Trevor Keels: 2022 NBA Draft Scouting Report
Keels brings a lot of raw skills to the table. How he bundles them together in the NBA will determine his role at the next level
During the season, solid players who are not a top-three option on their college team can often fly under our radar. The nightly statistics aren’t there to dive into, so clips or single-game film don’t show the nature of their game fully. Upon a rewatch of Duke’s games this season and a deep dive into Trevor Keels, we came away more impressed than we were at first glance.
Keels was a young 6’4” combo guard with the Blue Devils who bounced around in different roles as they needed him. No player started the season hotter than he did, bursting out of the gates with a 25-point performance in Madison Square Garden against Kentucky, locking down Wildcats guard TyTy Washington and going 9-14 from two-point range. Keels immediately looked like a first-round one-and-done prospect, and the immediate reaction in draft spaces reflected that performance.
But Keels cooled off greatly and did so fairly quickly. He averaged 10 points on 34% shooting over his next nine games, disappearing for stretches. A mid-season injury hampered some comeback efforts, too. The up-and-down year ended on a poor note, as his five-game NCAA Tournament run was far less than ideal: 9.2 PPG in 23 minutes, shooting a dismal 23.5% from deep and an uncharacteristic 3 assists to 7 turnovers on the grand stage.
While the full-season watch revealed a lot of positive traits and intriguing characteristics we want to buy into, there’s a head-scratching lack of harmony between all the skills he shows and the consistency with which he shows them.
Keels gets lauded most for his defensive effort. As a strong, brawny 6’4”, he is very capable of out-muscling guys his age and showed some fantastic effort on that end. Non-elite athletes couldn’t get past him and his impact showed. Yet Keels struggled at the point of attack, getting blown past by faster handlers and showing some bad habits such as reaching from behind as soon as he got beat.
All this goes to try and figure out exactly what position or role Keels can fill on an NBA floor. If he’s best-served not defending at the point of attack, he’ll slide up the lineup into the 2/3 role, instead of a combo guard 1/2. Some of the comparative advantages he enjoys at the 1/2 (posting up smalls, perhaps more secondary PNR reps) may disappear. Furthermore, that leverages the swing skill for Keels being his 3-point shooting, a trait that many scouts swear by despite barely making more than 30% of them this season at Duke.
There are a ton of variables in Keels’ game, but beneath them all is a fairly high-IQ player who would provide first-round value if the right role is created for him at the next level and his shot falls the way many anticipate it will.
It’s important to understand who Keels was in high school — and how his role shifted when he got to Duke — to most safely project him to the NBA. At Paul VI in Virginia, Keels was an elite 3-point shooter. But he was also a fantastic playmaker, running with the ball in his hands a ton and averaging over 9 assists per game his senior season. The combination of playmaking (without turning it over), shooting and an outlier physical trait (strength) made him attractive to a high-major program like Duke.
Still, Keels was profiled as a bit of a tweener in college, and that projection came to fruition his first year, to the point where we weren’t sure if Keels would even declare.