We’re approaching the home straight of conference play. It’s the time of the year when you’re usually getting a bit more comfortable with your evals,
As usual, this week wasn’t shy of great performances. Watching Duke absolutely obliterate Illinois at Madison Square Garden was quite something – this Blue Devils team has gone leaps and bounds since the start of the season and now are a bonafide national title contender. It feels like this year’s Duke is the best freshman-led college basketball team in quite some time.
Despite conference play approaching its end, this college basketball season still has some sleepers deliver big time. So let’s dive into it.
McNeil’s moment
One of the stories of the weekend was NC State’s Paul McNeil. Coming into the season, there were people who were high on McNeil, even believing that he could end up being a one-and-done player.
This clearly didn’t materialize as McNeil has been buried deep on the bench of a team fighting just to make the ACC tournament, let alone repeating their improbable March Madness run of 2024.
With coach Kevin Keatts desperately needing a win against Wake Forest, he finally turned to McNeil, giving the 6’5” freshman his first career start for NC State. And after that performance, it’s unlikely that McNeil is heading back to the end of the bench any time soon.
McNeil getting almost no playing time seemed bizarre for quite some time; NC State have been struggling all season in an unusually weak ACC, they play slow, suffer from poor shooting and low assist rates. Incidentally, athleticism, shooting and passing are three things that McNeil is more than capable of providing. Plus, the analytics on a super low sample size showed that the freshman was in fact producing and is due for a bigger role.
In his first start, McNeil immediately made that point clear. NC State jumped off to an 8-0 start, with McNeil having a hand in every one of those points – first, he got an offensive rebound outback, then drilled a three, before snatching another offensive rebound and finding a wide open three.
McNeil’s shotmaking was something else in this game. He displays a knack for self-creation and knocking down tough stepback threes. Though the best part of McNeil’s game to me is his passing – the execution may be a bit awkward in some cases, but he displays a high level of feel for the game with his court awareness and ability to deliver some pretty tough passes. This falling-out-of-bounds pass was a particular highlight; on the season, his AST% now stands at 25.3%.
McNeil is an impressive vertical athlete, though he doesn’t really have too much straight line burst to blow past defenders, so, at least for now, he’s a bit overly-reliant on making these tough stepback jumpshots. This manifests in poor rim pressure numbers (McNeil has taken just 16% of his shots at the rim).
It’s going to be fun watching McNeil for the rest of the season, as well as next year – be it at NC State, or any other college team.
Swain’s rise
I’ll just get straight to the point – Xavier’s forward Dailyn Swain is really good and should really be in NBA conversations.
By now he’s probably one of the best kept secrets, at least in high major basketball. An athletic 6’8” wing with + athleticism, fantastic defense, above average handle and ability to consistently get himself to the line? Yes, please.
Swain has had some really good games recently. I watched his performance against Butler on Tuesday and, once again, came away super impressed. Swain is a true stat sheet stuffer – the Bulldogs of Butler got hit with 13 points, 7 rebounds, 4 assists and, arguably most impressive, 6 steals.
I kind of already mentioned what makes Swain really good; he’s clearly an NBA level athlete, going way above the basic athletic threshold typically required for a next level player. Swain just glides around the court with his explosive first step and long strides. His hips are super fluid and allow Swain to stay glued to his defensive assignment as he navigates off ball screens. If you are guarded by Swain, you’re most likely have to work very hard to get to your spots.
Speaking of getting to your spots, Swain does that at a really good level himself, despite being a poor shooter (we’ll touch on that in a minute). It’s evidenced by two main metrics – Swain is in 91st percentile in rim shot frequency and has a 53% free throw rate.
This is all good stuff, but for Swain, his ultimate ceiling will come down to shooting. For a second straight season, he’s shooting his free throws at 80%+, which seems to indicate that his shooting touch is not completely broken. But Swain really doesn’t want to shoot the three, which is why Butler instructed his defender to completely roam off Swain on the perimeter.
His hesitancy to shoot the three also made for some awkward possessions when Butler went into a 2-3 zone in the second half, gladly giving up a wide open three for Swain. Having no jumpshot also prevents Swain from fully utilizing his handle and passing ability.
I’m not sure Swain is a guy for this year; he’s most likely coming back for a junior year, be it at Xavier or another program. He may (and should) go through the NBA process where the scouts will tell him to work on his jumpshot (duh), but despite the shooting struggles, I’m really high on Swain. He feels like a guy I’d have in the lottery for my first 2026 draft board.
Demin’s dilemma
By now I’m almost shocked to see BYU’s Egor Demin in top 10 of NBA draft conversations this year. ESPN’s Jonathan Givony had him going to the Blazers at 8 in his latest mock draft, published last week. And he’s not alone, there’s plenty of other people who still like Demin.
I really can’t wrap my head around that and I’m looking for explanations, I have the main two: First, Demin played really well early in the season (against some VERY light opposition), and he had some fantastic highlights, especially passing the ball, people assumed he was good and kind of stopped checking on him.
Second is that people are projecting an unreasonably high ceiling for Demin based on a profile of a player that he’s very unlikely to become – a 6’8” primary offensive engine. But that doesn’t look like what Demin is at all. I believe he has one of the worst shooting diets among all prospects projected to be drafted in 2025; we often criticize Ace Bailey for his shot selection and inability to get to the rim, but he’s at least making shots.
Meanwhile, Demin keeps chucking off the dribble three pointers at an unreasonably high rate and horrible efficiency, mainly because of his lack of explosion and handle. He stands at almost 10 three point attempts per 100 possessions. Per Synergy, 48% of his shots come off dribble.
His overall statistical profile on Bart Torvik still isn’t completely hideous, but that profile gets a very strong lift from the early non-con schedule; Demin’s BPM in conference play now stands at just 1.9, against top 50 opposition it’s even worse (-0.8). His three point shooting against top 50 teams drops down below 20%.
He’s being sold as a 6’8” long term project jumbo guard with next-level passing and feel for the game, but these types of players usually make their money being half-court offensive engines. On the contrary, Synergy ranks Demin in just 31st percentile in half-court. Demin indeed processes the game and makes good reads very quickly, but it was curious to see that almost all of his assists against Kansas came in open court.
In half-court, some of the possessions which ended up in Demin jacking up difficult threes were pretty painful to watch; it was basically offense coming to a half and watching Demin take shots that he’s unlikely to make.
This is pretty much me announcing that I’m out on Demin; I think that people are projecting him a ceiling that’s simply not there; I strongly believe that you can’t be a bad player in the Big 12 and be considered some sort of a high upside NBA draft pick. Demin has decent stocks and dunk numbers, so there’s probably a sign that Demin actually has the ability to access his physical tools and maybe, just maybe, there’s a path for him as a complementary offensive piece.
Javon Small is a big deal
Staying in the Big 12 – a few weeks ago I made this half-serious Bart Torvik query about West Virginia’s Javon Small being pretty similar to Payton Pritchard in terms of his statistical profile as a college senior.
The situation hasn’t changed that much. As a straight up comp, there’s obvious similarities between Small and Pritchard; both are slightly undersized, senior guards that are putting up phenomenal production in their final seasons; they are their team’s offensive engines with nearly identical usage, assist and turnover numbers, also generating a decent amount of steals.
Obviously, Pritchard is a better shooter; he was already nuclear in college. Small is not as good, but he can still very much hold his own in that department: the West Virginia guard hits that super sweet intersection of high volume three point and elite free throw shooting. Compared to Pritchard, Small is definitely more athletic. He has 12 dunks on the season, which may not seem like much, but is actually a pretty high threshold for senior guards with that level of passing and shooting in his height category.
For Small, he had to make major adjustments to his game as the season went on. The reason for that is the season-ending injury for his co-star Tucker DeVries, who provided some off-the-charts, from-the-parking-lot shooting ability and secondary playmaking.
That was a major blow for West Virginia offense, which, at times, can be a pretty tough watch, rarely breaking the 70 point mark in recent weeks.
Since DeVries went down, Small has basically been carrying the entire offense of the Mountaineers. Really, this team, without DeVries, has little business playing in the NCAA tournament, but Small has literally kept his team in the March Madness picture. According to evanmiya.com, his adjusted on-off offensive splits is 21.5, meaning that on offense, West Virginia is 21.5 points better per 100 possessions. That’s an offensive carry-job if I ever saw one.
For Small, the main questions he’ll have to answer will be at the other end of the floor. He’s actually putting up decent defensive numbers this season, but in his prior 3 college years, that wasn’t always the case. I like his ability to cover ground, generate steals and be a disruptive on-ball defender, but in the Cincinnati game, Small’s screen navigation left something to be desired.
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