Barnstorming: Could Buddy Hield be the next Stephen Curry?

Buddy Hield is a star.

This was supposed to be the year of Ben Simmons but Hield and his unflappable outside shooting have been the defining characters of this college basketball season. He has led his Oklahoma Sooners to the Final Four, averaging 29.2 points per game in the NCAA Tournament, shooting 56.7 percent from the field and 47.5 percent on three-pointers. Whatever happens this weekend, Hield is almost certainly headed for a career in the NBA by way of a lottery pick.

That NBA future has not always seemed so secure. Hield is a senior this season. Players with lottery talent rarely extend their collegiate careers that far and the four-year players who do find themselves at the top of the draft are usually there because of a slow burn of steady improvement. This has mostly been the case for Hield, although the past few months have offered a somewhat steeper trajectory.

On the Upside and Motor Big Boards, Hield has moved from No. 32 in mid-November, to No. 28 at the beginning of January, all the way up to No. 10 at the beginning of March. Draftexpress currently has him slotted No. 7 in their Mock Draft, after ranking him as the fourth-best prospect in the Big 12 at the beginning of the season. Move a little further down his Draftexpress profile and you’ll find an article from this past summer describing him as, “the consummate glue guy, constantly competing, talking and smiling in the heat of the battle – all important qualities for a player who (at best) projects as a rotation player,” and remarking that, “his current skill set, give him a great chance of at least making an NBA roster and sticking if he’s able to carve out a niche.”

Consider that niche carved.

What Hield has done at Oklahoma this season has, in dramatic fashion, reworked the expectations placed on his talent. His performance has been so striking this that it is difficult not to mentally entangle it with the NBA ascension of Stephen Curry.

The corollary between the two players is just too strong not to underline in red pen. Both confident shooters to the point of fearlessness, Hield and Curry have carried the volume scoring loads for their teams and they have done it primarily from behind the three-point line.

We’ve spent all season staring at the brilliance of Curry, slack-jawed and drooling. He is like nothing we’ve ever seen. Nothing we’ve ever really imagined, to be honest. Earlier in the year, at FiveThirtyEight, Benjamin Morris put together a comprehensive look at Curry’s unique shooting and the absurd levels of efficiency it generates. Morris showed that Curry was essentially immune to all the normal pressures that make a shot difficult — distance from the basket, distance from a defender, time remaining on the clock, whether the shot was off the dribble or caught and shot in rhythm.

Curry has transcended the expected models for efficiency and volume on long-range shooting.

Hield’s numbers look a lot like Curry’s. He made 46.5 percent of his three-percent this season. Only three players made a higher percentage than him this season but Hield had nearly 100 more attempts than any of them. He is the primary offensive weapon for his team with all the added defensive attention that entails. Hield is just as likely to be creating his own three-point looks off the dribble as getting them in the rhythm of the offense, and yet he is still one of the most efficient college shooters we’ve ever seen.

It seems certain that Hield’s shooting will make an impact in the NBA. Whether or not he is the next Stephen Curry is fundamentally unanswerable at this point. However, the rolling cycle of draft projections and evaluations, the mock drafts and the expert opinions, all that and where Hield is actually selected will offer a fascinating picture of just how big Curry’s impact has been on the thinking and aspirations of NBA teams.

What is happening now with Hield is something that happens with someone every season. A great player strings together a half-dozen great NCAA Tournament performances, NBA teams, fans, and analysts lose track of sample size and fall in love with what those games imply about a player’s ceiling and his likelihood of reaching it. The NCAA Tournament has been shown to be a huge factor in the evaluations of some players, and not a particularly accurate or useful one. Ironically, tournament heroics were one of the reasons Stephen Curry was viewed so highly when he entered the NBA Draft in 2009.

For as good as he’s been during Oklahoma’s run, Hield is also flawed — flaws that NBA scouts have had four long years to stare at. Hield measures out at 6-4 with shoes on and an average wingspan. He is not an explosive athlete or a particularly adept or aggressive defender. He has developed as a distributor and penetrator but is nowhere near the passer Curry was in college. While you can’t help but connect Curry and Hield because of their three-point shooting, someone like Jimmer Fredette or J.J. Redick might be a more apt comparison for Hield’s college production.

To some degree, every draft selection involves a team talking themselves into someone — doing the mental math on strengths and weaknesses and gambling that they’ve calculated correctly. A few months from now, some NBA team will be talking themselves into Buddy Hield and the shadow of Stephen Curry will almost certainly be shading the discussion. Hield has warts in his game, Curry certainly did too. But the potential for the former to become something approximating the latter is going to be what ultimately determines his draft position.

This all sets up sort of a rough natural experiment, a stress test for how big Curry’s impact is and how much teams feel like the only way to beat him and the Warriors is to create their own version. The threat of Golden State winning a title this year, and several more in the near future, is shifting the incentives for every franchise planning on opening a championship window. Some teams will look for ways to disrupt the Warriors. Others will look to beat them at their own game. For any team to truly emulate Golden State’s system, to really pull every fractional bit of potential out of small ball and pace-and-space, they would have to replicate the personnel. That means finding a Draymond Green and it means finding a Curry — a player with unlimited range and confidence to match, a player who can single-handedly bust a defense or warp it beyond all recognition.

The draft is an inexact science at best but, based on his full physical and statistical resume, Hield probably belongs in the mid-to-late-lottery. That’s not to say he couldn’t be better than that, or isn’t better than that right now. It’s simply the draft range where his production would likely place him if his offensive balance was a little heavier on slashing than blinding defense-be-damned shooting. If Hield leapfrogs players like Kris Dunn or Jamal Murray, joining Simmons, Brandon Ingram and Dragan Bender somewhere in the top-4, it will be the Curry bump that places him there.

For years, the NBA was slavishly devoted to the search for “The Next Jordan.” If that path is to be walked again and if search parties are being assembled to hunt for “The Next Curry,” then, rightly-or-wrongly, Buddy Hield is probably the place to start. Is that really where we’re headed?