With March officially here and conference tournaments starting up, the NBA playoff push beginning, and the NCAA Tournament right around the corner, things are starting to heat up on all fronts in the basketball world. This also means the NBA Draft is just a handful of months in the horizon, though you would not know it given the amount of teams that are looking to "tank" for players like Zion Williamson of Duke or Ja Morant of Murray State. But what about the others? What about some more unheralded first rounders, or even fringe picks to be drafted? That's where this prospect dive-in comes into play. Today, we're going to look at a pair of players who played on March 7th. I watched their entire game and evaluated with an eye towards the NBA game. Let's get started!
Chris Clemons: Campbell - Senior - 5'9": Big South Quarter-Finals vs. #8-seed Hampton
Senior Averages: 30.1 PPG (nation-leader), 5.1 rebounds, 37% 3P%, 87% FT%, 45.5% TFG%
Advanced Stats: 93.4% minutes played, 6.3 PORPAGATU!, 54.6% EFG%, 37.4 usage rating
Fun Fact: Also leads the nation in threes taken (330) for an average of 11.6 attempts per game.
The Background:
Thanks to a large part of his performances, Chris Clemons' Campbell Fighting Camels are the number one seed in the Big South Tournament. At 5'9", Clemons has faced the obvious height concerns that will plague any guard of his stature when it comes to looking at an NBA future. In spite of that, Clemons is going to end his collegiate career almost assuredly as a top-five scorer in NCAA history. With an unreal usage, it's the highest in the country, and a PORPAGATU! (that's points above a replacement player) that sits third, he is seemingly set to be an All-American at the collegiate level. His opposition for this game was the 15-15 Hampton Pirates, who sat just nine spots behind them in KenPom rankings (#189 to #180). Hampton's answer to Clemons is junior guard Jermaine Marrow, who is averaging 25.4 points per game -- fifth in the nation -- and 5.1 assists, far surpassing Clemons' assist numbers. Of the ten players who have seen significant minutes for the Pirates, nine of them are upperclassmen. This includes Kalin Fisher, a senior guard who received votes for Big South Defensive Player of the Year. Marrow and Fisher play 90.5% and 88.1% of their team's minutes, respectively. They've seen Clemons at his lowest (four-for-seventeen, fourteen points, in a Campbell loss at Hampton) but also at his peak (11-for-21, 48 points 22-for-24 from the free throw line, in a Campbell home victory).
The Game:
Clemons opened the game with a bang, hitting his first three shots, and doing so in impressive fashion. His first: a two in which he beat Fisher to the rim with a floater. The second: a three from the wing about three or four feet from behind the arc. The third: because Fisher gave him a brief moment of space and Clemons was able to quick-fire from long range. Defensively, Hampton threw multiple players at Clemons. The strategy seemed to be in transition to have whoever is closest to Clemons pick him up. In the half-court, though, it was Marrow or Fisher. They were assigned to face-guard Clemons and deny the ball at all times. Defensively for Clemons, Campbell gave Hampton a three-quarters court press before dropping into a 2-3 zone while occasionally show man-to-man. As a result, it was difficult to get a grasp on Clemons' defensive acumen as a whole. After ten quick points in the first 7:30, he was held scoreless till a flagrant foul late in the first half. It was a fourteen-point performance in the first half and still felt underwhelming, a testament to his scoring ability. Clemons, however, would start the second half cold, including a pair of point blank misses and a couple of threes that were not close to the mark. The 14:20 mark saw Campbell down six, but Clemons finished an and-one lay-up to get his scoring back started up. Campbell were eventually able to regain the lead, and they would not relinquish it after a Clemons two with 6:20 to play to make it 69-67. The final would be 86-77, but four free throws as a result of a pair of technical fouls on Hampton's end padded those stats. Clemons finished just three-for-thirteen from three, but ultimately scored 34 points on seventeen-for-nineteen shooting from the free throw line, and four-for-eight shooting from two.
The Evaluation:
At just 5'9", the questions around height will always linger. That, in itself, manifests in defensive worries. It takes special players on the defensive end if you are under six-feet tall to not be a minus on the defense end. If someone chooses to pick up Clemons, likely as a UDFA, they will be doing so because of his offensive potential. He has legitimate NBA range on his threes and gets to the rim well at the collegiate level. He is a bruising guard that is strong and well-built, allowing him to drive to the rim fearlessly on most occasions. Creating something out of nothing is a specialty and, as shown in this game against Hampton, his presence on the court simply can be too much for teams at times. Obviously he would not get face guarded in the NBA, but the range and tools he has are both pluses for him as a whole. His movement off the ball is strong as well, as it needs to be at this level when getting denied the ball on most occasions. He is good coming off screens and hand-offs when need be. That said, his passing numbers are not exactly what you would hope from a 5'9" guard. More of a scoring guard than a true point guard (which is also emphasized by his adequate handles -- nothing stellar) he is averaging just 2.9 assists this season, and just 2.6 assists compared to 2.5 turnovers per game for his entire career. Now, these stats are also misleading as, if you'll recall, he has the highest usage rate in the entire country. With a turnover percentage in his Division I games of just 10.8%, that is in the 5.3%-tile in the nation. His intangibles and things that are harder to teach, stuff like cutting down turnovers and extreme athleticism, are really out of this world. There is a reason he is the leading scorer in the NCAA, and it is due in large part to his range combined with a craftiness with the ball that cannot be accurately represented by someone of lesser athleticism.
KZ Okpala: Stanford - Sophomore - 6'9": Regular Season Finale vs. California
Sophomore Averages: 17.1 PPG, 5.7 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 38.3% 3P% (81 attempts), 67.5% FT%, 46.3% TFG%
Advanced Stats: 76.4% minutes player, 3.0 PORPAGATU!, 50.6% EFG%, 26.5% usage rating
Fun Fact: Possesses a wingspan of over seven-feet long (7'2").
The Background:
KZ Okpala is one of the more interesting player profiles for the 2019 NBA Draft. As a freshman, Okpala averaged over ten points per game, but shot 22.6% on barely over thirty threes for the entire season. All around, he shot under 40% from the field and only snagged 3.7 rebounds per game. As a sophomore, he has been much better as he has shown a willingness to shoot the three more and at a better rate, and take command as a leader and the best player on the court for Stanford. There are, however, concerns about a regression to the mean in terms of shooting. In the Pac-12, he is just 31.3% from deep with a 60.4% free throw percentage. His three-point stroke falls to just 21.9% when looking at his last eleven games, even when shooting roughly his seasonal average amount of three pointers per game. The first ten games of the season saw him shooting an even 50% from deep, so the thought process is that the stroke is there, but as I mentioned, there are the obvious concerns as well. A late game for the east coast, Okpala and Stanford took on their rivals Cal. 7-22 on the season, Cal had won two in a row, including a massive home upset over Washington, the top team in the conference, en route to a two-game win streak over the two Washington teams in the Pac-12 at home. Stanford played host to this bout, as in the previous game between these two teams Okpala played a full forty minutes and scored thirty points while shooting ten-for-seventeen from the field, but just zero-for-four from three, while also shooting ten-for-sixteen from the free throw line. His match-up to start this rivalry game was Matt Bradley. The 6'4" freshman plays 72.6% of the Golden Bears' minutes and tallies a PORPAGATU! of 2.2, second-best on the team behind another logical match-up for Okpala in Justice Sueing. Bradley is shooting 48.5% from three, best on the team, in 103 attempts while averaging 10.6 points, fourth-best on the team.
The Game:
Cal started the game on a 19-2 run. Through the first near-fourteen minutes of the game, Stanford had five field goals, all coming on strong finishes from the star sophomore. Cal showed a 2-3 zone defense that Stanford, without starting point guard Daejon Davis due to injury, could not seem to figure out. On the defensive end, Cal's big man Connor Vanover drilled four threes en route to sixteen points in his first ten minutes and eight minutes until his first miss. Okpala held Bradley early to nothing and dropped back to a wing position in a 2-3 zone when the Cardinal decided to try something different on defense themselves. Okpala had an athletic and-one lob finish where despite being hacked on the lob at the rim, he used his reach and had enough to finish through contact. Okpala had a tough moment where he barreled into a defender who drew a nice charge, but off a miss to close the half, Okpala went coast-to-coast with a massive dunk to cut the lead to ten with just seconds left. There was, however, time enough for Cal's Matt Bradley to bank home a three, his first points of the night, to beat the buzzer and deflate the crowd. Okpala went six-for-eight in the half from the field, both misses coming from three. The rest of his Cardinal went four-for-twenty and all Stanford players combined for a zero-for-twelve half from three. It was more of the same for Stanford to start the half. In the first 3:18 of the half, Stanford committed five turnovers and allowed a 10-0 Bears run to allow them to stretch the lead to 45-24. It took Okpala about eight minutes to find the bottom of the net for the first time in the second half, including after a false alarm bucket in which it was ruled out because a charging foul. Okpala sat a substantial amount of time, and Stanford's first three of the game with four minutes remaining cut the lead to single digits, but Bradley drove right at Okpala to push the lead back to eleven. With 3:10 left, though, it was Okpala's turn to finally hit a three. Stanford was even able to cut it to three thanks to a run of four straight made threes and a pair of clutch free throws from Okpala, but Vanover would haunt Stanford yet again with a three-point play. Despite the massive lead Cal jumped to, Stanford had chances to come back that ultimately went wasted. Okpana's final line was a 21 point night with nine-for-fourteen shooting to go with seven rebounds and a one-for-four performance from three.
The Evaluation:
In a brief sample size, this was a great opportunity to see the highs and lows of Okpala's game. For a long stretch in this game, Okpala was the lone source of anything positive on the offensive end for his side. His greatest strength is, without question, his elite ability to slash and drive to the rim and finish with floaters thanks to his unreal length. His ability to shoot forces teams to respect that and, as a result, he can then get by them and to the rim. Because of his size, very few guards have the size to check him, but few wings on the Pac-12 level can keep him in check as well with his solid speed and aggressiveness. He is a good defender as well on the wing and while he did get beat by Matt Bradley at a key moment late in the game, the things he can do off the ball as well as on it make up for the occasional burn. On the flip side, though, Okpala played nowhere near a perfect game. A key concern for those looking to draft him is that he can play out of control. Two charges were drawn against him and the wing committed six turnovers on the evening. He can occasionally put his head down and 'bull in a china shop' his way to the rim, and smarter defenders will get in front of him and draw the offensive foul. His handle is adequate enough for a wing, but it can get loose at times as well. The one-for-four night from three also only serves to highlight another concern, that the early season improvements were just apparitions of a greater improvement, which is highlighted by the about-60% mark from the free throw line. His shot mechanics may scare some people off, but the improvements he has made are evident and it looks good enough. Okpala, to me, projects as a sound three-and-D sort of player, almost like a more inconsistent Tayshaun Prince. He is a good athlete with sound technique on the defensive end, but he's going to need to be able to guard those smaller and quicker players while improving his three-point stroke if he is going to pan out to teams' projections of him in the league. Allowing 6'4", 220 pound Matt Bradley to blow by him on defense off the dribble is a concern, and it is not an isolated incident. He struggled with Luguentz Dort of Arizona State, who is similar to Bradley in build. In short and in summary, while the tools are all there and the potential has been shown, Okpala's next step is to make it all wrapped up into a consistent package.
Follow me on Twitter @RMAB_Ryan for plenty more basketball coverage, as well as AFC Ann Arbor and Liverpool FC coverage as well!
Chris Clemons: Campbell - Senior - 5'9": Big South Quarter-Finals vs. #8-seed Hampton
Senior Averages: 30.1 PPG (nation-leader), 5.1 rebounds, 37% 3P%, 87% FT%, 45.5% TFG%
Advanced Stats: 93.4% minutes played, 6.3 PORPAGATU!, 54.6% EFG%, 37.4 usage rating
Fun Fact: Also leads the nation in threes taken (330) for an average of 11.6 attempts per game.
The Background:
Thanks to a large part of his performances, Chris Clemons' Campbell Fighting Camels are the number one seed in the Big South Tournament. At 5'9", Clemons has faced the obvious height concerns that will plague any guard of his stature when it comes to looking at an NBA future. In spite of that, Clemons is going to end his collegiate career almost assuredly as a top-five scorer in NCAA history. With an unreal usage, it's the highest in the country, and a PORPAGATU! (that's points above a replacement player) that sits third, he is seemingly set to be an All-American at the collegiate level. His opposition for this game was the 15-15 Hampton Pirates, who sat just nine spots behind them in KenPom rankings (#189 to #180). Hampton's answer to Clemons is junior guard Jermaine Marrow, who is averaging 25.4 points per game -- fifth in the nation -- and 5.1 assists, far surpassing Clemons' assist numbers. Of the ten players who have seen significant minutes for the Pirates, nine of them are upperclassmen. This includes Kalin Fisher, a senior guard who received votes for Big South Defensive Player of the Year. Marrow and Fisher play 90.5% and 88.1% of their team's minutes, respectively. They've seen Clemons at his lowest (four-for-seventeen, fourteen points, in a Campbell loss at Hampton) but also at his peak (11-for-21, 48 points 22-for-24 from the free throw line, in a Campbell home victory).
The Game:
Clemons opened the game with a bang, hitting his first three shots, and doing so in impressive fashion. His first: a two in which he beat Fisher to the rim with a floater. The second: a three from the wing about three or four feet from behind the arc. The third: because Fisher gave him a brief moment of space and Clemons was able to quick-fire from long range. Defensively, Hampton threw multiple players at Clemons. The strategy seemed to be in transition to have whoever is closest to Clemons pick him up. In the half-court, though, it was Marrow or Fisher. They were assigned to face-guard Clemons and deny the ball at all times. Defensively for Clemons, Campbell gave Hampton a three-quarters court press before dropping into a 2-3 zone while occasionally show man-to-man. As a result, it was difficult to get a grasp on Clemons' defensive acumen as a whole. After ten quick points in the first 7:30, he was held scoreless till a flagrant foul late in the first half. It was a fourteen-point performance in the first half and still felt underwhelming, a testament to his scoring ability. Clemons, however, would start the second half cold, including a pair of point blank misses and a couple of threes that were not close to the mark. The 14:20 mark saw Campbell down six, but Clemons finished an and-one lay-up to get his scoring back started up. Campbell were eventually able to regain the lead, and they would not relinquish it after a Clemons two with 6:20 to play to make it 69-67. The final would be 86-77, but four free throws as a result of a pair of technical fouls on Hampton's end padded those stats. Clemons finished just three-for-thirteen from three, but ultimately scored 34 points on seventeen-for-nineteen shooting from the free throw line, and four-for-eight shooting from two.
The Evaluation:
At just 5'9", the questions around height will always linger. That, in itself, manifests in defensive worries. It takes special players on the defensive end if you are under six-feet tall to not be a minus on the defense end. If someone chooses to pick up Clemons, likely as a UDFA, they will be doing so because of his offensive potential. He has legitimate NBA range on his threes and gets to the rim well at the collegiate level. He is a bruising guard that is strong and well-built, allowing him to drive to the rim fearlessly on most occasions. Creating something out of nothing is a specialty and, as shown in this game against Hampton, his presence on the court simply can be too much for teams at times. Obviously he would not get face guarded in the NBA, but the range and tools he has are both pluses for him as a whole. His movement off the ball is strong as well, as it needs to be at this level when getting denied the ball on most occasions. He is good coming off screens and hand-offs when need be. That said, his passing numbers are not exactly what you would hope from a 5'9" guard. More of a scoring guard than a true point guard (which is also emphasized by his adequate handles -- nothing stellar) he is averaging just 2.9 assists this season, and just 2.6 assists compared to 2.5 turnovers per game for his entire career. Now, these stats are also misleading as, if you'll recall, he has the highest usage rate in the entire country. With a turnover percentage in his Division I games of just 10.8%, that is in the 5.3%-tile in the nation. His intangibles and things that are harder to teach, stuff like cutting down turnovers and extreme athleticism, are really out of this world. There is a reason he is the leading scorer in the NCAA, and it is due in large part to his range combined with a craftiness with the ball that cannot be accurately represented by someone of lesser athleticism.
KZ Okpala: Stanford - Sophomore - 6'9": Regular Season Finale vs. California
Sophomore Averages: 17.1 PPG, 5.7 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 38.3% 3P% (81 attempts), 67.5% FT%, 46.3% TFG%
Advanced Stats: 76.4% minutes player, 3.0 PORPAGATU!, 50.6% EFG%, 26.5% usage rating
Fun Fact: Possesses a wingspan of over seven-feet long (7'2").
The Background:
KZ Okpala is one of the more interesting player profiles for the 2019 NBA Draft. As a freshman, Okpala averaged over ten points per game, but shot 22.6% on barely over thirty threes for the entire season. All around, he shot under 40% from the field and only snagged 3.7 rebounds per game. As a sophomore, he has been much better as he has shown a willingness to shoot the three more and at a better rate, and take command as a leader and the best player on the court for Stanford. There are, however, concerns about a regression to the mean in terms of shooting. In the Pac-12, he is just 31.3% from deep with a 60.4% free throw percentage. His three-point stroke falls to just 21.9% when looking at his last eleven games, even when shooting roughly his seasonal average amount of three pointers per game. The first ten games of the season saw him shooting an even 50% from deep, so the thought process is that the stroke is there, but as I mentioned, there are the obvious concerns as well. A late game for the east coast, Okpala and Stanford took on their rivals Cal. 7-22 on the season, Cal had won two in a row, including a massive home upset over Washington, the top team in the conference, en route to a two-game win streak over the two Washington teams in the Pac-12 at home. Stanford played host to this bout, as in the previous game between these two teams Okpala played a full forty minutes and scored thirty points while shooting ten-for-seventeen from the field, but just zero-for-four from three, while also shooting ten-for-sixteen from the free throw line. His match-up to start this rivalry game was Matt Bradley. The 6'4" freshman plays 72.6% of the Golden Bears' minutes and tallies a PORPAGATU! of 2.2, second-best on the team behind another logical match-up for Okpala in Justice Sueing. Bradley is shooting 48.5% from three, best on the team, in 103 attempts while averaging 10.6 points, fourth-best on the team.
The Game:
Cal started the game on a 19-2 run. Through the first near-fourteen minutes of the game, Stanford had five field goals, all coming on strong finishes from the star sophomore. Cal showed a 2-3 zone defense that Stanford, without starting point guard Daejon Davis due to injury, could not seem to figure out. On the defensive end, Cal's big man Connor Vanover drilled four threes en route to sixteen points in his first ten minutes and eight minutes until his first miss. Okpala held Bradley early to nothing and dropped back to a wing position in a 2-3 zone when the Cardinal decided to try something different on defense themselves. Okpala had an athletic and-one lob finish where despite being hacked on the lob at the rim, he used his reach and had enough to finish through contact. Okpala had a tough moment where he barreled into a defender who drew a nice charge, but off a miss to close the half, Okpala went coast-to-coast with a massive dunk to cut the lead to ten with just seconds left. There was, however, time enough for Cal's Matt Bradley to bank home a three, his first points of the night, to beat the buzzer and deflate the crowd. Okpala went six-for-eight in the half from the field, both misses coming from three. The rest of his Cardinal went four-for-twenty and all Stanford players combined for a zero-for-twelve half from three. It was more of the same for Stanford to start the half. In the first 3:18 of the half, Stanford committed five turnovers and allowed a 10-0 Bears run to allow them to stretch the lead to 45-24. It took Okpala about eight minutes to find the bottom of the net for the first time in the second half, including after a false alarm bucket in which it was ruled out because a charging foul. Okpala sat a substantial amount of time, and Stanford's first three of the game with four minutes remaining cut the lead to single digits, but Bradley drove right at Okpala to push the lead back to eleven. With 3:10 left, though, it was Okpala's turn to finally hit a three. Stanford was even able to cut it to three thanks to a run of four straight made threes and a pair of clutch free throws from Okpala, but Vanover would haunt Stanford yet again with a three-point play. Despite the massive lead Cal jumped to, Stanford had chances to come back that ultimately went wasted. Okpana's final line was a 21 point night with nine-for-fourteen shooting to go with seven rebounds and a one-for-four performance from three.
The Evaluation:
In a brief sample size, this was a great opportunity to see the highs and lows of Okpala's game. For a long stretch in this game, Okpala was the lone source of anything positive on the offensive end for his side. His greatest strength is, without question, his elite ability to slash and drive to the rim and finish with floaters thanks to his unreal length. His ability to shoot forces teams to respect that and, as a result, he can then get by them and to the rim. Because of his size, very few guards have the size to check him, but few wings on the Pac-12 level can keep him in check as well with his solid speed and aggressiveness. He is a good defender as well on the wing and while he did get beat by Matt Bradley at a key moment late in the game, the things he can do off the ball as well as on it make up for the occasional burn. On the flip side, though, Okpala played nowhere near a perfect game. A key concern for those looking to draft him is that he can play out of control. Two charges were drawn against him and the wing committed six turnovers on the evening. He can occasionally put his head down and 'bull in a china shop' his way to the rim, and smarter defenders will get in front of him and draw the offensive foul. His handle is adequate enough for a wing, but it can get loose at times as well. The one-for-four night from three also only serves to highlight another concern, that the early season improvements were just apparitions of a greater improvement, which is highlighted by the about-60% mark from the free throw line. His shot mechanics may scare some people off, but the improvements he has made are evident and it looks good enough. Okpala, to me, projects as a sound three-and-D sort of player, almost like a more inconsistent Tayshaun Prince. He is a good athlete with sound technique on the defensive end, but he's going to need to be able to guard those smaller and quicker players while improving his three-point stroke if he is going to pan out to teams' projections of him in the league. Allowing 6'4", 220 pound Matt Bradley to blow by him on defense off the dribble is a concern, and it is not an isolated incident. He struggled with Luguentz Dort of Arizona State, who is similar to Bradley in build. In short and in summary, while the tools are all there and the potential has been shown, Okpala's next step is to make it all wrapped up into a consistent package.
Follow me on Twitter @RMAB_Ryan for plenty more basketball coverage, as well as AFC Ann Arbor and Liverpool FC coverage as well!
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