2025 NBA Draft: Hey Ace, be a Demin and plant your Flagg

People wanna comp Bailey ceiling to KD but I don't see it. Looks more like BIngram to me.

I just saw Demin is projected to go #17 in a Bleacher Report mock draft.

I think he’s going to succeed in the NBA and ultimately be a top 5 player from this draft.

This sounds like an EPIC idea. They already have Stephon Castle and Fox... so why take Harper. Trade down from #2 pick up a nice asset and BUILD TWIN TOWERS!

From the Ringer: His write-up

A postmodern rim-protecting titan with all the tools to be the perfect pick-and-roll finisher.

Lob Threat + Defensive Anchor + Ridiculous Upside

SCOUTING REPORT BY Danny Chau

Calling Maluach’s rise over the past four years meteoric feels like an understatement. Four years ago, the South Sudanese refugee became the youngest-ever enrollee at an NBA Academy, at just 14 years old. It was his first time playing organized basketball. At 16, Maluach became the third-youngest player ever to play in a FIBA World Cup. The following summer, he was—by a wide margin—the youngest competitor in men’s basketball at the Olympics. He’s had several lifetimes of experience in these past four years alone. Yet we’re still just at the ground floor.

One can assume Maluach’s role on the floor from one glance at his measurements. Maluach has a 9-foot-8 standing reach—1 inch longer than Victor Wembanyama’s and 1 inch shorter than Rudy Gobert’s and Duke alumnus Mark Williams’s. He has an unlimited catch radius on lobs; he can cordon off the painted area simply by spreading his arms. But it’s 2025—the NBA is no country for plodding bigs. There are interesting wrinkles in Maluach’s profile that suggest a possible deviation from the Gobert archetype. For one, his touch is exceptional for his size: He’s a good free throw shooter, he can gently guide lobs into the basket as routinely as he can flush them home, and he has the coordination to catch passes from uncomfortable angles. His screen craft is nuanced for a teenager, and his scoring efficiency as a finisher out of the pick-and-roll is astronomically high compared to just about every lottery big man of the past decade.

Players of Maluach’s archetype are typically seen as floor raisers on defense, but his unique style of pick-and-roll defense could be more of a ceiling play. His arms are constantly in motion, moving up and down like he’s an anthropomorphic mini-golf windmill that follows you around the fairway. He can get absurdly low in his defensive stance without losing his range of motion or velocity moving backward and laterally. Because of this, there is almost a hubris in Maluach’s defensive tendencies—he plays at the level of the screen in pick-and-rolls because he thinks he can; he dances on the perimeter with guards because he thinks he can. And if he can’t, he’ll bet on his own recovery speed and ridiculous reach to get back into the play. His ability to blow up plays in unconventional ways is something that Duke has consistently put to the test. The technique isn’t always sound, and the results aren’t always there. When he’s lost on a play, it can look really bad. But confidently defending in space requires both a skill and a mentality that players of his ilk rarely demonstrate with the same enthusiasm. It’s something NBA teams will want to see him test the limits of—if he figures it out, he could be the rare defensive anchor who raises both the floor and the ceiling of a team.

It does skew some of his data, however. Because of the amount of time Maluach spends defending outside the paint, his defensive rebounding numbers are unexceptional (he has one of the highest offensive rebounding rates in college basketball, though). His block percentage, while solid, doesn’t reflect his outlier tools. He wouldn’t be the first Duke center posting underwhelming numbers to get drafted in the lottery—Dereck Lively II’s counting stats were paltry, but his defensive influence was never in question. (To be fair, Lively’s block percentage was an order of magnitude higher than Maluach’s.) How teams reconcile the ho-hum numbers with both Maluach’s on-court context and his absurd potential will determine just how high he can go in the draft.

I don't know who Demin is but using Ben Simmons as a comp to any lottery pick is diabolical

betchau Danny was proud of this one, as he should be