2024 NBA Draft: The Best and Worst Athletes in This Year's Class
The NBA Combine has increasingly become eventized by the league in the same way so many dates on the calendar have before. The draft lottery is held right before the combine, the drills and testing are on TV, there are massive media availabilities, the whole nine yards.
But in recent years, it was also kind of a bummer because top prospects would either skip the combine altogether or show up but not get measured or participate in any of the drills or tests. This year’s combine was different on that front.
Among players commonly projected as potential lottery picks, only Kentucky guard Rob Dillingham, JL Bourg (France) forward Zaccharie Risacher, Mega MIS (Serbia) point guard Nikola Topic, and Cholet (France) forward Tidjane Salaun didn’t participate in testing. The three international players weren’t at the combine at all, so Dillingham (who is dealing with an ankle injury) was the only one who went and didn’t work out. Dillingham did get measured and he was a tiny 6-1, 164.2 pounds, for what it’s worth.
Because so many of the top prospects participated, I thought this was a good time to bring back a project I originally worked on a few years ago for a site called NBAthlete.com, where I housed all of the publicly-available NBA combine data and used it to generate both athleticism ratings and similarity scores for draft prospects. I was doing almost everything by hand and it eventually became too unwieldy to manage, so I shut it down.
I figured out a way to automate the calculations and save myself oodles and oodles of time, and I think the information itself is still quite valuable, so here it is. In the space below, you will find bSPARQ athleticism ratings for this year’s draft class, and every class since 2000. What is bSPARQ, you might ask?
bSPARQ is an offshoot of SPARQ, which stands for Speed Power Agility Reaction and Quickness, and it is a tool to measure the athleticism of NBA Draft prospects. SPARQ was originally developed by NIKE and some version of it has been used to measure the athleticism of athletes for several years. It is extremely popular among certain NFL teams, for example. By reverse-engineering the formula that was used to measure SPARQ for high-school athletes, we1 were able to create a similar metric to measure the athleticism of NBA prospects.
The full database of bSPARQ ratings can now be accessed by clicking the bSPARQ tab on the home page. (The old player similarity calculator I had for NBAthlete isn’t working correctly, but I do want to eventually have that up on the site as well. If you’re at all interested in helping and/or if you just know a good way to create similarity scores, feel free to reach out.)
Before we get into the data and a few of my key takeaways, please note:
bSPARQ ratings are available only for players who participated in the 3/4 court sprint, lane agility drill, bench press, standing vertical leap, and maximum vertical leap, and had measurements taken of their height, weight, and standing reach.
If a player is unlisted, he did not participate in the requisite number of drills to qualify for a bSPARQ score. That’s why you won’t see players like LeBron James, Zion Williamson, and more who would have assuredly broken the bSPARQ formula.
bSPARQ does NOT measure how good a player is at basketball. It strictly measures his performance in athletic testing at the combine relative to his peers.
Got all that? Great. Let’s get into it.
And here are a few of my key takeaways regarding this year’s prospects:
UConn forward Alex Karaban scored in the 1st percentile of athleticism for big men, making him the fifth-least athletic player relative to his position in a database that now includes 1,448 players. (A 22-inch standing vertical will crush your bSPARQ score.) He was listed as a power forward at the combine and so is classified as a Big here, but if he were a Combo Forward he still would have a 1st percentile athleticism grade and if he were a Wing it would be 5th percentile. No matter how you slice it, he looks like a low-level athlete. He did shoot 39% from deep across two college seasons, though, so he has an NBA skill in his bag.
There were five additional players who scored in the 5th percentile or lower in bSPARQ: Illinois forward Coleman Hawkins, Karaban’s UConn teammate, guard Cam Spencer, Iowa forward Payton Sandfort, Kansas guard Johnny Furphy, and Ilawarra (Australia) guard A.J. Johnson.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, UCLA big man Adem Bona registered a 99th percentile bSPARQ score, making him one of the most athletic players in combine history, regardless of position. bSPARQ loves players who weigh in heavier than usual for their height and then jump high, so Bona’s 35-inch standing vert and 40-inch max vert at 6’8.25” and 243.2 pounds stand out. Monster-sized Purdue big man Zach Edey, meanwhile, clocked 3.01 seconds in the shuttle run at 7’3.75” and 299 pounds, which played heavily into his 92nd percentile bSPARQ.
Edey, by the way, measured as the second-tallest player in combine history among those who participated in the athletic testing portion of the event, behind only Tacko Fall. Not too far behind was UConn’s Donovan Clingan, who measured at 7’1.75”, making him the seventh-tallest player in the database. Edey was also the seventh-heaviest player and Clingan was 15th-heaviest.
Alabama guard Mark Sears measured as the shortest player (5’10.25”) who participated in testing, tied with Shane Larkin2 and Sherron Collins. Sears still tested as the most athletic point guard in the class, ranking in the 86th percentile.
Projected No. 1 pick Alexandre Sarr checked in as only a 55th percentile athlete, though a lot of that is owed to his weighing only 224.2 pounds at 6’11.75”. If he registered the same athletic testing scores but weighed 240, he’d shoot up to the 78th percentile in bSPARQ.
USC guard Bronny James was listed as a shooting guard at the combine, which means he was classified as a Wing here. He registered a 78th percentile bSPARQ score; but if he were a Combo Guard (89th percentile) or Point Guard (97th), he would have fared even better. So, even though he checked in much shorter than expected (6’1.5”), he still (unsurprisingly, given his genes) looks like he has high-level athleticism, as evidenced by his 32-inch standing vert, 40.5-inch max vert, and uniformly above-average agility testing. One of his closest comps in terms of size and athleticism is Tony Allen, which is certainly interesting. (Note that this is not the athletic similarity comparison I referenced earlier, just a player who had similar measurements and bSPARQ score.)
Providence guard Devin Carter put up class-best marks in both the 3/4 court sprint and max vertical. (His sprint was actually the fastest of any player at the combine since 2000.) He was listed as a shooting guard by the combine and thus, like Bronny, came in as a 78th percentile athlete. A lot of that is because he is very small for the Wing classification at 6’2.25” and 193 pounds. Move him to Combo Guard (89th percentile) or Point Guard (97th percentile) and he fares far better. Carter (89.51) and James (89.50) had nearly identical bSPARQ scores.
Virginia point guard Reece Beekman and Kentucky point guard Reed Sheppard actually did have identical bSPARQ scores. They each checked in as 75th percentile athletes for the position. Beekman was significantly heavier at 196.4 pounds to Sheppard's 181.6 and he posted better marks in the lane agility and 3-4 court spring, but Sheppard’s better shuttle run vastly superior marks in both standard and max vertical were enough to close the gap. Beekman’s a senior who was not a particularly good shooter while Sheppard is a freshman who had one of the best shooting seasons of all time and jumped out of the gym, so that’d be why one (Sheppard) is a lottery lock and the other (Beekman) is hoping to get drafted.
Sheppard’s teammate, Justin Edwards, was a top prospect coming out of high school, ranking No. 3 in the class. But he was somewhat disappointing during his lone season at UK and he put up some eye-opening (in a bad way) combine numbers, with the worst lane agility time in the class, the eighth-worst shuttle run, and vertical leaps of only 28 (standing) and 32 (max) inches. He tested as a 34th percentile athlete.
Unlike his brother Jalen, Colorado forward Cody Williams (a potential lottery pick himself) did not fare so well here. Jalen checked in as an 86th percentile athlete for a wing back in 2022, while Cody was in just the 19th percentile this year. Jalen fared a bit better than his brother in the lane agility drill and the vertical leap (standing and max) portion of the combine, while Cody came out on top in the shuttle run and 3/4 court sprint. But Jalen putting up his scores at 6’4.5” and 209.2 pounds while Cody registered his at 6’6.5” and 178.4 pounds makes a big difference.
This one admittedly might only be notable for me because of my alma mater, but Miami wing Kyshawn George unsurprisingly checked in as a considerably below-average athlete (24th percentile). He’s incredibly skilled — especially for his height — but he is, charitably, quite ground-bound and not particularly quick or fast. Some of that could be due to the fact that he’s grown something insane like 10 inches in 2.5 years or something along those lines, but he’s also just not a bouncy dude in general.
If I’m shouting out my alma mater then I have to do the same for my brother, or else he’ll yell at me. Indiana big man Kel’El Ware put together an impressive performance. His lane agility time looked more like a guard’s than a center’s and he tied for the sixth-highest standing vertical. At 6’11.75” and 230 pounds, he registered an 83rd percentile bSPARQ.
Based on what I’ve heard about him as a player, I was not at all surprised to see UConn wing Stephon Castle post similar measurements and athleticism scores to Josh Hart. Herb Jones was also in a similar size-athleticism bucket. (Again, this is not an athletic similarity comparison, just a couple of players with similar measurements and bSPARQ scores.)
Duke big man Kyle Filipowski and Colorado big man Tristan da Silva checked in as 25th and 23rd percentile athletes, respectively. Filipowski is probably a floor-spacing big so that matters a bit less for him. (I admittedly don’t know all that much about da Silva yet.)
I hadn’t heard of Adelaide (Australia) wing Trentyn Flowers before compiling this data, but he tested as the most athletic wing in a generally very unathletic class of wings. He’s in the 85th percentile and is the only wing in the 80s. G League Ignite forwards Matas Buzelis and Ron Holland both registered as below-average athletes on the wing.
As I start preparing for the draft and watching these guys, I’m sure I will have more takeaways, but I wanted to get the data out there quickly. As previously mentioned, I am also still looking for help in generating a new similarity score engine, so if you’re willing and/or want to help, give me a shout.
bSPARQ was developed in conjunction with Brandon Boyd and Colin Clapham.
FROM? The U!