The Oklahoma City Thunder drafted another guard in NBC Sports’ mock draft published Monday.
The Thunder took Theo Maledon, a 19-year-old point guard for ASVEL in France who received lottery buzz early in the season and shown some promise as a potentially solid player.
Maledon is an interesting prospect in a couple of different senses. On the one hand, he was 16 years old when he started getting senior minutes for an ASVEL club that make it back to the Euroleague this year. He’s trained with the French senior national team. He started 23 of the 46 games that he played in. But his role fluctuated throughout the season, his consistency waned and he battled a shoulder injury throughout the season.
Maledon showed the ability to score at the rim and has a solid jumper, though he needs to improve his consistency on it. As a playmaker, he’s a creative passer and does a good job keeping his defender onto his back or hip, but must improve in traffic.
Hype for him died down after a shoulder injury and he doesn’t have a ton of minutes to watch: He averaged less than 18 minutes a game in both the LNB Pro A and EuroLeague.
On the Pro Basketball Talk podcast, Dauster and Kurt Helin discussed this pick.
While acknowledging that Oklahoma City is a good playoff team this season, they said that not many players project to be key pieces of the future.
“When you start thinking about the future for them, it’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and… anybody else? Unless you believe in Darius Bazley,” Helin said. “They need other young talent, so I don’t know that they’re going to be that picky about position.”
Because of that, adding another player to the dynamic three-guard unit isn’t out of the question, and Maledon has perhaps the highest upside at this point in the draft.
“Another player that can play the point, that can play a little bit off the ball, that could fit really well in a back court with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, that could fit really well in a back court with Chris Paul … and that could really use to learn from a point guard like Chris Paul to kind of develop some of those skills,” Dauster said.
With LNB Pro A, Maledon averaged 6.5 points and 1.9 assists in 15.6 minutes per game.
In EuroLeague play, he upped those averages to 7.4 points and 3.1 assists while shooting 36.7% from 3 in 17.7 minutes per game.
“That’s kind of like a plug-and-play and the fit makes a lot of sense,” Dauster said. “A lot of the mocks you look at will have Theo going like in the late teens … it feels like that’s a steal.”
