Houston Rockets: 3 perfect combinations for their pair of 1st-round picks

1. Amen Thompson and Dariq Whitehead

Amen Thompson is less developed than Ausar as a shooter and as a defender, but the difference is marginal and he’s still the slightly superior prospect. Why? Because where Ausar is a top-10 athlete, Thompson might just be the athlete in the NBA next year. He’s that explosive, nimble, evasive.

Watching Amen Thompson dance through the defense is like watching one of those high-speed magnetic trains in Japan: there’s no friction, nothing preventing him from reaching top speed at any moment. He’s great at keeping defenders off balance with hesitations and side-steps before bursting downhill like a bolt of lightning. Finishing at the rim, no player has hang time like Amen. His body control is superhuman.

He was more ball-dominant in the Overtime Elite league than Ausar, which does factor into the equation if the Harden rumors are real. But Thompson, like Ausar, has ample potential cutting off the ball and filling the lane in transition. If he can work hard at the 3-point shot and become even league-average spotting up on the perimeter, it will unlock whole new dimensions of his game attacking off the catch while Harden draws doubles in the middle of the floor.

As for Dariq Whitehead, he has the potential to be the best value pick in the draft. Before the season at Duke, he was a consensus top-10, maybe even top-5 pick. Injuries hampered him significantly in Durham and he underwent a second foot surgery after the season. That’s probably going to make him drop, but honestly, it should reassure teams that he was definitely not operating at full capacity with the Blue Devils. A healthy, fully-realized Whitehead is a lottery-level scorer who just shot 42 percent from deep as a freshman. This is the home run outcome for Houston.