Sekou Doumbouya - The Skywalker
No player in this draft epitomizes ‘potential’ as much as Sekou Doumbouya.
A native a Guinea, Doumbouya grew up in France and has played his basketball so far for Limoges. He missed a good part of last season with a hand injury, but those who watched him closely overseas all say he clearly turned a corner when he came back.
Strengths:
First and foremost, Doumbouya has an elite physical profile. He has the prototypical build for a 3/4 forward that NBA teams crave. He, in fact, has almost identical measurements to his closest player comp, Pascal Siakam.
Further, Doumbouya moves gracefully. He accelerates and runs like a deer, has excellent balance and body control, and gets off the ground quickly.
Doumbouya also has the age curve in his favor. Siakam was 22 at the time of his draft combine: Sekou is 18 - the youngest player in this draft. He also didn’t start playing organized basketball until he was 13. His tremendous progression and fairly high skill level in just 5 years of real play points to a tremendous natural talent. It’s almost certain he is not done growing, both physically and as a player.
Concerns:
There are no glaring red flags with Doumbouya. The concerns about drafting him are going to be specific to the teams evaluating him - their situation, and the infrastructure they have in place.
Doumbouya is very raw. It will take 2-3 years for him to be a real contributor at the NBA level, and how far along that path he gets will depend heavily on how patient the team that drafts him can afford to be, and what kind of training and developmental staff they have in place.
The Timberwolves shouldn’t have any issues with the second, as they’ve hired a fantastic development coaches in David Vanterpool and Pablo Prigioni, and have a President in Gersson Rosas who heavily emphasized the G-League as a developmental tool. However, the first could be a problem. The Wolves have effectively 3 years to prove to Karl-Anthony Towns that this new direction will work. If Doumbouya is drafted as the key to that and can’t cut it, the Wolves won’t know that until it’s too late to come up with a plan B.
The other issue is simply that there is no clean translation between Euroleague and the NBA. NCAA players come from a vast range of schools and levels, but the process of evaluating them is fairly proven, and there is significant historical data to prove the current analytics methods are accurate. They can be (more or less) compared to each other on a 1-to-1 scale. Not so with players overseas. The Wolves have an excellent international scout in Gianluca Pascucci, and Rosas won’t be intimidated by Sekou coming from France (which, by the way, has a very solid track record of players - Tony Parker, Boris Diaw, Nic Batum, Rudy Gobert, etc) But it is an extra complication to consider.
In summary:
Sekou Doumbouya is the home run swing in this draft. He definitely does not have the kind of guarantee to his success as Zion Williamson or Ja Morant. But he has perhaps the most ideal physical profile among the lottery picks and has barely scratched the surface of his potential. If he can reliably hit 35%+ of his threes at the NBA level, he’ll be the second or third best player in this draft when it’s all said an done.
