Jahlil Okafor’s had to block out the critics his whole life.

Despite being the nation’s top-ranked player since middle school, the talented big man was told that he was a member of a vanishing breed, that NBA teams no longer needed players like him, and that the bullish frame set atop ballerina’s feet that would once have made him a generational prospect now served as mere window dressing. The back-to-the-basket big man is dying, they told him, and his demise, too, was inevitable.

The 19-year-old isn’t buying it, and neither are the Philadelphia 76ers, who used the third-overall pick in Thursday’s draft to select him.

“When I got to Duke, I was the leading scorer and [even then] it was the same thing, ‘You don’t need a big man.’… [but] for as long as I can remember, big men have dominated the NBA,” Okafor told reporters during his introductory press conference Saturday in Philadelphia. “Around sixth or seventh grade, I fell in love with Tim Duncan and his all-around game. That’s when I started watching him, and then my father gave me film on Hakeem Olajuwon, so since seventh grade, those are the two guys I’ve modeled my game after.”

But Okafor, who stands 6’11” and weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 270 pounds, doesn’t just look the part, he plays it too. Many analysts believe that his offensive post game last season at Duke was more refined than any college freshman since Duncan, selected by the San Antonio Spurs with the top pick in the 1997 Draft after spending four years at Wake Forest. The 19-year-old from Chicago has nimble feet, counter moves for his counter moves, and uncanny touch around the basket thanks to massive hands that allow him to palm the ball like a grapefruit.

In his first and only season playing for Coach Krzyzewski in Durham, North Carolina, Okafor was remarkable, averaging 17.3 points on a gaudy 66.4% shooting clip to go along with 8.6 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and 1.4 blocks per game. He earned Consensus First-team All-American and ACC Player of the Year honors for his play and led Duke a National Championship, the fifth in its history.

On a nightly basis, he made life miserable for opposing defenses, forcing teams to construct their game plans around slowing him on the block. And every night, he made them pay by using his excellent vision and passing ability to get the ball to open teammates. J.P. Tokoto, who played at rival North Carolina for three seasons before being selected by the Sixers with the 58th-overall pick in Thursday’s draft, remembers the two times his team faced Okafor last season vividly.

“Big Jah, he’s a game-changer,” the 6’6” swingman said Saturday. “If you’re not doubling him, he’s beating whoever’s guarding him one-on-one. He’s a handful. Our game plan was to send the opposite big man from the weakside to double, and then everybody just rotated over. While at times it did work, Jahlil’s a big boy, and he’s very skilled. He made plays around the basket.

“[On one play], we sent our big over, and [Okafor] dribbled out, and once our big man retreated he just drove against his man and finished on the other side of the rim. I watched that play a couple times and wondered how somebody that big can move so well.”

The play in question is embedded above, and from where it came there are many more stunning displays of Jahlil Okafor’s freakish combination of size, quickness, and coordination from his 38 games at Duke.

Last fall, Duke became the first college program to install SportVU cameras in their home arena, the same technology used by all 30 NBA teams to track movement on the court and convert it into functional data. The 14 games in which the system was used by the team in 2014-15 give us an interesting glance at the remarkable effect Okafor had on the Blue Devils’ offense last season.

Unfortunately, we’re not able to compare his numbers to his NCAA contemporaries, but for the sake of some context we’ll use NBA players. As a freshman, Okafor got a post touch on a ridiculous 52.0% of Duke’s halfcourt possessions. That amounted to 14.3 post touches per game, a number that dwarfs that of the NBA’s leader in post-ups per game, Al Jefferson (10.1).

Jefferson is a name that comes up often as a pro comparison for Okafor, and the resemblance is obvious. Both are supremely skilled on the post, and both rely primarily upon strength, footwork, and touch on offense. However, Jefferson, set to enter his 12th NBA season this fall, was far less polished than Okafor is today when he entered the draft out of high school in 2004. And it can be argued that there are areas of the 19-year-old Okafor’s game that are already more sophisticated than those of Jefferson.

Despite facing constant double teams last season, Okafor shot a staggering 58.5% out of the post as a freshman. That’s nearly a dozen percentage points higher than Jefferson’s 46.9% clip in the post in 2014-15 and is still a good deal higher than the NBA’s most efficient post-up player last season, Enes Kanter (53.4%).

But despite his absolute dominance on the low block, he made sure to get his teammates involved and dissuade opposing players from leaving their assignments to double-team him. Okafor only attempted shots on 41.0% of the possessions in which he received the ball while posting up, the rest of the time looking to move the ball and create open looks.

As a team, Duke scored an average of 1.00 points on possessions in which Okafor posted up (0.93 PPP when he attempted a shot himself and 1.19 PPP when passing to a teammate out of the post). Okafor post-ups were more efficient than NBA possessions in which Klay Thompson attempted a shot off a screen (0.90 PPP), Robert Covington attempted a catch-and shoot (0.95 PPP), or Chris Paul handled the rock in the pick-and-roll (0.97 PPP).

Comparing Okafor’s impact at Duke to that of other top big men who have come out in recent years, we see a similar trend.

Even with his 51.0% conversion rate from the free-throw line, the 19-year-old’s true shooting percentage was a stellar 65.0% last season. That number is better than the freshman year TS% of any big man picked in the top three of the NBA Draft since 1980; hall of Famer Patrick Ewing comes closest with his 64.5 TS% in 1982 as a freshman with Georgetown. And Okafor maintained this remarkable level of efficiency while also being an incredibly high-volume scorer at Duke. Among big men picked in the top-three since 1980, his 23.0 points per 40 minutes is matched only by David Robinson, who also scored 23.0 PTS/40 as a freshman at Navy in 1984.

Simply put, Okafor compares favorably to the best offensive big man prospects the game has seen over the last 35 years.

Entering last year, Okafor was the only freshman to make the Associated Press’ First-team All-American list. It appeared a foregone conclusion at that point that the immensely talented big man would be the first player selected in the 2015 Draft, barring catastrophic circumstance. But despite his best efforts, questions about his potential on the defensive end caused some teams, including the Minnesota Timberwolves to move Kentucky’s Karl Towns to the top of their big boards; they would eventually use the first-overall pick to select him.

For the better part of the month-plus since the Draft Lottery, the assumption amongst NBA analysts had been that Okafor and Towns would be selected first- and second-overall, in some order. But in the days leading up to Thursday’s draft, there whispers began that the Los Angeles Lakers were considering taking Ohio State guard D’Angelo Russell with the second-overall pick.

To the surprise of many, that’s exactly how the draft went, and when the Sixers came on the clock with the third pick they happily scooped up Okafor.

“You’ll hear many of the Jahlil’s contemporary’s rave about how strong he is, about how wonderful his hands are, about how amazing he is. He’s largely been the best player of that class for some time now,” said Sixers President of Basketball Operations and General Manager Sam Hinkie of the team’s newest addition. “Someone that can draw a double team, and we don’t see those a lot in our league right now… is enormously useful, enormously useful. That’s one of the things he can do. Someone that has hands that are as good as his, that can catch every ball thrown his way, that can do all sorts of things in the post, that can be a pick-and-roll player like that, that’s hard to find. That’s really hard to find, which is why you’ll hear people that have coached him and you’ll hear people that have been around him rave about him. We feel very excited to be able to take him.”

The questions about Okafor’s defense are legitimate, sure. If they hadn’t existed, the Timberwolves would have likely taken the Duke product first-overall, popped a bottle of champagne in the war room, and called it a night. But in Hinkie’s mind, the 6’11” big man’s deficiencies on that end of the floor can largely be corrected in the classroom.

“With the way the game is officiated, people who can use verticality around the rim, people who can be big around the rim and dissuade shots in a big way, that is useful,” said Hinkie of Okafor, whose 9’3” standing reach puts him in the neighborhood of Dwight Howard, Andrew Bogut, and Tyson Chandler. “It may not be what you had in mind, somebody running around and trapping the ball, or blitzing it on side pick-and-rolls, or doing the sorts of things that were maybe in vogue with Coach [Pat] Riley’s Heat teams or the like, but we do see a lot of guys that are able to hang around the rim and really, really bother people. I think Duke had the 12th-best defense in all of college basketball last year, with several players who were thought of as good defenders and some players who weren’t. One of those keys, we think, was Jahlil in the back of that, [with] the way he was able to dissuade shots, sometimes just by his presence.”

It doesn’t hurt that Okafor will share the frontcourt with Nerlens Noel and Joel Embiid, two of the best defensive big man prospects in recent memory. And it also doesn’t hurt that the 19-year-old is fully aware of the questions surrounding his game and is committed to becoming the prospect he knows he can be, a game-changer and a player who can help lead the Sixers back to contention.

In high school, Okafor led Whitney Young to a Chicago Public City League Title, the following summer, he led Team USA to a FIBA Under-19 Championship, and as a freshman he won a National Championship with Duke. Nobody is going to tell him that a big man can’t do it at the next level.

“Tim Duncan won it [in 2014],” he told reporters matter-of-factly. “Then Pau Gasol [in 2010 and 2009] and Kevin Garnett [in 2008]. People get a little excited, because what Steph Curry and those guys did was great, and it worked, and their formula was fantastic. But for as long as I can remember, big men have been dominant and the result has been NBA championships.”

The Sixers are unlikely to be championship contenders in 2015-16, but in Philadelphia Okafor has the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a program committed beyond measure to one day getting there. With him, Noel, Embiid, a handful of talented young players, a fully-stocked cupboard of tradable assets, and as much cap flexibility as any team in the league in the coming years, a foundation is in place. Soon, the future will become more clear.