1) When everything is said and done, there will likely not be a more divisive prospect in this draft than LaMelo Ball. After all, before we even get to LaMelo the player, there’s the outsized personality of his father. There’s also the fact that he dropped out of high school, played sparingly (and terribly) in a pro league in Europe as a very young kid, and then returned to America to play at Spire Academy, which supposedly had trouble scheduling quality opponents due to LaMelo’s presence on the team. The available statistics were also highly questionable, and in addition LaMelo played hardly at all in summer circuit play.

Put simply, the general familiarity with LaMelo Ball outside of the fact that he’s a member of the Ball family is not great. (Yes, most of my familiarity as of now comes from highlight scouting, which is surely very precarious.) With Ball signing to play professional basketball in Australia, this viewing familiarity is something that’s not likely to change. Sure, teams will scout Ball overseas, but players who take nontraditional routes to the NBA are starting from behind since the NBA is fairly risk averse. Keep in mind it’s a league that chose both DeAndre Ayton and Marvin Bagley over Luka Doncic likely in part because Luka was dominating professional basketball in Europe rather than college kids in America.

2) There’s also questions about how much LaMelo really loves to compete. Just as a highlight watcher, that’s not what I see. I see a player who plays with joy.

However, these are of course just highlights, and a knowledgeable basketball fan in the comments of a previous post when asked by me about his thoughts on LaMelo answered that he couldn’t take LaMelo seriously until he showed that he actually cared about the game. That’s a serious issue if present, one that would make LaMelo virtually untouchable as a prospect outside of potential trade value.

But I’m going to ignore that for the sake of this post. Not because it’s not potentially real, but rather, because if it is real, it will become evident very early into Ball’s first season in the NBL. And I’d also like to decide for myself if a lack of care happens to be the case. If It’s not the case and Ball does care and does compete, he’s probably the player who’ll have the best argument to unseat Cole Anthony as the consensus #1 pick, even if it’ll never happen because of Ball’s nontraditional route.

Melo filled the stat sheet in a SPIRE win over Bella Vista Prep then gave his shoes away! ⚡️@MELOD1P pic.twitter.com/Gs2ymU5jrb — Who's Next (@WhosNextHS) December 8, 2018

Just look at the array of skills at his size.

3) That’s where the argument for Ball begins, but before we get there, let’s take a look at how these skills show up in the Spire Academy stats we have available to us. And please note that we should take them with a grain of salt, as they suggest that LaMelo only shot 16 free throws in 24 games, which is fairly unlikely considering how skilled Ball is at his size and the types of scores Spire is running up.

What we do have is that Ball scored 22 points a game while picking up 9 boards, 9 assists, and stealing the ball four times or more in six of the ten games for which steals stats were present, and averaging just over 4 steals per game over those ten.

Yes, this is basically a high school all-star team playing a schedule of supposedly dubious quality. No, no one else on the team was putting up numbers like these. When everything is said and done, so long as Ball respects the game, there’s a fairly reasonable chance that Ball will be the best player out of this next draft. Though we should remember that respecting the game has been brought up as an if rather than a given.

4) If Ball does respect the game, compete, try hard, or whichever descriptor you happen to prefer here, he’s likely to be the draft’s major inefficiency, as it’s very unlikely a player playing in the NBL will go in the top three of a draft where there will be others who will not only perform but are also considered “known” quantities.

LaMelo 2nd Clip is one of the smoothest things you’ll see 🥶🥶

pic.twitter.com/VjdxnxLetW — Brad Ballislife (@BradBallisLife) July 14, 2019

5) The first thing one notices in these highlights is Ball’s size. First, he’s noticeably taller than Lonzo. I’d guess 6-foot-6.5 to 6-foot-8. Beyond that, his frame appears to me to be set slightly more like his father than his brother, in which case it’s high possible he’ll be able to carry additional weight without a reduction in athleticism. That is, he could eventually get strong, meaning we may be talking about a combo guard — one who is eminently scalable due to height and shooting ability — but it also would not be surprising if in Ball we are ultimately talking about a big wing.

Even if not, a 6-foot-6 or 6-foot-7 player with these skills is almost a lock to be impactful on offense.

6) The next thing one notices is that LaMelo is more fluid than Lonzo. That’s important, since this difference makes it possible for Melo’s dribbling to be a lot more useful to beat defenders than his older brother. The younger brother is also further along in terms of change-of-direction dribbling maneuvers, and while there seems to be a substitution of dribbling for the economy of Lonzo’s game, that’s not necessarily a negative, as Lonzo’s game means that he’ll top out as a very high-level contributor on offense in the event that he shoots, whereas there’s at least some possibility, as of now, that LaMelo could be a player who doesn’t just grease an offense put pushes it to points way beyond sufficiency.

The lack of pure burst or vertical explosion could be a hang-up for LaMelo there. And while we shouldn’t ignore that there’s a chance LaMelo does get more athletic as he gains core strength and his movements get more powerful, it’s also not necessarily the case that he needs to do so, pending just how accurate he gets shooting from the deep distances from where he’s already comfortable pulling, and how quick/anticipatory/reactive his decision-making becomes in response to how defenses attempt to take away his scoring.

7) Let’s just list the assortment of skills and remember that they belong to a player who is 6-foot-6, 6-foot-7 or perhaps even 6-foot-8, as at least one highlight video can attest.

Ambidextrous dribbling and passing. Change of direction and change of speed dribble moving left, right and backwards. Passing accuracy. Understanding how to use shoulders/body to carve out space and set angles. An easy and quick pull-up with potentially devastating range out to 35-40 feet. (Also moving forward in the mid-range.) Understanding of time and space. Fluidity of movement, unlike his brother. Elite hand-eye coordination, just like his brother. Touch on in-between shots. Legit open court speed when dribbling. Legit vision. A scorer’s mentality. And, at least to me (as stated above) it seems there’s joy when playing.

The last one might seem curious, but how better to judge who truly loves basketball than by actually seeing their joy on the court?

Though of course, perhaps I’d be remiss to note that the joy of winning is not the same as the joy of competing. And while taking and making shots from half court totally out of the run of play is no doubt fun, the willingness for a coach to allow a player to do so is an indication that the game being played was likely not competitive.

8) If you want evidence of the 2-point jumper, here’s a video with some mid-range attempts.

9) Obvious drawbacks? Not super bursty. Normal defensive questions for most high school players. Ugly jumper mechanics. Questions on his desire to compete and try hard.

10) While we should acknowledge the questions, we should keep our eyes open to how they present themselves at the next level. What we shouldn’t do is let the questions stop us from retracing the skill and intangible qualities of the paragraphs above and realizing we’re talking about them in relation to a probably 6-foot-7 or 6-foot-8 player, not some 6-foot-2 guard. Once we do that, we understand we’re talking about a very rare subset of players. And precisely here is where and why we should pay attention to heuristics.

Specifically, the one that tells us that we should look towards 6-foot-6+ or greater nominal point guards as likely NBA players. Indeed, they develop often enough into some of the best ones. And what’s more, the taller they get, the more likely their eventual goodness is to be.

11) Let us list the 6-foot-7 or taller NBA players who can (or could) dribble, pass, and shoot on the move while possessing functional perimeter athleticism and ability to make decisions on the move as well:

Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Tracy McGrady, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant, comeback era Magic Johnson, Paul Pierce, Scottie Pippen, Paul George, Luka Doncic, Gordon Hayward, Joe Johnson, Joe Ingles, Hedo Turkoglu, Khris Middleton, Jimmy Butler, Mike Miller, Rick Barry, Clyde Drexler, Kawhi Leonard, Anfernee Hardaway, Julius Erving and, as we are slightly stretching, Dirk Nowitzki.

I’m not sure if that’s everyone, but it’s close to everyone. Zion Williamson and RJ Barrett likely join this list. Maybe Brandon Ingram. Regardless, you get the picture. It’s a small list. Basically everyone on it is an all star. Many of them upper order All-NBA player and more than a few MVPs. And the one or two guys who weren’t any of these were key players on championship teams or contenders. That’s not by coincidence.

12) A player like Luke Walton would make the list, but he couldn’t shoot. Kyle Korver as well, but his dribble didn’t mean much in the NBA. Older guard guys like Reggie Theus, Paul Pressey and Marques Johnson didn’t have the jumpers that some of these guys had either.

13) Whatever you think about his father, so long as LaMelo competes and tries hard, he’s an overwhelming favorite to eventually end up on this list as well. And whatever Ball lacks in top end athleticism, it’s highly possible and even likely for a player like him to make it up in both shooting skill from distance and passing intuition.

Now if that’s so, and we have a list of something like 23 players and 20 of them are all-stars, what are the odds that LaMelo Ball is eventually going to be an all-star as well?

I reckon it’s pretty high. Height matters. Players the size LaMelo Ball is with the skills he possesses are not commonplace, and almost all of the ones whose names we know are not just really good but great. The worst of these settle in at really good.

14) Once again, 6-foot-6+ nominal (or real deal) point guards with shot making and reasonable athleticism are very often better than we expect. It probably has the single highest hit rate of all.

15) I don’t always rank players preseason, but when I do I tend to rank players by their hypothetical upside. The reasons for this are at least twofold. First, due to several of our cognitive biases, it’s for some reason far easier to move a player down in a ranking than to move especially one whom consensus doesn’t favor up. Second, the negatives that would cause us to drop Ball figure to be obvious almost from the word “Go” once he starts playing real games. If LaMelo doesn’t care, we’ll be able to spot it. If he folds in tough situations, we’ll spot it.

As such, I have LaMelo in a tier alongside Cole Anthony right now. I have a preference for Anthony, but with LaMelo right there. I am quite prepared to be wrong here, and if so, Ball will drop in the ranking likely precipitously. But I also want to prepare myself to be right, in consideration of my cognitive biases, should the heuristic argument laid out above be the one that plays out in reality. If that’s the case, five to ten years from now when we speak of the 2020 draft, we’ll likely be speaking not just of Anthony but also of Ball.