at one thing?
While I’ve spent most of the week breaking down more position-locked bigs like Dereck Lively, Adem Bona and James Nnaji, we finish big man week with a dive into a versatile post player. Noah Clowney, freshman from Alabama, is a bit of the ying to the yang of some of these players we’ve looked at before.
I think of Clowney more as a forward because I see his best NBA position being primarily playing as a 4. For anyone who watched the Sacramento Kings and Golden State Warriors first-round series this Spring, you may have noticed that Trey Lyles spent a lot of time playing the 5 to counter some smaller rotations the Warriors played or to lean fully into the offensive end of the floor.
To me, that’s where Clowney’s time at the 5 is spent: a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ option whose size is what makes him able to play there. For those reasons, he’s so different from a Nnaji, Bona, or a Lively. But he matters in this conversation, particularly since I so strongly advocate for drafting based on what can win games in the playoffs.
The idea of Clowney is pretty clear. Few 6’10” guys have as smooth-looking of a shot and the defensive length to challenge on the interior as he does. There are natural movement patterns that have many buying into him as a switchable defender who can really survive on the perimeter long-term.
But the idea of Clowney is different than the actualization of him. Prospect analysis is difficult in striking the balance between these terms, especially with an 18-year-old who is still so early in his basketball journey. Really what it comes down to is whether an individual scout believes that Clowney will keep developing and become the realized player of many in the areas he shows potential.
The scouting video I did on YouTube was carefully crafted to show that balance. For each section of his strengths, there is a corresponding section with his improvement areas. The potential he shows in several key areas is met with a lack of refinement and some flags that provide doubt in my mind that he’ll evolve into the idealized forward his archetype points to.