Zion Williamson isn’t perfect, but he’s close

Zion Williamson isn’t a perfect prospect, but he’s the best in the 2019 NBA Draft class, and he’s going to be a very good NBA player.

For the first time since Duke’s Elite Eight loss to Michigan State in April, you’re going to get a chance to see the best player in the 2019 NBA Draft class this week, as Zion Williamson participates in the NBA Draft Combine.

He probably won’t participate in most of the drills, but it’s still going to be nice to see the player who has had a strangle hold on the number one spot in the 2019 NBA Draft since about December. He’ll be only the second player to be selected number one since 2012 (Markelle Fultz) to attend the scouting showcase, and his performance in any drills he does participate in will likely be met with either intense consternation or a coronation of future stardom. After all, with all of the talk about how iffy this draft class is, there’s a ton riding on Williamson’s outcome. He’s the single prospect featured in ESPN’s draft lottery promo ad, and it’s very clear that every team in the lottery will be praying for the opportunity to select him.

Zion is a prospect with a polarizing skill set. On one hand, he’s the most explosive athlete we’ve seen in college basketball since at least Blake Griffin. His own dunk reel matches that of the rest of the college basketball season combined:

And Zion couples that athleticism with production that let him post the best college Box Plus-Minus ever. But at the same time, there is concern about Williamson’s weight, and how it will relate to his NBA position and injury risk. There’s also some concern about his skill set, as Zion struggled to shoot from outside this season and didn’t run hardly any pick-and-roll, which figures to be his primary function as an NBA four.

We’ve addressed the problems with the injury risk complaint before, but there are real weaknesses to Zion’s game. His shot is a major question mark for his potential to be a franchise scoring prospect. While he did hit 33.8 percent from 3 on 71 attempts last year, projecting his shot forward is difficult, given his shot form. He squares his feet to a 45-degree angle away from the basket, has a relatively low release, and his release is quite mechanical.

He did show some potential as a pull-up shooter, especially in getting to long 2s, but him pulling up from 3 seems out of the question early on.

His handle is also a bit of a question, as he struggled early in the college season to shake defenders and really get by defenders. A legitimately dominant spin move pairs well with his ability to bulldoze people off the dribble, but in the NBA, he’s going to need more than this level of crossover to beat athletic 3s and 4s off the dribble.

The positive is that he did progress throughout the season prior to his knee injury, when he took a small step back likely out of caution. Prior to his injury in ACC play, he was showing the ceiling of what his playmaking off the dribble could be.

These questions will make or break Williamson’s ultimate outcome, because this is what separates Zion from being a star on the level of Anthony Davis or Blake Griffin, to whom he’s often compared. As it stands right now, Williamson probably can’t be tasked with primary creation duties for an offense, and he definitely is going to be schemable in the playoffs, despite being built like LeBron James. But these are areas that are improvable, particularly in shooting, where simple tweaks should help him be at least a positive catch-and-shoot threat. And any shooting threat will feed into his creation ability even if his handle doesn’t really improve because that threat means he’ll have to be pressed against, and that’s a nightmare for anyone containing him off the dribble.

That nightmare comes from the things that Zion is already good at. We aren’t sure what Zion’s exact measurements are, but estimates float around 6-foot-7, 285 pounds with a 6-foot-11 wingspan — which is to say, the basketball version of a freight train. He can get to the rim against pretty much anyone at the college level, and the combination of his power and his ability to glide through the air on the way to the rim make him very difficult to stop in the open court.

These two traits wow pretty much everyone, but they mask what will really be Zion’s calling card in the NBA — his touch, which is his single most important skill. Being powerful and having agility is one thing, but you don’t just become an 80.3 percent finisher at the rim without incredible innate touch at the hoop.

This helps Zion play much bigger than 6-foot-7, as he should have no issue finishing over NBA centers thanks to his deft touch around the basket. This also helps his projection as a shooter; touch is a massive stepping stone towards growing as an outside shooter, and Zion’s is probably the best of any prospect we’ve seen since Karl-Anthony Towns. Zion’s performance is even more impressive factoring in hispredominant use of his left hand. Zion might have used his right hand to finish on less than ten occasions this season, but it didn’t matter. And it’s not like he couldn’t do it:

But he just never needed to. In the NBA, he’ll need to; and he’ll probably succeed at it, too.

Outside of finishing and getting to the rim, Zion’s other offensive skills don’t get a lot of hype, and he’s certainly going to get the Blake Griffin-style “All he does is dunk!” complaints from the more ignorant sects of NBA fans. But he has a future as a primary initiator because of his passing. Most commonly, this came out in transition, where he would often return the favor for the setups of his highlight dunks with excellent outlets to R.J. Barrett. He figures to not just be a solid transition finisher, but a player who can grab and go on the defensive end and dictate transition opportunities at the point of attack.

In the halfcourt, his playmaking was similar to De’Andre Hunter’s, where he mostly made simple reads out of post-ups or isolations, like this.

These didn’t afford Zion many assist opportunities, as he posted just a 14.9 percent assist rate. But you can see from the above clip that his vision is in an elite class, and despite that pass being too low for R.J. Barrett, he has good to great touch. As his on-ball capabilities continue to grow, it’s possible Zion could become a Blake Griffin-type passer, following a similar trajectory. He has the technique and the vision to be at that level as a passer, especially from the elbow.

Zion also has a high ceiling as a pick-and-roll scorer, though he wasn’t used that way at Duke. That he wasn’t is nearly criminal, because there’s obvious utility in putting an 80 percent finisher that can handle and pass into basketball’s most efficient play. Zion is manufactured to kill as a short-roll big man, given his handle in space, ability to explode from outside the restricted area towards the rim, and decision-making on simple passes. There’s also a very likely ceiling that he can be used as a Ben Simmons or LeBron-type pick-and-roll weapon that can be effective at both spots. Duke did experiment with plays like this, using Zion on dribble hand-offs to spring R.J. Barrett, and then having him drop into the dunker spot to capitalize on a bent defense:

Zion may not have all of the tools to be a number one option as a scorer right now, but he has a path there, thanks to his baseline skill set and the direct application of his skill set to modern NBA sets. People worry about how Zion will translate to the NBA offensively, but it’s pretty easy to see how he will be a dynamic pick-and-roll finisher, secondary playmaker, and transition dynamo. We’ve seen Ben Simmons and Giannis Antetokounmpo master those roles over the last two seasons, and Zion might be the best finisher and shooter of the three. And just like those two, his defense also sets the table for him to be a star-level player, because he is going to be a brilliant rim protector.

Zion finished the season with a block rate of 5.8, made more impressive by how little 5 he played in college with Marques Bolden and Javin DeLaurier. He still was a killer defender at the rim though, able to close space better than any prospect since Anthony Davis and using great timing to smother shots from the weakside.

This play from the Army game still sticks out as Zion’s most impressive play of the year, just because it shows how quickly Zion can go from out of the play to erasing it:

Now, his reaction time isn’t perfect, and Williamson did have his share of mental lapses like all freshmen do. But he did do a great job of setting up in the right position, and his reaction to actions one pass away are great when combined with his closing speed. And it’s not like he’s just a block-chaser; his space defense is excellent, as he is flexible enough to change directions laterally very well, and he has solid footwork to close off space after an opponent gets an edge.

Zion isn’t a perfect prospect. He does need a lot of development to become the type of player that every lottery team wants him to be, and he’s likely to always have matchup issues against big centers at the 5 and guys like Jimmy Butler that he can’t overpower. In comparing him to other prospects from past drafts, I’d probably still take Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis, and Ben Simmons over him, and it’s close between Zion and Towns.

But that’s not an insult to Zion. He’s not perfect, but that’s still in, “fairly confident he’ll be a top-15 NBA player at some point” range. His skill set is very translatable to the NBA, he couples top-tier athleticism and touch with solid decision-making and feel, and he out-produced even the best young NBA players at the college level. He’s so far ahead of even R.J. Barrett and Jarrett Culver that it’s even comical to suggest that a team might favor one of them over Williamson. Zion isn’t a perfect prospect, but he’s as close as we can get to that this year; and he’s going to be the number one pick, and one that is going to change the fortune of whatever team is lucky enough to draft him.