2018 Orlando Magic NBA Draft Preview: Taking a chance on Jarred Vanderbilt
The Bad
Jarred Vanderbilt’s strengths and weaknesses are impossible to discuss in complete isolation from one another.
For example, his scoring deficiencies significantly hinder his ability to create for others despite his excellent passing feel. So much of what this slide will contain was touched on in the previous slide.
Defensively his main weaknesses are his light lower body, technical rawness and somewhat disappointing agility in his hips.
At this stage, he does not have a strong enough base to defend post players in traditional isolation or box those players out. Instead, he has to rely on his upper body strength, quickness, vertical and physicality to front in the post, high-point rebounds and use swim moves to get into position under the boards.
Those are perfectly valid pathways to generating positive value as a small-ball center but he clearly does not have the size to play large swaths of minutes at the five.
Vanderbilt has the aggressiveness and instincts to make plays on the ball every possession, making good rotations, maintaining awareness and putting forth great effort.
But he regularly jumps for blocks without so much as a credible shot fake and does not always sit down in a defensive stance and lower his center gravity quite enough to maximize his quick-twitch movements, which caps his effectiveness containing guards on switches or even in traditional pick-and-roll defense.
That may be a function of his relatively weak base.
For a big man, he is definitely going to bring positive mobility and switchability. But considering one of his biggest selling points is 1-through-4 switching, his hip agility is somewhat underwhelming.
He is slower than one would like at times rotating his body to contain smaller players. Because of that, he can sometimes be caught in suboptimal positions in isolation. Unless he manages to significantly strengthen his base and make it easier on himself to get low in a defensive stance, his equity as a legitimate lockdown switch defender is fairly limited.
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None of that is to argue anyone should be excessively concerned about his defensive projection. But it may place him out of the upper tier of this class’s defensive prospects even before the injury concerns, distributing some more emphasis on the other side of the ball.
His offensive weaknesses have been well-chronicled. Because he is as far away from being a shooter as anyone in this draft and is most effective scoring via dunks, putbacks and even baby jump-hooks, he is effectively an offensive five while being primarily a defensive four.
That makes his fit tricky. Ideally, he should be paired with a center with the size to defend in the post and box out and either a shooting center or more capable shooters in the backcourt.
Obviously, he is not nearly the player Draymond Green is on offense or defense (even Green is a more reliable spot-up shooter). But Vanderbilt’s ideal NBA situation would be playing a similar role, where he can play alongside a point guard comfortable without the ball for some possessions, grab-and-go, short roll, play center with excellent shooters in certain configurations, pass out of the post and run an occasional pick-and-roll.
But that would also require him to make strides as a defensive player on switches. The bottom line is that offensively he will be reliant on spacing, and no team should rely on him to provide spacing or consistent scoring even as a third or fourth option in whatever lineup he plays in.
So he will need to provide elite defensive and rebounding value — which is possible — to earn rotation minutes.