How Should Elite Prospects With Atypical Physiques Be Valued?

Hope springs eternal among NBA fans. Most are hyper focused on upside, and finding the next big superstar to hopefully build a championship team around.

The common mentality is that nothing matters but winning a championship, and the only reasonable way to go about this is by placing a huge value on every hail mary lottery ticket in sight.

This is exemplified with the notion that Zion Williamson has clearly positive trade value, in spite of being owed $194 million over the next 5 years after averaging 28.5 games per year in his first 4 NBA seasons.

Zion’s unreliability has been foreseeable since he entered the league, and now that it is plainly obvious, people still refuse to acknowledge it. No player with this body type has ever succeeded in the NBA. Even Shaq and Barkley were not this thick in their early years.

Zion’s body has failed him at every stop. He got hurt in high school, he got hurt in college, he got hurt in summer league, and he has been consistently injured in the NBA. Combine that with questionable discipline, and there is no reason to project him to be healthy going forward.

He has been so frequently injured that people have not paused to consider that perhaps his contract is not especially good value even if he stays healthy. Zion is an excellent scorer with elite volume and efficiency, as well as a good passer, but he barely attempts 3 pointers and is subpar on defense. For all of the obsession with 16 game players, it should be obvious that a player who offers neither 3 nor D is unlikely to lead a team a championship.

When you consider the high likelihood that he will continue to get hurt, how is he ever worth the risk of $40M of year when the payoff with health is essentially Fat Trae Young on the wing. Zion is not nearly as bad as Trae defensively, but he is a much worse shooter and ultimately a similar level of flawed + high friction player.

Trae is a very good player of similar statistical caliber. He raises a team’s odds of reaching the playoffs, and gives them a puncher’s chance of winning a series or two. But his lack of defense makes him high friction to build around, and fans started to sour on him this season after Atlanta failed to improve with a Dejounte Murray acquisition.

Most would agree that Trae is still worth the $43M/year he is due over his current deal. But if he was a clear favorite to get injured and miss the majority of the regular season as well as the playoffs each year, nobody in their right mind is paying $40M+ per year for Trae.

Yet because Zion has yet to play consistently enough to show his warts, fans still perceive him as a positive asset. The current debate on twitter is how high the price should be, with some major resistance to the idea of trading him for #2 overall or a quality young prospect.

Getting any useful assets would be nothing short of a heist for the Pelicans. Yet people still prefer to degenerately gamble on his generational hype coming to fruition. This is insanity.

Chet

Chet Holmgren is on the opposite end of the girth spectrum as Zion. He didn’t have as much of an injury history as Zion, but it was still clear pre-draft his atypical physical profile could lead to subpar durability.

Then he got hurt and missed the season before playing a single NBA minute. This is a bad sign for somebody with such a frail physique.

Perhaps he will have better health luck going forward, but even if so his frame could limit his ability to create offense, finish in traffic, and defend vs stronger NBA players. He can be good anyway, but may fall short of the greatness implied by his college numbers.

Walker Kessler was a similar NCAA player in both impact and style, posting 14.7 BPM at Auburn compared to Chet’s 15 BPM at Gonzaga while being just 9 months older. He slid all the way to #22 because he does not offer 3 point shooting to space the floor like Chet, but he also does not have an outlier thin frame.

While Chet was rehabbing his injury, Kessler posted a monster rookie season for Utah, and was statistically the best rookie in the NBA by most metrics.

He is a slightly older rookie with less to build on, and it is not clear that he has a path to becoming much better than Rudy Gobert. But he has fairly decent odds of becoming a Gobert level player, and is already playing at a higher level than a typical #2 overall pick.

Yet the vast majority of twitter still prefers Holmgren, which is insane. He has some fuzzy amount of injury and translation risk, and not all that much more upside to be better than Kessler. 

Chet’s shooting makes him a more desirable archetype if they reach a similar value, but that benefit is trivial compared to all of the risk presented by his unprecedented frame. If he stays relatively healthy and provides similar value to Kessler, that’s a great outcome for Chet or any #2 overall pick. There’s not nearly enough unicorn upside to punt so much median value.

Wemby

Wemby is on the thin side, but not quite as thin as Chet. This on its own is not a fatal flaw, as he may fill out decently enough in time. But in tandem with his massive 7’5 height, he is in a zone where there have been few successful NBA careers.

The hope is that he becomes a modern Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who had exceptional peak and longevity and one of the best careers in NBA history. But Kareem was several inches shorter at 7’2, which has been the maximum height for a long NBA career.

We have seen Ralph Sampson fall flat both in terms of early production and have a short peak due to injuries. Yao Ming lived up to his #1 selection when healthy, but had a relatively short peak due to injuries. Kristaps Porzingis showed promise early in his career, and he is still good for a #4 pick in his prime, but injuries have limited his defensive impact and market value.

Granted, this is a small sample and perhaps Wemby can be the first 7’3+ guy to have a long and dominant career. But he obviously comes with more injury risk than the typical #1 prospect. And while he should be good, it is not clear that he is a lock to be a perennial MVP level of good.

He is clearly the correct choice at #1 overall this year, but the generational hype is overblown. It is ridiculous to put him on the level of LeBron James or Luka Doncic who fit traditional star molds. And if there was an Anthony Davis, Joel Embiid, Jaren Jackson Jr., or Evan Mobley tier prospect on the board he may not be the correct choice.

Yes, he could have a huge payoff, but his atypical physical profile gives him extra downside that is not a concern with prototypical molds.

The Spurs say they are not listening to Wemby offers, and that could be a mistake if a team is willing to gouge themselves to trade for the pick.

If they could get Franz Wagner and Paolo Banchero from Orlando, that is a deal that would be worth pursuing. Especially if they can sneak in a Jalen Suggs on the side.

Franz is already a good NBA player. He will likely always be underrated for the value he derives from doing small things well, but his upside is not all that limited in a traditional sense. He can handle, pass, shoot, defend multiple positions, and get to the rim and finish, and is the type of player that fits into every lineup. Perhaps he never posts MVP caliber box score statistics, but he could make a top 5 impact by cumulatively offering a bit of everything.

Paolo is a bit riskier as he is highly levered based on how much his shooting and efficiency improves throughout his career. But he was the #1 pick last year and rookie of the year. He likely will be a good player and possibly will be great.

It may be a scary proposition to potentially trade the next Kareem for what may never amount to more than an elite role player and empty calories volume scorer. But it should be at least as scary to pass up a possibly elite star wing duo to lock into the next Greg Oden or Ralph Sampson.

Wemby is not quite in the same boat as Zion or Chet, as he has a much thicker upside tail. But everybody is so obsessed with upside, it is inevitable that median gets underrated.

Summary

Most fans want hyped prospects to succeed to make the NBA more exciting. It adds further to the intrigue when there is a prospect that is unlike anything we have seen before, such as Zion with his explosive scoring and Wemby being a supersized unicorn.

If there is a prospect unlike anything we have seen before, there is typically a reason why. In part it’s because humans with Zion’s girth, Chet’s skinniness, or Wemby’s insane dimensions scarcely exist. But guys as thick as Zion normally end up in the NFL, jumbo bigs have an extremely spotty injury history, and it’s intuitive that being as physically frail as Chet should be a significant impediment in a physical sport.

They should be valued for their on court goodness, but they should also be viewed through a skeptical lens without a clear precedent to suggest they are reliable value propositions. But it seems that consensus tends to swing the opposite way, and wishfully think that maybe their uniqueness makes them better than anything that has been seen in the past.

Chet can be good, Wemby can be great, and Zion can randomly have a healthy season or two without leading his team to a title. But there is a limit to how high they should be valued when they are trying to overcome a lack of historical precedent.

Ironically, nobody considered Nikola Jokic to have a unique upside tail when there had already been two high IQ passing bigs with underwhelming athleticism to be criminally underrated in the draft in Marc Gasol and Brad Miller. It should not have been difficult to discern that upside was plausible with two historical precedents. Then Jokic turned out to be a suped up version of those guys and is now the biggest draft steal in NBA history.

Conversely, Ralph Sampson and Greg Oden have flopped at #1 due to injuries, and even successful prospects like Yao have been limited by longevity issues. This alone makes it worth pausing before valuing Wemby to the moon and treating him as a LeBron James tier prospect.

Zion doesn’t even require logical deduction. He always gets hurt and he is a flawed player. One dimensional scorers never lead teams to titles historically, so gambling that he will both be healthy and the one to do it is a wildly degenerate parlay. If he can be traded for anything New Orleans needs to get a deal done this offseason.