2025 NBA Draft: Why Khaman Maluach is No. 2 on my board above Dylan Harper
The biggest move I made in my updated Big Board is moving Duke center Khaman Maluach to No. 2 ahead of Dylan Harper, the consensus favorite for that slot.
The biggest move I made in my updated Big Board is moving Duke center Khaman Maluach to No. 2 ahead of Dylan Harper, the consensus favorite for that slot.
I just posted my new big board, but I thought that this decision merited a longer explanation — and I didn’t want to make my other piece even longer.
To be totally transparent, I’m still very high on Dylan Harper. Whichever team and fanbase drafts him this summer is going to be very happy, and rightfully so. He’s a tremendous prospect who put up gaudy numbers for Rutgers, especially at the rim, while being a constant paint touch and self-creator.
However, I have some general concerns about Harper’s style of play, whether it fits the NBA of today and tomorrow, and if the expectations that would come with being a rebuilding franchise’s No. 2 pick are actually achievable for him.
Here are four reasons, with broad explanations and applications, for why Khaman Maluach is my new No. 2:
Chance to hit desirable outcome
Explanation: Is a prospect’s skillset translatable to a wide variety of contexts, or is it only maximized in specific settings?
Application: If you draft Harper at No. 2, I think the hope should be that he develops into the heliocentric guard type that can motor an NBA offense by himself. My concern here is that those players have to become REALLY, REALLY GOOD — like, maybe all-time “I’ll remember that this guy played for my team in 25 years” good.
Thinking about players Harper reminds me of, that’s a very hard outcome (James Harden). Sometimes, it takes beating the odds (Jalen Brunson), more time than expected (Cade Cunningham) or a change of scenery (Harden, again). It also takes fairly specific roster construction. Most of all, it’s just incredibly difficult to become that great — even though I like Dylan. Plus, being led by this sort of guard isn’t a proven formula for championship success, especially as the league moves towards quick/ancillary decision-making and connectivity across positions on top of flat-out production. It is a floor raiser, though.
With Maluach, I think he’d be a seamless fit across basically every NBA team and most lineup constructions due to his elite play finishing (77.6% at-rim on 156 attempts for 1.55 PPS, 80 dunks in 39 games), functional and diverse athleticism, on-ball flashes, and proven production on low volume. This definitely includes two-big configurations, even if we haven’t seen this at Duke (we saw it some with the NBA Academy alongside Ulrich Chomche[!]). If you’re a rebuilding team, you can give him more expansive reps and flesh out his intriguing flashes. Alex Sarr this year is a good example. Maybe this works out, maybe it doesn’t, but Maluach retains a valuable, secure, and high floor regardless.
That’s because he can also be used in a narrow role like at Duke, which is also what would happen if Maluach ended up on a contender in the short term. Think Dereck Lively II when he first entered the NBA (although it’s worth thinking about whether Lively might struggle now that Luka Doncic isn’t there to service him). I’m thinking about how the Lakers saw Mark Williams as the possible missing piece for a championship run, for instance — and I rate Maluach much higher than I did his fellow Duke Blue Devil. Harper’s floor is still quite high, but I’d argue that it’s not as safe.
A natural counterargument to pose here is that, despite what I just said is in vogue around the league, Maluach makes very few decisions and he can only play one position. To that, I’ll say: for all the connectors you have, you still need guys who can finish plays. I have more faith in Khaman becoming an elite play finisher (on both ends, too) than I do in Harper (largely a one-way player right now) becoming that at all three levels (rim, mid, three) or turning into an elite connector.
Trajectory and speed of improvement
Explanation: How much room for plausible improvement do you have left and how quickly do you get better?
Application: Thinking of this as ‘Upside’ might be helpful. Here, I’m largely but not only focusing on age (generally speaking - the younger1 a prospect playing at a high level is, the better/more promising they can become) and developmental trajectory (how and if a prospect has improved over time)
Khaman Maluach picked up basketball at 13 when he was a refugee in Uganda. He was spotted by a local high school coach who noticed him because of his height (6-foot-8 then) and recruited him to play at a tiny Ugandan school named Bethel Covenant College.
COVID derailed Maluach’s experience there, but he was eventually offered a scholarship in April 2021 to the NBA Academy in Saly, Senegal. Since then, the now-Duke big played in the Basketball Africa League for three seasons (including minutes as a 15-year-old), competed in some high school-aged tournaments stateside (read my evaluation of Maluach from July 2023), won MVP awards at Basketball Without Borders camps, represented South Sudan at the 2023 FIBA World Cup and the 2024 Olympics, and helped Duke to a Final Four run.
This experience is wildly impressive given when, where, and how Maluach picked up basketball. You might argue that he barely played for those South Sudan teams in the World Cup and the Olympics, but then I’d implore you to look at the context — basketball and otherwise — and also consider his extreme youth. Just being there (and Maluach did more than that, to be clear) was definitely immensely valuable.
I started off this section with Khaman’s backstory because it’s remarkable, yes, but it’s also illustrative of how quickly he’s improved and legitimately broken new ground. I also think it means that Maluach can still keep getting way better taking into account how late he started playing truly organized basketball and regularly competing against high-level opponents.
Harper’s backstory is interesting too. His dad Ron Harper had a 15-year NBA career. His mom Maria was a D-I player at New Orleans and has been coaching boys’ and girls’ high school basketball for two decades. His brother Ron Jr., also a star at Rutgers, has appeared in 10 NBA games while largely playing in the G League. The numbers imply that players with a parent who previously played in the NBA (Ron Sr.) or who grew up around basketball (Dylan’s entire life) tend to do very well.
Harper's growth spurt appears to have taken place as a high school freshman. This lines up with his year-to-year improvement at Don Bosco Prep, which I broke down in my full scouting report of the Rutgers prospect. Like Maluach, he has played up age levels before, as well. Then, he wasn’t strictly a guard. Harper was 17 when he represented Team USA at the 2023 U-19 World Cup (Tre Johnson was also included on the squad). He actually led the USA in assists during that tournament, but the overall experience was an unquestionable failure given that the team finished in 4th place.
Harper’s reps and competition are of a higher quality than Maluach’s to date. No question. At the same time, I’m not convinced there’s as much to build on. It feels like Harper is much closer to a finished version of himself. Tweaks are needed and will come, but I feel fairly confident in saying that Harper’s broad strokes will remain very similar 4-5 seasons from now. Maluach could remain similar, for better or worse, but I love that he is much more moldable while managing to keep a steady floor.
I’ve broken down what I perceive to be Harper and Maluach’s broad improvement points into three categories:
Probable: It’s likely that the prospect will improve in this area
MALUACH: Rim protection (continued), defensive discipline, hands and rebounding (although I think overstated)
HARPER: Pull-up shooting
Possible: It’s a possibility, but by no means a lock, that the prospect will improve in this area
MALUACH: Spot-up shooting
HARPER: Playmaking for others
Idealistic: It’s not impossible, but it’s far fetched, that the prospect will improve in this area
MALUACH: On-ball self-creation, playmaking for others
HARPER: Vertical athleticism, on-ball defense
Positionally, Maluach’s improvements seem more plausible. Lower hanging fruit, if you will. His rim protection already improved a lot this season at Duke. The numbers weren’t there, but that’s because this improvement was directly related to Maluach’s discipline getting better. He used to jump at almost everything around the basket not too long ago.
Then, I’ve written about how Maluach’s rebounding process can still improve (especially upon the first contact vs. the attacker), but how the concerns about him on the glass are overblown and actually better than recently drafted bigs. Even the spot-up shooting, which is not a necessity, is realistic enough. Maluach took threes with the NBA Academy and in the African league. He’s also shown soft touch throughout his career and will maybe get encouraged to shoot triples. RealGM has Maluach at 74.3 FT% (104/140) and 28.9 3P% (22/76) in 71 tracked games (he’s played more in that timespan, but NBA Academy box scores aren’t always easy to find).
You can also argue that Harper has improved, but I don’t think the case is as strong. His volume off the dribble was good, but the conversion wasn’t. The Rutgers guard made 29.2 3P% (28/96) of his off-dribble threes and 27.8% (15/54) of his off-dribble twos. Harper lacks a midrange/in-between game despite being a below-the-rim finisher (an excellent one so far, but TBD vs. NBA competition) and he’s more efficient spotting up (36.8 3P% on 21/57 catch-and-shoots) than pulling up, even if the latter is more conducive to his play style. There are questions about his form, too. Interestingly, Harper initially wasn’t allowed to shoot jumpers by his mom.
As a passer, Harper’s numbers were very decent and displayed tangible improvement (4 AST to 2.4 TOV per game … 1.7 A/TO on high volume … 27 AST%), but I think a look at the tape shows that his process is improvable as a point guard. Going back to those Harden or Cade comparisons, Harper hasn’t proven himself to be that level of a passer with the reads he makes. His Rutgers team wasn’t very good, but still. Also, I’m not really weighing this heavily, and Harper did average 4.9 AST in AAU play - but I’m a tiny bit suspicious that his highest assists season average in high school was 1.3 AST as a junior.
Here’s what I wrote about Harper in my full scouting report:
“Harper is a smart passer who creates advantages out of the pick-and-roll [... leveraging his] driving ability into passes that create shots from three or at the rim. Uses his change of direction to facilitate for others. Gets paint touches and makes the correct read while using his positional size. [...] Can miss relatively easy reads. Accuracy can improve. Handle can still be cleaner sometimes. Athletic limitations can pop up. Some unforced turnovers.”
Those two items — shooting off the dribble and setting others up — are essential and need to be executed at a VERY HIGH level if Harper is to be the heliocentric point guard that you spend a No. 2 pick on. At this juncture, he is an elite slasher given his volume and context, but a lot of crucial categories that are not low-hanging fruit at all still need significant work to become elite.
To be clear, both Maluach and Harper have improved since I first started watching them. Harper, for instance, has gone from slightly more of a wing to an on-ball solo engine. Maluach, however, has the edge here. If you watched his very young career in six-month increments, his improvement would blow any evaluator away.
Versatility
Explanation: How many different things can you do on both ends at a high level?
Application: This explanation would typically also include ‘how many different positions can you play?’ — but Maluach can only play the 5 (or the big, I guess, if we wanna be generous) and Harper will be thought of as a guard by most teams. There might be some slight room for the latter to turn into more of a Jalen Williams-like player, although that’d be a fairly substantial profile change.
Instead, I’m focusing more on whether Maluach and Harper can be versatile within their positions and in terms of how rosters and lineups are built.
Starting with Maluach, I think he showed his versatility the most at Duke on defense. Khaman was a big part of how Duke switched everything, but he could also come up with defensive plays in the pick-and-roll. That meant hedging at differing levels of aggression and, not as often, playing in drop coverage. Maluach was also used in different pick-and-roll coverages at previous levels.
Offensively, the versatility largely came in those settings outside the USA. Maluach was strictly a play finisher at Duke, as reflected in his dominant numbers near the rim and his low numbers as a passer. Before that, though, we have tape of him shooting threes, operating out of face-ups, posting up, and even handling the ball some. In an absolute dream scenario, Maluach becomes Joel Embiid or Anthony Davis, but I’ll emphasize that said outcome is ultimately just as hard as Harper becoming James Harden. Dereck Lively (RSCI #2 in 2022) or Mitchell Robinson with more offense (RSCI #8 in 2017) are more logical.
Now, let’s break down Harper’s two-way versatility. On defense, I think it’s pretty theoretical. Rutgers never asked him to do much, which was reasonable given the offensive load he carried. The idea is that Harper is positionally strong, big, and long (6-foot-6 with a 6-10 wingspan), so he could maybe be used on wings. However, we haven’t seen this play out in practice. Given his offensive workload, he was logically stashed away on defense pretty often. Harper also isn’t (as) versatile schematically.
On the other end, Harper needs to be on the ball — or at least that was definitely the case at Rutgers, and an adjustment would need to take place. He had 314 possessions in the pick-and-roll (including passes), 123 in transition and 83 in isolations. That’s compared to 76 possessions spotting up. Then, Harper took 150 shots off the dribble (twos and threes), compared to 59 catch-and-shoots. That doesn’t scream on- and off-ball versatility or willingness to me. Plus, like I mentioned, Harper is great at getting to the basket, but quite a bit of improvement would need to occur for him to reach those levels from the midrange and from deep.
Still, you could also argue that Harper’s on-ball dominance and production (linked to his lack of versatility) is what gives him the edge over Maluach. The self-creation difference is a no contest and the Rutgers guard doesn't have to rely on others to produce, he has greater skill off the bounce, he can absorb more possessions and probably minutes, and his tools take less projection.
However, I keep returning to the idea that Harper’s floor is decently high, but his ceiling is actually pretty tough to crack. Harper will flat out score more than Maluach in 9/10 outcomes, but Maluach ultimately just misses less shots and turns the ball over less — even if that’s down to volume. Simply put, the South Sudan man is more efficient. Harper is an amazing slasher for a guard, but he still makes 1.35 points per shot at the rim compared to Maluach’s 1.55 PPS. It’s hard to do better than basically dunking everything.
Lastly, I’m also thinking about the stacked 2026 draft. The teams picking at the top of the 2025 draft might end up being the same ones in 2026 (Wizards, Jazz, Raptors, Nets, Bulls). They’d probably give AJ Dybantsa, Cam Boozer or Darryn Peterson on-ball priority, which would coerce Harper to adjust to more off-ball reps anyway. He could do it, but you don’t draft him at No. 2 for that.
Trends in and around the league
Explanation: Are there any recent NBA/NBA Draft examples to get encouraged or discouraged by when it comes to projecting a player?
Application: I’m not a massive believer in player comps, but I do think that it’s pretty useful to look around the league and think about NBA players’ roles, what they’re expected to do, and whether prospects’ skill-sets can be projected to meet similar profiles. I also find it very helpful to evaluate trends around the league or scouting.
This piece is pretty long already, so I’ll try to stay succinct here since I’m looking at broader ideas instead of honing in on specific examples or numbers.
For Harper, I’m thinking about the importance of heliocentric guards in the league and why/if their teams succeed. Trae Young, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Cade Cunningham, Luka Doncic, Jalen Brunson, Devin Booker, and James Harden are in the NBA's top 10 for points created per game.
Again, these are the cream of the crop — so can Harper get there? But also, why aren’t some of these teams experiencing more success (Atlanta, Phoenix)? What changed for other teams to enjoy more success (Detroit, LA Clippers)? How do new pieces around these ball-heavy guards (Cunningham, Doncic, Brunson) affect their style of play?
For Maluach, I’m thinking about how you need to cover ground — going sideways and going up — in today’s league. This is maybe more important than ever with how ridiculously overpowered NBA offenses are. Maluach is 7-foot-2 with a 7-foot-5 wingspan and a 9-foot-8 standing reach, so I think that speaks for the range he possesses.
I’m also thinking about all the two-big lineups increasingly spotted around the NBA. I think that Maluach’s floor and ceiling show up. In a narrower role, he can act more like Steven Adams, Goga Bitadze, Zach Edey, Jarrett Allen, Kel'el Ware or Yves Missi. If Maluach explodes, why not dream about him as Kristaps Porzingis (this was a great piece on Swish Theory - from one of my favorite Twitter follows DraftPow), Brook Lopez or Chet Holmgren?
In this draft: Cooper Flagg or Noa Essengue…
In previous drafts, even Ulrich Chomche can fit the bill because being the youngest player in the draft was part of his intrigue…
If you're young and producing vs. older, high-level opponents, then that kinda speaks for itself.
Reasonable explanation