2024 NBA Draft: bSPARQ Athletic Similarity Scores for top prospects

Which players count Jalen Brunson, Brook Lopez, John Wall, Aaron Gordon, Klay Thompson, and Dwight Howard among their closest athletic comps?

Photo by COLIN MURTY/AFP via Getty Images

Earlier this week, I brought back the bSPARQ athleticism ratings after many of the top prospects participated in this year’s NBA combine. I also put out a call in that post for help with a new athletic comparison engine, and very quickly got some from

Jacob Sutton

. Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t allow for embedding of Google Sheets, so I can’t grant wide access to the engine itself. Instead in the space below, I’m going to run through comparisons for some of the top prospects in this class.

We’ll start with projected No. 1 overall pick Alex Sarr, who has quite an eclectic mix of athletic comparisons. It runs the gamut from a traditional center in Marcin Gortat to a space big like Pascal Siakam, who now plays like more of a wing than he did when he participated in the combine back in 2016. Also included are Nic Claxton, Chris Bosh, and 2024 draft-mates Jesse Edwards and Kel’el Ware.

I’d like to note a couple things here:

• These comparisons are strictly based on a player’s measurements and athletic testing at the NBA combine. They do not at all account for style of play, production, projected role, draft slot, or really anything other than the data is collected at the combine itself. That’s why you’ll find a diverse array of player archetypes in each list.

• The comparisons account for a player’s height, weight, wingspan, standing reach, lane agility, 3/4-court sprint, shuttle run, bench press (or imputed bench press, as appropriate), standing vertical, and max vertical.

• It is very important to look at the similarity scores themselves. For example, every player in Sarr’s top 20 comparables registers a similarity score of at least 80.66%, as you can see above. Meanwhile, Tristan da Silva’s single-closest comp checks in at 78.52%. So, factoring in the closeness of the comparison in addition to the identity of the player to whom they are similar is something to take into account.

Got all that? Great.

Now, for the rest of the athletic similarity scores — including Matas Buzelis, Reed Sheppard, Donovan Clingan, Stephon Castle, Ron Holland, Dalton Knecht, Cody Williams, Isaiah Collier, Ja’Kobe Walter, Devin Carter, Jared McCain, Tristan da Silva, Kyle Filipowski, Yves Missi, Carlton Carrington, Kel’el Ware, Zach Edey, Tyler Smith, Johnny Furphy, Kyshawn George, Adam Bona, and Bronny James — hit the jump below.¹

Founding level subscribers, reply to this email and I will send you a link to the comparison generator so you can test it out. It includes every prospect who has participated in athletic testing at the combine going all the way back to 2000, so if you have ever wondered about things like, “Which NBA players were most similar athletically to Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje (or — more likely — Dwyane Wade, Blake Griffin, Kevin Durant, Rudy Gobert, Jalen Brunson, and more)”, you can now see for yourself.

In the meantime, if anybody out there knows of a workaround for embedding Google Sheets into Substack so that I can have the dynamic chart and allow more people to play around with the generator, please hit me up!

Enjoy.