Positional Previews: Top Preseason Prospects
A position-by-position preview of some 2023 NBA Draft frontrunners ahead of the college season
Lists and rankings are pretty arbitrary by nature. Yet they are more than just an expression of opinion or an attention-grabbing headline. Rankings are a helpful practice to sort through and compare talent across categories and in ways that aren’t always clearly comparable.
Before you get to the rankings stage, you have to nail the categories down and put them in some sort of order — or, at the very least, lay out your top options in each. This applies to the NBA draft, too: there’s no point in coming up with a big board or a numerical listing of rankings/ tiers until you know who the best players are at each position.
With that in mind, part of our preseason preview process leading into the height of draft season is to look at each position and outline some of our favorites to be included in the draft pool this coming June. So much can and will change between now and the early entrant deadline, and many of these prospects have a wide range of outcomes. Still, this exercise helps us frame the draft in terms of where there is positional strength and where there might be opportunities for guys not on these lists to sneak their way in and carve out a niche for themselves.
The way we think about positions is a little bit different than most. Gone are the days of traditional roles and assignments to players, where their role on the floor is often assigned based on their height. What we have now instead are skilled bigs, undersized forwards, and creative offensive coaches who understand how to use and leverage different types of skills.
As a result, we define positions based on the defensive end of the floor: which size or type of offensive skill set does a player most effectively guard? Sure, there are remnants of offensive impact that bleed into the positional assignment, but it’s by and large more about their size and athletic profiles on the defensive end. We were able to sort our prospects into six categories:
Point guards - those who exclusively defend at the point of attack/ smaller guys. Most will be PNR facilitators and/or guarded by opposing 1s.
Combo guards - those who can defend the 1 or the 2 and play on-ball or off-ball on offense. They are ideally guarded on the other end by mostly 1s or 2s.
Wings - those who guard the 3, while also being able to guard some 2s and some 4s depending on their body type. Some may defend 1 thru 4, but their main positions are closer to the 3. They’ll be guarded predominantly by those players as well.
Forwards - those who defend the 4 most often. Some will be able to play spot minutes at the 5, while others will be bigger versions of wings that might be able to survive against wings.
Posts - those who anchor a defense and defend predominantly the 5, or are going to be involved primarily in the screen-and-roll game as a screener on both ends. Likewise, they will be defended mostly by 5s.
Athletes - a positionless category to describe players who don’t neatly fit into any of the five aforementioned categories. Athletes don’t automatically need to have an elite amount of athleticism, just that their intersection of skill/ role and defensive body type don’t correlate with another possession.
So who are the top prospects we see at each position group ahead of the 2022-23 college basketball season? Let’s take a dive into the preseason favorites who have impressed us, either throughout last season as returning prospects or frontrunners to become one-and-dones in this class.
Point Guards
The position of the point guard is changing and evolving. The margin for error to be an undersized handler/ facilitator is razor thin, as there are a ton of them capable of playing in the league but not enough roster spots to go around.
Because of that, this is a positional group where depth isn’t really as important as others. There will be two types of players: those who are impactful enough and dynamic enough athletically to project as NBA contributors even at their size, and those who are much more questionable in that manner. The first group can find their way into the first round, if not higher. Teams are best served taking a flier on everyone else outside the top 40.
Coming into the season, three players stand out as point-of-attack threats to deserve that first-round consideration. A few others are really talented and impactful collegiate prospects but have to show a lot this year if they plan on going higher in the draft.
Scoot Henderson clearly stands head-and-shoulders above the rest in this group. The others with high upside potential (Terquavion Smith and Tyrese Proctor) are standouts in at least one key area. Smith is a jittery scorer with deep range and plus athleticism; he’s also got solid size at 6’3” and decent length. Proctor has size and tremendous basketball IQ in ball screens.
Whether both Smith and Proctor turn in first-round performances this upcoming season remains to be seen. There are others who could join them, or those who may prove they’re just damn good enough to deserve first-round consideration anyway. But when studying trends of this position and archetype over the last several years, we have a hard time betting on more than two or three of these guys amounting to much at the next level.
Combo Guards
In essence, two things separate a combo guard from a point guard: a little more size and the ability to play off-ball. If it can be argued that their best offensive role is going to be off-ball and not as a ball-dominant player, they’re likely to find themselves garnering the combo guard designation.
By its nature, the combo guard spot is typically thinner than some of the others. Many of the restrictions that we noted above for point guards (6’5” or smaller guys) apply here, making it more difficult for them to stick in the league. Guys who have that size and are off-ball offensive threats tend to be lumped into the wing category.
This year’s crop of combo guards has a few guys who are tremendous scorers: those who rise to the top of the combo guard rankings are, year after year, elite scoring threats. Over the last five years of using these parameters, these are the following combo guards to be taken in the top-half of the lottery:
Jalen Green
Anthony Edwards
Jarrett Culver
Luka Doncic
Save Culver and the disappointment he’s turned into, the guys who really make it at a high level are potential number-one options. There are a few of them (potentially) in this class, with Nick Smith and Keyonte George serving as high-caliber scoring threats.
The depth behind those top two have different niches and need to carve them out to prove they’re deserving of play at the next level. Some are simply bigger point guards, guys who play the same role on offense but defend up the lineup (see Jalen Hood-Schifino and Nolan Hickman). Others are defensive-minded athletes who are too small to be considered wings but purely complementary on the offensive end (Jordan Hawkins and Cason Wallace). Then there are the elite shooters who are too small to be considered wings but might be best-served playing off-ball (Caleb Love).
At the end of the day, this crop of combo guards is decent at the top and doesn’t have much less depth than in prior years. We believe that we’ll see an uptick in players being categorized as combo guards as opposed to point guards in the coming years, where the off-ball play becomes further emphasized at a young age to better blend into NBA styles.
Wings
I’ve never heard of a team having “too many wings”. Look at the roster constructions currently taking place in the NBA. The Toronto Raptors are building a team based on length. The Boston Celtics have a ton of guys who play different wing spots. The switchability and versatility of 2 thru 4 spots means several rosters are built with tons of guys who can all be interchangeable at those spots, most of whom are known as wings.
As a quick precursor to this section, be advised that there are many prospects who are listed as “athletes” due to the funky nature of their game. Most of the players in the athlete category (but not all) share some defensive similarities to the guys in the wings department: they mostly guard 2 thru 4 when they’re at their best.
When you combine those two categories, there’s a solid amount of talent in this draft class for those who primarily will defend on the wings. However, this video and breakdown of the wing category on our board don’t have as much depth as in years past.
Whitehead stands out as the top player at this position, a clear top-five talent in our eyes. Brandon Miller has top-ten upside, and Nikola Djurisic could go anywhere in the 12-30 range. Beyond them, we aren’t really confident that many of these guys will be on first-round radars by the end of the season. Almost everybody on the positional list (except for Matthew Cleveland) is a fantastic 3-point shooter, making them the typical wing who spaces the floor and has enough size to not be picked on defensively on the interior.
Forwards
We’re always fascinated by how to best define this position. The 4 is the one in the NBA that most clearly defines how your team is going to play stylistically. Have a bigger, stiffer 4 and you’re likely to have different defensive schemes (avoid switching 1 thru 4, for example) and might be more inclined to mismatch post on the offensive end. Play smaller with essentially a big wing at the 4 and you tend to be more space-and-pace, as well as funneling everything towards your 5-man at the rim defensively.
The forward category is filled with guys who show traits to be versatile to survive against either. Some may end up being good enough to play at either spot effectively, while others excel against one type of 4-man while being competent enough to survive against the other.
Most importantly, they don’t neatly fit into either the wing or post categories. Defensively, you don’t want these guys to be the 5-man that has everything funneled to them at the rim: it doesn’t match either their size or their skills. Perhaps they can play the 5 in a pinch, but it isn’t the ideal construction of a high-caliber defense to place them there consistently. The same goes with wing play: if you slot these guys as full-time 3s, you are likely giving something up that isn’t ideal for your team.
Another position group that is typically smaller in total numbers, there are a few lottery guys to track here. GG Jackson of South Carolina and Jarace Walker of Houston are those versatile pieces that seem to bring strengths to the table where they can thrive against bigger or smaller 4s. Others, like Arthur Kaluma or Kyle Filipowski, can be legitimate first-rounders based on their shooting ability while defending the position competently.
Unlike point guards, there is merit for swinging on some of these guys in the second round or trying to find ways to make them work. Bigger lineups are becoming all the rage in the NBA, so it would be the trendy thing to do to take a swing on a project at the forward spot.
Posts
Ahh yes, your traditional big men.
We call them ‘posts’ because they traditionally are the ones who guard opponents who are “post-bound”, meaning they would play primarily with their back to the basket. Those players are a dying breed in the NBA, though there are still some elite players (Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokic) who carry their teams through the position. If that’s going to be the case, each team needs a player who can (at least most effectively) put up a fight down there.
We highly associate posts as being the ones commonly involved in the screen-and-roll action. On offense, they’re mostly the screeners, diving to the rim or even popping into space. Their size and catch radius make them impactful in these areas. On defense, they’re likely to defend that same spot: the screener. By doing so, they become the focal point of their own team’s defensive coverage and structure.
It’s a very important position, and we’re even seeing a few teams try to play multiple posts at a time. The Cleveland Cavaliers start Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen, two guys we would label at their best as posts, because they are versatile enough defensively and Mobley has some offensive perimeter skill.
The posts in this class don’t stand out as being dominant guys coming into the season. Dereck Lively of Duke has the most in terms of physical tools and defensive impact. He can sneak into the top-half of the lottery if his offensive game proves versatile. Guys like Kel’El Ware have an amazingly high upside; he could easily be a lottery name.
There’s been a longstanding trend that posts either get drafted after their first draft-eligible season or drop to the second round when they do declare. That puts a lot of onus on guys like Adem Bona, Yohan Traore (who may well prove his playstyle is more aligned with being a forward), and Barcelona big man James Nnaji to have strong seasons this year to prove they can be first-round talents.
Athletes
The guys that defy conventional wisdom. You’ll see all the misfits in this category, making this less of a spot of commonality and more of a demonstration of basketball’s increasingly blurred lines between size and skill. Victor Wembanyama doesn’t have a position, for example, because he’s the most grotesquely talented 7’5” individual we’ve ever seen. There’s no right way to describe him, nor a category to try and jam him into. That’s what this designation of ‘athlete’ was designed for.
We also have those guys like the Thompson Twins, big 6’7” or 6’8” athletes who can play with the ball in their hands on offense and play like ball-dominant point guards but defend all the way up the lineup to the 4. There are those who don’t have a true position but are just freakishly athletic, making them impactful somewhere and in some way.
From a long-term standpoint, we’ve thought about adding multiple types of position groups in the past, expanding the groupings from 6 to about 12-14 so we can accurately describe all different types of guys who wind up in this ‘athletes’ page. At that point, it simply feels too watered-down and that amount of specificity leaves far too many players who fall into multiple categories. For now, we are sticking with this format.