Why Donovan Clingan and Reed Sheppard are the obvious prizes of the 2024 NBA Draft

People are overthinking this

Note: As I started writing this piece, Kelly Iko of The Athletic just reported that Donovan Clingan and Reed Sheppard were the top prospects on Houston’s draft board. Life can be hilarious sometimes.

If there’s one thing that plagues NBA Draft Twitter above all else, it’s a strange persistence on trying to project how young players will fit into “the modern NBA”. Despite how often the NBA proves to be a diverse league that a broad spectrum of talents and styles can fit into, this community insists otherwise on searching for specific moulds. Winning in the NBA is not homogenous, but this narrow way of thinking has successfully bled into the team side of things. Every year, front offices are looking for “the next great wing” come draft time.

However, the truth is, when you put players into boxes like that, you’re going to miss out on some spectacular talent.

Rockets center Alperen Sengun is a great example of this. Sengun fell out of the lottery because teams viewed Sengun as a center that would “struggle to adapt to the modern NBA” due to supposed perceived physical limitations. The reality is those physical limitations were overstated and what teams really meant is they were opposed to drafting a player of Sengun’s “archetype”. Wing culture (what I’m going to coin it because sounds funny) has forced teams into making mistake after mistake in the draft and it’s about to have them make them make two more: passing on Connecticut center Donovan Clingan and Kentucky guard Reed Sheppard.