Go into the statistics and it becomes even more obvious that Kennard is far from the stereotype. For starters, as a sophomore at Duke Kennard took far fewer threes than his main two comparisons of Korver and Reddick. Korver took 69% of his career shot attempts from deep and Reddick took 59% of his, and both players were much higher in their second season. For Reddick, he took 63.4% of his shots from deep in his second year at Duke and Korver took 70.2% of his from deep as a sophomore.

Kennard on the other hand, took 41.4% of his shots from deep, a high mark, but far from the “just a shooter” of his comparisons. Kennard wasn’t a off-ball complimentary player, he was a guy who entered a team with Jayson Tatum and Grayson Allen on it and became their leading scorer and, by most accounts, their best player.

But he still has a low ceiling because he isn’t a good athlete.

Here’s the thing about that. People love to look at guys who are the best athletes as having the highest ceiling all the time because they like to believe that it’s basically like 2k where you just add points in an area and get continuously better. But that isn’t how it works for almost any player.

While it is true that Kennard faces a real issue with his athleticism (more on that in a bit) there is a huge thing that many people overlook when talking about the ceiling of players.

If we say that the average NBA player starts to seriously hoop at the age of 10 (which is older than most do but we will be generous) then by the time they get to the NBA they will have already gotten between 9-12 years of development, most dudes don’t actually manage to last 10+ years in the NBA and by the end of that time they are typically starting to decline athletically. There’s only so much time that you can get better, and only so many things you can work on. As such, when a player is already so advanced by the time they enter the league, they get to move right to the finer points.

So while Stanley Johnson is still trying to learn how to shoot straight, Luke Kennard has been furiously watching Reggie Jackson to perfect a floater and to wield his ass as a weapon, typically one of the toughest skills for young players to master.