I’d really like to give the prominent programs in college basketball a lot of credit: The scheduling this season has been outstanding. We’ve had some really high quality, true-road-game matchups (Alabama at Purdue, Duke at Arizona, etc.), so many talent-packed holiday tournament games that it was borderline impossible to keep track of every single second, and some fun conference challenges.
But there’s plenty of draft-related developments to dig into from what we did get to see. So for our second notebook of the 2025 NBA draft cycle, we’ll do a blend of introductions and check-ins on key players that evaluators are watching closely—potential no. 2 pick Dylan Harper, Maryland’s Derik Queen, and more—and make a trek to rural Kentucky to see perhaps the two best players in next year’s class (who might’ve also been the two best players in this year’s class, too): AJ Dybantsa and Darryn Peterson.
Dylan Harper’s Finishing School
The jump from the high school/grassroots level to higher levels of organized hoops is often a sobering one, even for elite prospects. Certain flaws weren’t as visible when a player was ether-ing his peers with raw physical tools, but the greater competition has a way of shining a light on shortcomings. And that microscopic attention can be especially harsh on athletic lead guards with wobbly shots from beyond the arc. Just this past year we saw Isaiah Collier, the no. 2 player in his high school class, nearly fall out of the first round of the NBA draft. Similarly, we saw D.J. Wagner, no. 6 in his class, struggle so badly to be consistently productive as a shooter/passer/finisher that he decided to come back to college for another season.
Shooting can open doors. Jared McCain (rated no. 14 in high school) and Reed Sheppard (no. 79) both leapfrogged higher-ranked classmates last season after proving to be knockdown shooters as college freshmen. Dylan Harper had perhaps the most memorable 3-pointer of the NCAA season so far with his buzzer-beater against Seton Hall over the weekend, but his overall shooting has been … we’ll call it streaky (36.4 percent from 3 through 11 games), with lots of caveats that deserve more attention at a later date. What separates Harper’s game from other players of this ilk is his interior craft and technique.
More on the NBA Draft
In our draft-related college basketball primer published last month, I mentioned Harper’s reputation for exacting footwork in the paint, and he has more than lived up to that billing. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a guard prospect perform around the basket the way that he has this early in the season.
First of all, Harper does a fantastic job of knowing where his bread is buttered. Through the beginning of Rutgers’s schedule, 36 percent of Harper’s field goal attempts have come at the rim, and his proficiency there has been outlandishly good. Harper is shooting 80 percent at the rim. That’s an absurd number. How could that possibly be sustainable?
For a player of his size and build, Harper is refreshingly aware that there are other ways than simply relying on pure speed and athleticism. Afterburners when they’re needed, definitely, but that’s one tool on a belt loaded with them. I mentioned the build: Ron’s son has been measured at 6-foot-5 in shoes, with an impressive 6-10 wingspan, 9-by-9.5-inch hands, and an 8-foot-6 standing reach. He uses that brick house of a frame to take smaller guards for a ride when it’s called for. The rest of the time he’s a very technically dynamic player in the middle of the floor.
Permission to quote John Mayer? Cool. John Mayer gave a talk at the Berklee School of Music a while back that I really liked. In one part of it he talked about the relationship between growing your musical vocabulary and command of your instrument so that, when an idea hits you, your mind isn’t limited by what your body and skill set are unable to do. This is a big explanation for why I think Harper is so effective in the paint. He seems well-schooled—the tool belt is well-stocked and his situational savvy for what to do in a given situation rings of maturity.
The actual shot attempts themselves are interesting. Harper has soft hands and utilizes the glass with a lot of know-how, however I’m often impressed with the way he sets the table for himself. There’s a maturity in the way he makes his initial move. You don’t see any dancing or indulgent performative nonsense. It’s bang, bang, bang.
Despite not having a blazing first step, Harper manages to get downhill constantly. His main method of doing so is suspending defenders with his mix of physicality and start-stop game. We see the hanging crossovers. I’m not even sure I have a name for what he does in the clip below. Watch him push off of his left leg and, instead of taking that next left-footed step, tap the brakes and essentially hop forward to reset the same movement again, which freezes the defender. He then lowers his shoulders once alongside the defender’s body, gets off balance a bit, recovers, and then finishes.
If a less-mobile big meets Dylan halfway up the lane, Harper often uses those big hands and a wingspan five inches longer than his height to jump early and simply work around them. If a switchier big confronts him in the same spot, he knows to engage their body to ground the shot blocker and create an angle. A lot of the repertoire was on display in Rutgers’s loss to Alabama in late November. Here, he slithers around the slower-footed Grant Nelson for an easy layup, but later in the game he encounters Cliff Omoruyi, who is bigger, longer, and faster. Harper at first tries to avoid him and misses the shot, but a few minutes later he meets Omoruyi again, and makes sure to deliver the bump so that he can finish.
Harper’s footwork in the paint is exemplary, and it has to be to attempt 61 shots at the rim in just 11 games, and hit 80 percent of them, all without committing a single charge. I mentioned Harper jumping early to extend and evade, but watch what he does when Penn State’s Ace Baldwin meets him about 10 feet from the hoop: He does a right-over-left-legged Euro-step, with big strides, to get to his beloved left side of the glass. Or watch him lance Alabama’s transition defense here by getting all the way to the block; sell a right-shoulder move, which Mouhamed Dioubate tries to deny, sitting on that left hand; so Harper reverse pivots and finishes with his right. Just phenomenal poise and below-the-rim improvisation around the basket.
Or there’s this play against Notre Dame (which, not exactly the 2004 Pistons defensively), in which Harper sees that there’s open space in front of the rim and hops all the way in there. Once in his happy place, he feels the contesting defender leave his feet, and on the way down, Harper carves an angle for himself and flips this in.
We’re not looking for a perfect balance of rim attempts and above-the-break 3s—players have strengths and I think it’s important for them to work toward them however possible. But a top prospect’s counters need to be sharp and they need to be accessible without hesitation. That’s not always the case for athletic point guards, but Harper isn’t falling into the same pitfalls as some of his predecessors of that archetype. It’s a big reason why he’s squarely in the mix to be the first player drafted after Cooper Flagg comes off the board.
The Duality of Derik Queen
Is Derik Queen one of the best players in this class? Three of the players he suited up next to in last season’s starting lineup at Montverde Academy are projected lottery picks in the 2025 draft: Cooper Flagg (Duke), Liam McNeeley (UConn), and Asa Newell (Georgia). But Queen’s role flexibility and dizzying displays this season—through 10 games he’s at 65.4 percent true shooting and pushing 80 percent on 59 attempts at the rim—have me wondering if the 6-10 freshman could go higher than every one of his former teammates save for Flagg.
That said, Queen is also going to be one of the more challenging players for me to evaluate, for a simple reason: his inconsistent motor. I’m going to be teetering back and forth between absolutely reveling in just how versatile and skilled he is, and wanting to spear my retinas because I can’t stand to watch him saunter around the court in situations where he doesn’t have the ball.
Let me be very clear—I love this kid’s game. This is going to sound extremely hoopster hipsterish, but I’ve loved to watch him play dating back to his physically awkward days on the Under Armour circuit, back when he clearly aspired to play beyond the arc and before he transferred to Montverde. It’s been fun to see him improve his game and his body so much in the following years. But knowing what he’s capable of is why the languishing drives me so crazy.
Queen does not move like a player who is pushing 250 pounds. He has dynamic hips on defense that allow him to make quick changes of direction with some real control. His balance is terrific, and he has a knack for getting his hands in the cookie jar at the perfect moment. He navigates tight spaces gracefully and seems unbothered in traffic within the flow of a possession. In fact, “flow” is a great word to put on his list of adjectives. He swims with the current of a game in a beautiful way, and I am a sucker for easy-breezy on-court temperaments who play that way—guys who can casually slay defenders with high levels of skill. Queen does that, all the time. His feet around the rim seem almost preternatural—effortless, instinctive—and he can make enough space for himself to work with either hand, over either shoulder.
The shooting component of Queen’s game remains his biggest developmental question mark. He shoots from the midrange almost exclusively off of his right hip, and I think this catches defenders by surprise. In this no-dribble, high-post isolation, the ease and comfort level he displays is wild. His 3-point shot is a little tougher to get a good read on. As his high school career progressed, his game became heavily paint-oriented and his attempts from 3 tapered off dramatically. In fact, over his last two to three years before college, between grassroots and the highly organized ball at Montverde, he only made a few dozen attempts from 3. He’s currently shooting 13.3 percent at Maryland, but that feels misleading. He displays touch in nearly every aspect of his game and fluidity in his mechanics, and he’s been an acceptable shooter at the free throw line. There’s plenty of justifiable optimism that he will become at least a stationary threat from 3, which would do him wonders.
It’s just that he has a tendency to mosey like a roommate who decided to take a nap right before company was supposed to come over. It’s just that for every nonchalant fadeaway that he cashes or eye-widening dime that he lofts to the opposite side of the floor, there is a careless turnover where he seems unfazed (in a bad way) followed by a matador defensive effort on the perimeter that concedes an easy layup.
Queen is firmly in the running for the title of highest all-around offensive skill level among the big men in this draft. When you’re talking about shooting, passing, and handling, for me, that contest is between the Ivisic brothers at Illinois and Arkansas, St. Louis’s Robbie Avila (although I doubt he declares in 2025), and Queen. If invested, if consistently engaged, Queen could be in the realm of a David West, Zach Randolph type, but neither of those guys had the raw passing talent that this new model does. For that reason you might even persuade me to invoke the names Boris Diaw or DeMarcus Cousins. On talent alone, Queen could justifiably go in the top three. But it’s never purely about talent. If you told me that going forward, Queen was going to play hard not just consistently but constantly, I would tell you that 10 years from now there’s a world where we might be saying that he was the best player in this draft. He’s that talented.
Philon This Away …
When I’m not reveling in the way my ’Cats are playing on offense this year, Alabama is pretty easily my favorite team to watch in all of college basketball. Nate Oats has built his most balanced roster yet (it was so balanced and deep that they redshirted two highly capable players and lost Latrell Wrightsell Jr. to injury and might still be OK). They have an energetic, athletic roster, and play a sophisticated style. A real connective, driving force within that is the heady and steady freshman point guard, Labaron Philon.
Inside of Philon’s game are two wolves. In transition, he’s been a literal driving force. He can and does score, typically with his runner/floater middle game in the paint. But watch him survey the balance of the floor during a sequence against Purdue when Alabama sorely needed a great look. The lane is there but he sees that the right corner is empty, so he brakes momentarily and motions for Grant Nelson to get into the play. These early transition ball screens are tough to cover because the action never stops and the help defenders aren’t set. Purdue overplays the ball, Nelson slips, layup.
In the half court, it’s a different story. Philon is still getting the hang of taking an extra moment to create the best possible option. He has respectable size for his position—listed at 6-4, although I’d like to see an official measurement on that one—but adding some strength to his wafer-thin frame would help him linger on his spot for a second longer so that he can avoid staring down his first option when he’s in a crowd. In Alabama’s guard-screening-guard actions, it’s nice to have a crafty scorer and lob thrower making that call in the short roll. However, a lot of his turnovers in that area seem like they could be fixed if he did some basic faking of one thing and then doing another. His passes over the top often get tipped by help defenders, his dribble-to-pass motion can be a bit sloppy in traffic, and this can put a below-the-rim finisher in compromised positions.
But I love how unselfish Philon is. In his senior year of high school, he decided to transfer from hometown Baker High, where he was a do-everything, bucket-getting king, to Link Academy, where he eagerly embraced the role of table setter. He prioritizes the greater good in every situation and offers enough things on both sides of the ball that it’s difficult to fully take him away. Through 10 games, Alabama has had 20 four-man lineups log at least 40 total possessions. Eleven of those have hit a net rating of plus-10 or better. Philon is a part of eight of them. More or less, every player on the roster is better when he’s on the floor.
We’ll see how this season plays out, but if Philon hovers in that mid-to-late first round zone, I could see a team projecting what he’d be a year from now and “pre-drafting” him as high as the lottery this year. The smarts and the skills point to a player with strong growth potential.
Scouring Hours: Disruptive Defenders
Duke’s Maliq Brown might be a Robert Covington type of gem hiding in plain sight—strength and size to defend bigger frontcourt players while also being quick and disruptive enough to backcourt players. He played a major role in stifling Auburn’s casual offensive momentum in an early December matchup by pestering Johni Broome. I’m beginning to wonder if Brown could be this year’s version of Ryan Dunn (who’s just a few months older than Brown), the late first-round pick of the Phoenix Suns who flew under the radar for most of last season before buzz began to build about his spectacular defense.
If you have a center who can cover him by shooting 3s, Brown, a 6-9 forward, could be an intriguing option as a connective passer on offense who can check anyone up or down the positional food chain on defense. He sometimes moves the ball to the wrong team, but he is effective at turning an opponent’s attempted 3s into attempted 2s, and that alone has value.
Brown annoyed Kansas’s Hunter Dickinson to the point of resorting to skull kicking. You ever have a sweat bee fly next to your earhole? That irritant that gets you to start swatting at nothing? That’s what Brown’s hands are like. He’s like a basketball histamine.
Keeping those hands on the floor will require him to be more than a hypothetical threat to put the ball in the basket, and you can already see how Duke opponents are selling out to stop Flagg by piling up in the paint and turning a cold shoulder to the threat of Maliq attempting to shoot at all. It could be a case of getting his confidence up, because he’s barely even looked at the goal this season. (That’s especially true from 3.) He was similarly hesitant last season at Syracuse, but when he has a moment and his feet are set, I’ve seen worse. The free throw indicators are middle of the road—in three college seasons he’s attempted 100 of them and made 64. I mentioned the passing, and it’s a nice way of utilizing him, but I don’t expect that to be something that NBA offenses are going to want to hang their hats on.
Another thrilling defensive prospect is sowing chaos in the western part of the country, at Grand Canyon. You wanna talk about a saga of a college career? Take a look at Tyon Grant-Foster, a fascinating player who will surely stir some division among evaluators. Grant-Foster was born in March 2000, which means he’ll be 25 years old on draft night—geriatric by draft standards. He started at the JUCO level, but that was in 2018-19. A lot of players are staying five, in some cases six seasons these days, but this was pre-COVID! While Tyon is definitely a bit of a late bloomer, medical issues kept him off the court for an extended period of time. So here he is, finally, healthy and finishing up his career at Grand Canyon for Bryce Drew.
Grant-Foster makes a bunch of home-run defensive plays—accurate swipes and digs when he’s off ball, straight-up rips when he’s on it. While those are a piece of the puzzle and make for a great time, the reality is that defense is really played in the mundane moments in between those jaw-dropping moments. Steals and blocks matter. We want to see that you can put out fires when the emergencies call for it. It’s just that rim protection and containment against dribble penetration are frequently the subtle and unsexy pursuits that matter even more. The big play didn’t have to happen because the offensive player never actually got an advantage.
Grant-Foster makes some flabbergasting defensive plays in open space. But while it’s fun to watch him dig hard on Stanford’s Maxime Raynaud (someone we’ll surely talk about at some point) and then recover to the corner that he’d left fast enough to block an attempt from 3, I wonder about his ability to avoid gambling too much when it comes defending legitimate NBA scorers. If you have an obvious jumpiness, it will quickly get used against you.
At a smaller program, Grant-Foster’s role is drastically different than Brown’s, although he doesn’t exactly inspire visions of a life handling the ball beyond college. He is a nimble, bendy athlete who can change directions easily, and he uses those traits to slither his way into the paint. The problem is that he’s often out of control once he gets there—he’s a fairly turnover-prone player who too often finds himself either awkwardly bowling over defenders, losing the ball and failing to leverage his advantage in any meaningful way. We’re early in the schedule, I grant you, but the uptick in pick-and-roll and isolation reps has not been accompanied by efficiency. TGF would almost certainly be forced to become an off-ball mover and a catch-and-shoot player, which teams would relentlessly and ruthlessly dare him to do, which I fear would prevent him from ever really breaking through.
The NBA has shown us how tricky it can be for even the best defenders to stay on the floor if they struggle to be a positive on the offensive end. Passing the ball well isn’t enough—you’ve got to be a threat to score, because if you aren’t, everyone suffers. If I’m in a draft war room, my gut says that Brown is a better bet to offer enough on both ends to warrant a chance.
The Two Game-Changing Prospects On the Horizon
In most situations in life, if you announced that you were driving three hours to something called “The Grind Session” to see some teenagers, you’d feel the cold snap of handcuffs locking onto your wrists moments later. Luckily this was basketball, and basketball that I couldn’t pass up. So I drove to Murray, Kentucky (a long, uneventful drive along the width of the state from one end to the other), to see Utah Prep take on Prolific Prep.
Together, these clubs feature multiple high-major prospects. Winters Grady is a sharpshooter headed to Michigan. Skillful stretch big Niko Bundalo is a part of a stellar Washington recruiting class that includes Utah Prep’s JJ Mandaquit (injured and sitting out this event). Obinna Ekezie, the former Maryland standout, has a son, which causes me to have an existential crisis every time I think about it; he was there, too. But AJ Dybantsa and Darryn Peterson were the draw, and they sit in a clear-cut tier above everyone in not only this event, but nationally. A chance to see them head-to-head was too good to pass up.
I’ve droned on and on about Dybantsa, now a BYU commit. But Peterson, a Kansas commit, clouds the discussion around AJ being the consensus no. 1 player in the 2025 high school class. Peterson’s public notoriety doesn’t match his reputation amongst evaluators. Dybantsa is a confirmed 6-foot-8, with slippery mobility and impressive explosiveness, but Peterson didn’t look out of place next to him. Peterson, who is 12 days older than Dybantsa, is at a minimum 6-4, and might be 6-5, with a lean yet chiseled frame and broad shoulders. He emphatically checks the boxes of power and speed without constantly bulldozing his way into the paint. A real smooth mover with the ball in his hands. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I would take Peterson over any non-Flagg player in this upcoming draft, and even him vs. Flagg is at least a discussion.
Power and speed can often become a hammer in the hands of a young player, and as a result, they see every quandary in front of them as a nail. But I’m encouraged by how carefully Peterson utilizes his physical tools at this stage. The real pressure within his offense is still in attacking the basket—if he turns the corner and sees contesting help he has no problem contorting or powering through hands or arms; he adjusts well in the air to pass or finish and his touch in the middle is good. From there, you hope to see a pull-up game that can punish defenses loading up to prevent that, and that’s one area where Peterson is working to become more consistent. While I wouldn’t say he’s the most dynamic shooter when it comes to direction or what kinds of actions he’s shooting out of, he definitely looks the part when all the details of his mechanics have the time to play out. His shot was highly volatile this past summer on the Adidas 3SSB circuit (26.2 percent on 61 3-point attempts) because his selection was volatile. With Prolific, the choices have been more sensible and the results have been better.
At this moment, I don’t have a solid enough opinion to choose a satisfying one-to-one comp for Peterson. His build, size, and the degree of twitch in his movement stir Russell Westbrook vibes, but at a similar age Peterson shows more polish and control in the nuance of his craft and decision-making around the rim, in addition to being a better shooter. There’s some Anthony Edwards in there, although DP is further along as a passer and (like nearly everyone) not quite in that stratosphere as an athlete. If tortured by a Bond villain, I would say he’s in the Victor Oladipo or Donovan Mitchell archetype, just a bit bigger—a three-level scoring guard with blossoming playmaking chops.
Something that I love about the top of this 2025 high school class (and, eventually, the 2026 draft class)—and I’m going to include Flagg, who reclassified before his senior year—is that they all seem to want to go at each other. We wring our hands a lot about the future of the American game, and I really don’t worry about this group in that sense. Peterson and Dybantsa were checking each other for a lot of the game and were animatedly competitive throughout.
The “winning me over” part of the conversation has been over with Dybantsa for a while. We’ve moved on to monitoring the responsive skill sets within his game, and the absence of Mandaquit in this game was thrusting him into those situations even more. Prolific consistently brought two to the ball in an effort to make someone else on Utah’s roster beat them, and Dybantsa more often than not did the simple (correct) thing. For superstar talents, that’s the baseline of what we’re looking for. Create advantage. See advantage. Take advantage. It’s amazing how many skilled scorers can do the first or even the second thing while failing to do the third.
When he wasn’t working that polished midrange game, Dybantsa was skipping it to the corner from the post and zipping it to cutting teammates. Prolific pulled away in this one, but I was pretty impressed with Dybantsa’s ability to share.
People seem to whisper a bit when they talk about Dybantsa’s comps, because the names that come up feel blasphemous. AJ himself mentioned Tracy McGrady. I’m going to fire this one off: his shot distribution and athleticism remind me of Kobe Bryant. Will he be as good as Kobe? No idea. A wagering brain would say no for sheer safety, but I see more Bean in him than McGrady. What an argument to have about a prospect, right?
There’s been a lot said in recent days about Dybantsa’s BYU announcement, but a stealthy wrinkle of his decision is that he’ll be steeped in a defensive philosophy that is committed to peel switching on a day-to-day basis. This is a concept that is increasingly present in the NBA, one where teams avoid bringing an extra defender to the ball once the initial player is beaten by having the closest defender switch onto the offensive player, and the beaten defender “peels” in a mad dash to the place where the switch defender left. During that mad dash there are windows (albeit small windows) where the ball handler can make a quick read and create an open shot. It’s an accelerated exercise of seeing rotation, and that could be huge for the way Dybantsa processes the game.
He’ll also be in the Big 12, which means we’re going to see him against quality in-conference competition. Among those opponents will be … Kansas. And Darryn Peterson. Take my money.
