Let's Not Be Mean: Jaime Jaquez has an Underrated Median

In spite of winning Pac-12 player of the year, Jaime Jaquez is failing to garner 1st round draft hype, sitting at #36 on ESPN’s big board. In some regards it makes sense. He is a 6’7 PF, who relies on a crafty old man game to outmaneuver and bully opposing defensive players in the paint. But he is not an athlete, struggles to blow by defenders, and struggles to finish over length. As a senior who recently turned 22, he does not project to be much of a scorer in the NBA.

This gives him less perceived upside than a number of players who are younger and/or more athletic, as he fits more of an NBA role player mold. And even within the role player mold, his shooting is somewhat fringey for an NCAA senior, making career 32.9% 3P 73.5% FT.

But Jaquez has been a 4 year starter who has helped revitalize a UCLA program that was at a low point. In his sophomore and junior seasons they finished #13 and #11 via kenpom.com ratings, and this year they are #2 as they enter the Pac-12 tourney. Jaquez has statistically been the best player on all of those teams, and backed it up with an excellent defensive performance. He made the Pac-12 all-defensive team as a sophomore and junior before missing it this year— seemingly because the voters did not want to reward too many UCLA players with teammates Adem Bona and Jaylen Clark occupying 2 of the 5 spots on the team and Jaquez getting his flowers with conference POY.

He may not seem like a traditional defensive stopper as a 6’7 guy who is not particularly explosive, but he moves his feet decently enough to adequately defend the perimeter. He also has excellent awareness on defense, makes intelligent rotations, and occasionally makes surprising blocks on larger bigs. He is a solid rebounder with good strength and is not easy to push around, and has quick hands to generate a good steal rate.

While he does not have the length or athleticism to be an NBA defensive player of the year candidate, he brings enough goodness on this end to likely make a positive impact. The concern is whether he will do enough offensively to fit in.

Historically the best signal for undersized NCAA PF’s converting to NBA wings (an archetype formerly called a “tweener” for being stuck in between SF and PF) is assist to turnover. Jaquez is averaging a rock solid 2.4 assists vs 1.9 tovs this year and 2.0 vs 1.5 for his career. He is also a passable shooter, and is the leading scorer for the #2 team in the country posting 55% TS on 27 usage, so there are signals to believe his offense will be fine.

Comparisons

If we look at comps at barttorvik.com, there are late 1st busts similar to Jaquez such as Damion James (1.1 assists vs 1.8 TOVs) and Lazar Hayward (0.9 assists vs 1.7 TOVs) who can be red flagged with subpar A:TO rates over their 4 year careers.

JR Giddens also pops up as a close comp, but he was mostly a 6’5 spot up guy with mediocre shooting early in his career for Kansas, and did not break out until being a 23 year old 5th year senior for mid-major New Mexico. This is another important signal for the archetype— many tweeners who have decent A:TO that do not succeed in the NBA such as Chandler Hutchison or Semi Ojeleye do not play like NBA caliber prospects until later in their NCAA career, which is a red flag.

Once we weed out the prospects who looked nothing like future NBA players early in their careers and the bad assist:turnovers, this mold has a fairly high hit rate. If we look at the prospects in the past 20 years fit this standard and are most similar to Jaquez, we are left with a solid group of role players. Per 40 minutes pace adjusted.

These are the more optimistic role player outcomes for Jaquez. But it’s a fairly long list of success cases, and all of these guys are/were highly useful to contenders at their respective peaks. They also were largely questioned for their lack of athleticism and quickness pre-draft. There was no dunk info on Dudley, Carroll, and Tucker, but it would hardly be surprising if Jaquez had the highest dunk rate of the bunch.

In terms of dimensions, Jaquez is listed as 6’7, but we will have to see his official measurements at the combine. If he measures closer to 6’6 that will be a disappointment. He seems unlikely to have a massive wingspan, but on the bright side Kenrich and Dudley show that T-Rexism is not a major red flag if you are 6’7+ and know how to play.

All of these guys became above average 3 + D role players, which is a great asset in the modern NBA because teams cannot get enough of this archetype. Granted, this is the list with an optimistic skew, so let’s move onto some more lukewarm comparisons:

What is interesting is that this cluster outside of Singler is much dunkier and had more praise for their athleticism and quickness from DraftExpress scouting reports than the prior group, but nobody peaked as particularly good. There is a case to be made that outside of the top 20 that filtering for the best hoopers with acceptable athleticism is more efficient than filtering for the best athletes with acceptable hooperism.

Regardless, this group is not all bad. Booker + Barton performed well above median for late 1st/early 2nd picks, and Pondexter and Singler are close to median. Jeff Taylor was a bust, and he was a diluted version of the rest of the group across the board. Same for Singler, who had an anemic dunk rate to boot.

Gary Clark went undrafted, and played for Mick Cronin who currently coaches Jaquez at UCLA. Clark had an insane profile statistically, but was sorely underskilled for a 23 year old SF as he played more of a garbageman role for Cincinnati. He also seemed a bit too slow to defend the perimeter. I rated him 47th and liked him as UDFA, but had doubts about translating to the NBA. Since Clark had elite stats for the same coach he is reason to pause before getting too drunk on Jaquez kool-aid. But at the same time Jaquez seems better equipped to translate to the NBA perimeter in terms of handle, mobility, and shooting, which correlates with his draft stock being higher.

Dekker is the good prospect of the group who failed. He is not exactly the same archetype as the rest of these guys, but he was huge and efficient and a legit 1st round talent who didn’t work out.

Not listed was Sterling Brown who had similarities to Jaquez, but he was 6’5 with anemic scoring and reeked of quality NCAA role player not built for the NBA. Jacob Evans is another Mick Cronin prospect who flopped with a somewhat similar profile, but is smaller measuring 6’5.5” at combine and significantly worse rebounding than this group at 6.3 per 40 pace adjusted. He was a small SG all the way, not a tweener who needed to convert to SF.

While plenty of similar players have failed, most of them do not check quite the same boxes as Jaquez. And a number of similar players have gone on to solidly useful careers, so it seems that Jaquez should have a good success rate for a non-lottery prospect.

Should We Be Worried About Jaquez Lack of Upside?

Even if we buy Jaquez as having good odds of being a PJ Tucker or Jared Dudley type, and not likely to be worse than Will Barton or Quincy Pondexter, how valuable is that prospect really? He is not going to do much to turn around a team stuck in the dumpster, and conventional wisdom says that teams need to swing for the fences before settling for a solid role player like Jaquez.

But sometimes players who don’t seem to have high upside end up becoming really good. Here are a couple of guys drafted in the 30s who have some similarities to Jaime who worked out well:

Granted, it is not likely he becomes nearly as good as either of these guys. Draymond was bigger with a huge wingspan, and a stronger rebounder. It’s unlikely Jaquez could fill Draymond’s role as a small 5 for a death lineup.

Jimmy Butler is an even stranger case because he had no clear signal of upside whatsoever. DraftExpress lauded him for doing all of the small things that add up, but nevertheless lamented his lack of athleticism, quickness, or creation ability and said “he does not have the pedigree of a future NBA All-Star.” And his statistics painted a similar picture of low upside role player.

Granted, it is a rare case for a prospect to overachieve to the outlier extent that Jimmy did. But it happens sometimes, and Jaquez shares the commonality of being a high IQ team oriented player who gets by on feel more than athleticism. It would be a major surprise if he became anywhere close to Jimmy’s level of greatness, but the same could be said for most picks outside of the top of the lottery.

Where Does Jaquez Rank in This Draft?

It is too soon to say with certainty. His measurements are fairly important— if he disappoints by measuring 6’6 in shoes that takes away appeal. Also it would be nice to see him perform well in the draft combine scrimmage, as that often is a surprisingly predictive signal for older prospects.

But we can look at some of the “upside” guys projected above him in round 1 such as GG Jackson, who is #26 on ESPN’s board, even though he is terrible at basketball. His median outcome is something like a poor man’s Kevin Knox, so if we say Jaquez median is something like a Will Barton, then it should be clear that Jaquez has a better median outcome.

But the question is— at what inflection point does Jackson pass Jaquez due to his youth and decent tools giving him wider error bars? At 70th percentile if Jaquez is Jared Dudley and GG is Kevin Knox, it still isn’t close. So does GG pass him at 95th percentile? 99th percentile? 99.9th percentile?

Even at 99.9, Jaquez is probably something like Jimmy Butler with a better 3 ball. GG’s 99.9 percentile likely entails growing 2” and becoming an elite 3 point shooter. He may resemble something like Kevin Durant, but he still will have less length + fluidity and likely worse feel and still not be as good as KD. Jaquez may still be better if they hit their 1 out of 1000 upside.

Granted, GG Jackson is the tutorial boss of fake upside comparisons. Any half-decent prospect should be rated ahead of him, so let’s move on with some comparisons of Jaime to prospects rated in the lottery.

We can start with Jalen Hood-Schifino, currently ranked 12th on the premise that he will be Malcolm Brogdon if he has an outlier path of development. But at this time he is an inefficient mid-range chucker, and does not appear to be much closer to becoming Brogdon than Jaquez does to becoming Jimmy Butler. And of course Jaquez has the better common outcomes, because he is currently a much better player and is only 2 years 4 months older.

Then there are top 10 projected combo guards Nick Smith Jr. and Keyonte George. It seems you are hoping for them to become a player like Jordan Poole, Anfernee Simons, Tyrese Maxey, or Tyler Herro so they can be massively overpaid to be a decent 6th man. 3 + D wings like Dudley, Tucker, Carroll, DFS, Crowder, etc. can round out an elite first unit and are overall more impactful.

Or the Thompson twins are currently projected top 5. But they are still playing fake high school competition at age 20. When Jaquez was their age, he was the best player on UCLA’s Final Four team. They have more “upside” because of their athleticism, but their defense seems fairly far behind Jaquez in terms of fundamentals, and are not quite dominating high school defenses as creation hubs. They are fuzzy guys to estimate given their unprecedented level of competition, but odds are they are less good than Jaquez and it’s difficult to buy into them having any special upside tail.

And even if we look at the young guys who are reasonable choices in the mid-late lotto, such as Anthony Black, Jett Howard, Cam Whitmore, Brice Sensabaugh, and Jarace Walker, it’s hard to say. They are in the “why not” tier of young guys, where they have clearly shown enough potential to be worthy of lottery consideration, but not quite enough to believe in them with conviction.

Historically I have favored these mid-conviction young guys over higher conviction old guys, and looking back it appears that my rankings would have been more efficient by ranking some of the older prospects higher.

Bottom Line

It is too soon to commit to an aggressively bullish take on Jaquez. There is still the Pac-12 tournament, NCAA tournament, combine scrimmages, and combine measurements to come.

But with 4 year sample of NCAA goodness, a solid eye test, and fitting a mold that historically provides good value in the late 1st and early 2nd, there is quite a bit to like here. He seems to fit the archetype of 3 + D that every team wants that slides through the cracks due to lack of perceived upside.

For now, let’s stick to the lukewarm take that he is a top 20 prospect in this draft. But if he continues to look good after further scrutiny, it may be accurate to defy conventional wisdom and rate him as a lottery or top 10 value.