Patrick Baldwin Jr, Peyton Watson & FIBA U-19 Track Records
A case study on prior USA Basketball team members reveals we should worry about their early-season struggles
To be recognized as the best in your age group, in anything you do, is a noteworthy achievement. The best basketball players in the world under the age of 19? Pretty damn impressive accolades to earn.
When the United States puts together their U-19 roster for the FIBA World Cup, they need collegiate or high school players to fill out their team. The selection of the players, the best in America at their craft and their positions, mirrors their talent at right around the age these guys are gearing up to join the NBA and professional ranks. One would expect, then, a strong correlation between guys who make the World Cup roster and being the best prospects in the world, thus getting selected early in the NBA Draft.
As the last few years of proof from the FIBA U-19 United States teams have shown us, that isn’t always the case. Whether due to failed production or the differences in styles of the international and NBA games, the track record of players to make the roster to all go on to achieve professional stardom is not great.
As the 2022 NBA Draft cycle nears, let’s look back at the last three iterations of the U-19 World Cup team, what lessons we can learn from them and try to apply them to the current prospects battling for draft position.
The Rearview Mirror
The 2021 USA Men’s U-19 team won gold in the FIBA World Cup for the third time in the last four cycles. The games have risen in prestige and opportunity, with more top prospects jumping at the opportunity to hop onto a team than before. The collection of talent in the United States is elite in comparison to other nations.
The 2019 team may have been the most dominant in terms of talent. Eight of the twelve players on the roster were lottery picks in the 2020 or 2021 NBA Drafts. Cade Cunningham, Jalen Green, Evan Mobley, Scottie Barnes and Jalen Suggs made up the first five picks in 2021 — a truly elite run for these players.
It’s still too early to definitively say how they, along with other lottery picks Ziaire Williams, Kira Lewis Jr. and Tyrese Haliburton have fared in the NBA. Haliburton, on an impressive string over his last twelve games (17.8 points, 9.5 assists) is the oldest of that lottery group.
Of the other four players, two are still in college: Trevion Williams (Purdue) and Isaac Likekele (Oklahoma State). Williams is getting buzz as a second-round prospect in the upcoming 2022 NBA Draft, by which time he’ll be 21 years old. Likekele, the 6’5” guard, is averaging a sturdy 7.5 points, 6.1 rebounds and 3.7 assists with the Cowboys in his fourth collegiate season. He doesn’t seem to be on many draft boards due to his lack of 3-point shooting (only 12.5% this year).
Here’s the catch. The other two players — Reggie Perry (drafted 57th in 2020) and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl (31st in 2021) — were the leading scorers on the U-19 team. In fact, Perry (13.1 points, 7.8 rebounds, 1.9 assists, 1.4 steals, 1.0 blocks) took home MVP honors. We used his performance, the modernity of his game and defensive acumen as a major part of our evaluation to give him a first-round grade in 2020:
Perry was the team’s most productive big man, playing 21 minutes a game while Trevion Williams (13.8 minutes) backed him up and Evan Mobley only played 7 minutes due to injury. It’s hard to evaluate Mobley in this context, though the fact Perry was slotted ahead of him on the depth chart from the beginning is revealing.
Robinson-Earl, another prospect receiving a first-round grade from us, is more of a role player in the NBA. Yet his offensive output (12.7 PPG) was greater in that tournament than franchise-carriers like Cade Cunningham (11.7), Jalen Green (10.1) or Scottie Barnes (9.7) — and was done in fewer minutes.
A natural hierarchy that 2019 head coach Jamie Dixon contstructed has somewhat held true. Other than with the bigs, those who received the most minutes have gotten earlier roles in the NBA. As we find out when we look at older versions of the U-19 team, that has not always been the case. It feels like this 2019 group was special.
As we look back at the 2017 roster, we have much more room to evaluate NBA ceilings. While there were eight lottery picks in 2019, the team two years earlier produced only three: Cam Reddish, Romeo Langford and PJ Washington. Neither have turned into franchise-carriers at the next level. Washington, the PPG leader on a balanced 2017 squad, has been the most productive of that group (12.3 points, 6 rebounds in his third NBA season).
Of the other nine, five are rotation players: Immanuel Quickley, Payton Pritchard, Hamidou Diallo, Josh Okogie and Kevin Huerter.
That leaves four others as guys who, less than five years after leading the United States to Gold as the best in their age group, that aren’t in the NBA. A third of the team has struggled to find their professional footing. Louis King has bounced between the NBA and G-League for the last three years; he’s played 21 pro games in two-plus years. Carsen Edwards, the former second-round pick, is back in the G-League after two rough seasons with the Boston Celtics.
The two big men have, once again, really struggled to find footing. Neither have played a game in the NBA. McCoy is playing in Europe for Oostende, one of the better clubs in the BNXT. He tried his hand in the G-League for two years but never got a grasp in the league. Wiley stayed at Auburn through the 2019-20 season. Injuries hampered his collegiate career but a solid defensive effort in his third season with the Tigers made him a fringe prospect once again. He is also playing overseas in the German Pro A League, averaging 17 points and 12.5 rebounds through his first five games of the year.
It’s not like the 2017 roster was absent of top talent coming out of high school. Reddish (2nd), Langford (5th), McCoy (11th), King (20th) and Quickley (23rd) were all highly regarded according to the RSCI. This team simply failed to produce many future NBA stars. Langford, a stud in high school scoring the ball, has failed to shoot it on an NBA level. Reddish has underwhelmed from a consistency standpoint, while King and McCoy aren’t on rosters.
We need to go back one more cycle to see if there’s a trend at play. The 2015 team, which won a Gold Medal, might be the strangest iteration we’ve seen.
Two players were lottery picks. That’s it, two. Jayson Tatum and Josh Jackson, taken back-to-back in the 2017 NBA Draft, are the only players to sustain their performance to the NBA. Harry Giles, derailed by injuries shortly after the Team USA run, is an aberration that likely needs to be removed from the conversation.
The nine players are a who’s who list of inconsistency. There’s Jalen Brunson, the only player other than Tatum still in an NBA rotation, who spent multiple years at Villanova before going pro.
The rest of the team: major disappointment after major disappointment. Once again, the bigs failed to live up to the hype. Caleb Swanigan, drafted 26th in 2017, played only 75 career games. 2nd round picks Chinanu Onuaku (6 games) and Thomas Welsh (11 games) have been out of the league for the last three years. With the exception of the injured Mobley in 2019, no Team USA big man has cracked a long-term NBA rotation.
Terrance Ferguson took the circuitous route of going to play in Australia instead of college. He’s started 124 games in his career and is still with the Philadelphia 76ers but is outside the rotation. Jawun Evans (56 games) and Allonzo Trier (88 games) both had cups of coffee in the NBA before heading overseas. LJ Peak, the shooter who went to Georgetown, and Justin Bibbs, the point guard from Virginia Tech, never made it to the league.
Once again, Jackson (1st), Giles (2nd), Tatum (3rd), Trier (12th), Ferguson (12th), Swanigan (16th) and Brunson (19th) were all highly-touted in their own classes. It’s not like the top talent hasn’t been playing with Team USA long in the past. The top talent simply hasn’t hit when they get to the NBA.
These few years beg one important question to be asked: why have so many of the top American prospects not lived up to their potential, both ahead of and following the NBA Draft?
Inside the Caravan: The 2021 Team
The 2021 Gold Medalists from the United States follow a pattern from the last decade of great high school recruits joining the fray. Chet Holmgren (1), Patrick Baldwin (5), Kennedy Chandler (6), Peyton Watson (8) and Harrison Ingram (16) were all atop the 2021 high school class. A few impact sophomores (Jaden Ivey from Purdue, Mike Miles from TCU, Adam Miller from LSU, Jonathan Davis from Wisconsin) made the roster as well, giving Team USA more guard depth to compensate for a high school class relatively devoid of it.
Within this draft cycle — the first that members of the 2021 U-19 World Cup roster are eligible for — we’ve already seen some wild swings from the roster. Watson has barely played for UCLA and hasn’t registered a field goal since before Christmas. Baldwin is having notable struggles at a mid-major in UW-Milwaukee, perhaps trying to do too much. Ivey and Davis have emerged as top-ten picks.
While Holmgren remains an elite prospect, he is closer to the Evan Mobley territory of “exception and not the rule” when it comes to big men. The others with size on this team are currently not on our draft radars: Kenneth Lofton (Louisiana Tech), Caleb Furst (Purdue) and Ryan Kalkbrenner (Creighton). Lofton, the most productive during the World Cup, is the only one we could envision declaring this year.
Currently, six players on the team have first-round grades on our board: Holmgren, Ivey, Davis, Baldwin, Chandler and Watson. Mike Miles from TCU is just shy of a first-round grade, as is Stanford’s Harrison Ingram. That would make two-thirds of the team draftable, and if the trends of the past tell us anything, not all of them will have a positive impact in the NBA.
We’re all about asking the right questions, and then trying to find trends that inform us to become better scouts. If the trends we’ve noticed from the last few World Cup teams, with the uber-talented 2019 group as the exception, hold up, many of the guys on this 2021 roster will fall in draft position and fail to produce in the NBA.
The question is: which ones will that be, and can those who are currently struggling turn around their trajectory?
The Road Ahead
Two players from last summer’s World Cup triumph have struggled mightily to start their college careers. Peyton Watson (UCLA) and Patrick Baldwin Jr. (UW-Milwaukee). Watson was similarly unproductive in the FIBA World Cup. He played in all seven games, tallying 4.0 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 1.1 blocks in 12.4 minutes. He was good in a lot of ways but great in none, imposing his will through sheer athleticism.
Seemingly everything was off dunks or in transition. His best outing — 15 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists — came against a South Korea team that is likely as talented as a low-level D2 team. He was 2-12 from 3-point range during the tournament, stuck on the outside of the depth chart looking in.
Such a trend has carried over to UCLA. He’s 1-11 from 3-point range with the Bruins. The lack of shooting touch limits how he’s able to play off-ball, and he’s frankly not as explosive in traffic as many thought he would be. Watson is one of the rare cases where the struggles in one level of competition mirror the other. The reinforcement of his shortcomings from the UCLA tenure lead us to believe he needs to be dropped down big boards and, at the very least, is one of those high-risk prospects who gets a giant red flag raised based on the failures of the past USA Basketball players who have endured similar hardships.
Patrick Baldwin Jr. is a little different. Playing a key role with the World Cup team, Baldwin was one of the leaned-upon shooters. Averaging 7.7 points, 5.0 rebounds and 1.9 assists, Baldwin performed pretty well last summer despite not shooting the ball as well as he’s capable. The trend of subpar shooting has continued into his time at Milwaukee. Combine the NCAA and FIBA 3-point shooting numbers, and PBJ is 24-75 (32%) from deep.
For a shooting specialist in the frontcourt, that’s hardly a comforting percentage. He wasn’t much better in one realm than another (32.1% in FIBA, 31.9% in NCAA), but his roles have been incredibly different.
With Team USA, Baldwin was much more of a movement threat off screens, spotting up on the perimeter and rarely dribbling. When surrounded by teammates who could collapse the defense, drive-and-kick to him and keep his role simple, he appeared much more comfortable and effective:
Choosing to go to UW-Milwaukee to play for his father, PBJ has been exposed in an alpha role. He isn’t as polished off the bounce, cannot separate from mid-major competition and isn’t a great creator for others. He’s tall and has a smooth stroke, so there is a modicum of mismatch post potential since he scores from the mid-post. That said, he should be viewed primarily as a catch-and-shoot specialist. It’s where he’s thrived with Team USA (evident from the highlights above) and had his best outing with the Panthers this year (against the zone of Robert Morris).
So what does this mean for Baldwin’s NBA draft stock? Increasingly over the last few seasons, we’ve seen shooting specialists get drafted in the lottery or its fringes. Cameron Johnson, Buddy Hield, Corey Kispert and Chris Duarte all come to mind. None were as tall as PBJ (a legitimate 6’9”) but all were multi-year college players who splashed in over 40% consistently from deep. The tradeoff with Baldwin’s lack of reliable sample size is the fact shooters his height don’t grow on trees.
The athletic concerns are legitimate, and it’s time to rid ourselves of the notion that he’ll be more than a shooting specialist. To us, there’s still a great deal of value in that role, especially up against a weaker draft class. We’d be willing to take a chance on Baldwin in the lottery and feel like the NBA game, when surrounded by NBA-caliber talent, will put him in positions to succeed more than his time at Milwaukee will.
These two, undergoing severe struggles in comparison to their expectations coming out of high school, aren’t the only ones with fluctuating draft stock. Kennedy Chandler has been on a major cold streak shooting the ball (25% from deep over his last 10), not ideal for an undersized point guard. Mike Miles Jr. from TCU shows some fantastic flashes but gets crushed as the lone scoring option on the Horned Frogs and is below 40% from the field on the season.
We don’t aim to punish one prospect for the sins of another. There’s a line to be walked between noticing trends and relying on them to make the eval for us. The way we feel like we’re on the right side of that line: seeing if the eye test from one level (FIBA) matches that of another (NCAA).
For a guy like Watson, the struggles are consistent and add up, giving us much more pause on drafting him. For Baldwin, we saw enough to like about how he fits in a positive role to be able to see the differences in usage with Team USA and Milwaukee. Neither are in the clear, but when sorting through whose struggles are able to be overcome, going back to the tape and data from USA Basketball performances really helps.