Draft Breakdown: Jared McCain and Devin Carter — Two Potential Sixers First-Round Picks
Draft Breakdown: Jared McCain and Devin Carter — Two Potential Sixers First-Round Picks
The Danny has switched into NBA Draft mode.
Yes, I’m well aware that the Sixers will probably trade the 16th overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.
Kyle Neubeck recently put the odds that Philly moves the pick at 80%, and with how active everyone expects Daryl Morey to be trying to bring in a superstar with all the cap space he’s accumulated, it makes for the Sixers to use their first round pick as a trade asset rather than to bet on the grand unknown of a draft prospect.
But I don't care. The NBA Draft is awesome, and I love it. Until that pick is officially moved, I’m scouting as many players as possible in this year’s class, and particularly focusing on those that should be available to the Sixers in the mid-first round. Even if this year’s draft is a relatively bad class, that has more to do with the lack of superstar bets at the top, more than it has to do with the depth of the class. Restocking the cupboards with young talent is always a good exercise for a healthy organization (just ask the Phoenix Suns what intentionally neglecting the draft for a half-decade did to their roster depth).
The two subjects of today’s scouting report are Jared McCain and Devin Carter, two of the best off-guards in all of college basketball this past season, and two guys who are primed to go in that 11-20 range after the top 10 picks are off the board.
Jared McCain — Duke, Guard
Stats: 14.3 PPG, 61.1 TS%, 41.4 3PT%, 5.0 RPG, 1.9 APG, 21.1% Usage
Measurements: 6-foot-2 without shoes, 203.2 pounds, 6’3.5” wingspan, 20.3 years-old
There’s plenty of great reasons for the Sixers to draft McCain with the 16th overall pick, even aside from the fact that he’s the only potential new Sixer who’s already been written about in an AU-edited Billboard feature.
McCain’s shooting prowess is unquestionably his selling point. Making 41.4% of your three-point attempts while firing up 5.8 per game is impressive at any level, let alone the college game where spacing is often imperfect. He also converted 77 of his 87 total free throw attempts, again good for an elite mark of 88.5%.
He uses a tight, one-motion shooting form that’s compact and remains consistent over every one of his attempts. It’s somewhat close to a set shot, with McCain perching the ball ever so slightly over his right shoulder, and flicking straight up from there, while maintaining an extremely wide base with his feet. For a player as small as McCain, usually having such a rigid form makes getting any shot off extremely difficult.
However, McCain excels at pre-shot and pre-catch footwork. He always catches the ball prepared to shoot, always hunting out looks for himself behind the arc. In the ilk of guards from Pat Connaughton to D’Angelo Russell, McCain follows after them as a specialist in the no-dip three-pointer, able to rise and fire no matter how fast he sprints into each shot.
McCain rarely started possessions with the ball in his hands, as he was not the primary creator for Duke during his freshman season. With two dribble-heavy point guards in Jeremy Roach and Tyrese Proctor, and a playmaking forward in Kyle Fillipowski who also demanded creator reps, McCain was often content being used as a play finisher and off-ball mover.
The Blue Devils often played in a 5-out alignment, and one of their favorite ways to utilize the shooting gravity and capability of McCain was with empty corner flare screens on the right side of the floor. McCain is generally more comfortable shooting on the move when running to his right rather than to his left, so Duke often set him those flare screens whenever that side of the floor was cleared.
While it wasn’t his primary function in the Duke offense, McCain also flashed plenty of creation equity in his limited reps with the ball in his hands.
McCain doesn’t have the typical traits of an on-ball threat — he’s small, he’s relatively slow-footed, and his handle isn’t particularly flexible or creative — but he makes up for it with his strength and craft. He’s absolutely built in his lower half, and is great at holding perimeter defenders behind him when given a ball screen. All McCain is looking for is a subtle misstep from the defender, and thus, he rarely has a wasted movement with the ball in his hands. Every jab, every dribble is done carefully, with the thought of getting his defender just off-balance enough for him to create all the separation he needs to let his absurd shotmaking talent takeover.
McCain has a penchant for a few pet moves, such as snaking and jailing pick and roll. Though he doesn’t have Maxey or Harden level burst to create oodles of space on a step back, he can get just enough breathing room with a hard lefty pound dribble before snapping his shot form into place and drilling one in his defender’s eye. He isn’t much of a high flier or acrobatic finisher (hence his middling 59.6% shooting at the rim this season), but he’s adept and wise at knowing when to avoid contact and finish with finesse vs when to use his bulk and power through an opponent’s chest in the paint.
There’s so much to love about the skill and precision of McCain’s game – but the concerns over his size and speed are very real (especially for Sixers fans who experienced problems with Buddy Hield being a slow + small sniper during the second half of the season). He can pass and find open teammates when he stays outside of the paint, but the further he gets into a congested crowd inside, the more likely he is to be swallowed up by length and either throw up a duck of a shot and/or have whatever pass he throws get deflected easily.
Defensively, McCain is stereotypically the archetype of a smart, smaller guard — he competes, and he’s almost always in the spot his coach wants him to be in. But again, he just doesn’t have the bend and quick steps to consistently navigate around screens and cut off drivers at the point of attack, nor the length to seriously affect the shots of taller opponents.
There’s a lot to love about McCain. Having only recently turned 20 years-old, he still has massive potential for growth, even as he was already the best player on an Elite Eight team in his freshman season (yes, he was better than Fillipowski).
Given one of the Sixers’ major shortcomings in their series defeat against the Knicks was their lack of pure athleticism amongst their role players, trepidations around selecting a smaller, shorter guard are justified. Still, in a flat draft class with very few sure things, there are few more bankable NBA skills available than McCain’s three-point shooting.
With Tyrese Maxey entrenched long term as the Sixers’ starting point guard, McCain would likely never be anything more than a backup guard off the bench. He’ll be best when paired next to a better initiator, but in time, he might be capable of full-time backup point guard duties as well. Most importantly, it’ll be hard to find a lineup where he can’t at least contribute in some way. He’s way too good and versatile of a shooter for his offense to ever go to waste.
Devin Carter — Providence, Guard
Stats: 19.7 PPG, 59.7 TS%, 37.7 3PT%, 8.7 RPG, 3.6 APG, 28.1% Usage
Measurements: 6-foot-2.5 without shoes, 193 pounds, 6’9” wingspan, 22.2 years-old
Carter is a classic Sixer in that he’s had a rather bizarre basketball playing career.
As a freshman at South Carolina in 2021-22, he averaged just 9.0 points per game on horrifically low shooting percentages across the board. Yet, two seasons with Providence later, he averaged 19.7 points per game on efficient splits, was named the Big East Player of the Year, and is now a bona fide lock to go in the first round of the 2024 NBA Draft.
Though Carter is just half-an-inch taller than McCain, the two are significantly different as athletes. Carter has none of the girth or lower half muscle of McCain, but makes up for it by being exponentially quicker and bouncier. His 42-inch vertical was the best among all prospects at the Draft Combine, and his 2.87-second three-quarter court sprint tied the Combine record.
Providence constantly ran NBA-style actions to get Carter the ball where he could drive to his strong right hand. He often didn’t need much craft or change of pace, just a sliver of daylight where he could blow by his defender and get to the cup, where he finished an impressive 65.2% of his shot at the rim this season. Carter’s tape is littered with him running off level/away screens out top, flying out from the corner after receiving staggered pindown screens, and with him running the classic Chicago/Zoom actions (pindown into a dribble-handoff) all to get back to his right.
Carter was able to access his driving and finishing game more as a junior because he shot threes far better than he did as an underclassmen. Listen to any Big East broadcast from this season, and the play-by-play announcer is bound to talk about how hard Carter worked on improving his shot during the summer of 2023.
He has a bit of a funky form, almost pushing the ball away from his face rather than flicking it off his fingers, and the space he needs to get into his unique form can sometimes prevent him from getting off the shot as cleanly as he wants. But still, Carter managed to shoot well above average from deep (37.7%) while attempting nearly seven triples per game, and he took everything from step back triples, to movement threes where he’s running Floppy sets like he’s Buddy Hield. It was an undoubtedly impressive shooting season from him.
As is the case with any one-year leap, there’s reason to worry over how real Carter’s shooting improvement is. His percentages went up across the board during the 2023-24 season after being dismal during his first two college seasons. He wasn’t just an average shooter previously, he was a bad shooter. Making only 26.7% and 29.9% of your threes on low volume is well below the shooting Mendoza line.
There is one recent example of a fake improved-shooting year for a prospect — Davion Mitchell.
During his title-winning season at Baylor as a 22 year-old senior, Mitchell shot a blistering 44.9% from three after shooting 28.8% and 32.4% during his prior two seasons. Nevertheless, his hot shooting senior year was enough to get him drafted ninth overall by the Sacramento Kings, where he immediately regressed to 31.6% and 32.0% from three during his first two seasons in the NBA. There’s reason to believe Carter has indeed become a real shooter (namely the pure difficulty on the threes he hit this season), but the one-year jump isn’t something that can just be glossed over.
But before he was a three-point sniper and pseudo-primary creator, Carter was better known for his defense. He has a knack for making things happen on that end of the floor with his speed, length and ability to leap off the floor quickly. He averaged 1.8 steals and 1.0 blocks per game during each of his past two seasons at Providence, extremely rare marks for a guard who doesn’t crack 6-foot-3.
Now, he does have some space-cadet tendencies on that end that are concerning. He’s prone to falling asleep off-ball and completely losing track of his assignment, and he’s a bit of a riverboat gambler trying to jump each and every passing lane for a steal. He’s closer to the Matisse Thybulle archetype of unreliable playmaker than he is to that of a lockdown stopper like De’Anthony Melton.
Still, for the most part, the good outweighs the bad when it comes to Carter’s defense. Having a guard who can rotate over and block a center’s shot is not something that every team can boast.
How many on-ball reps Carter can handle at the next level will likely be the swing factor for him. He has the straight-line burst and shooting touch to get his own buckets, but his creation for others comes and goes. He often doesn’t have the strength to slow down and hold defenses in compromised positions, and his passing accuracy can be all over the place at times. There’s merit to giving someone as athletic and skilled as Carter a lot of ball screens as a rookie in order to see what you got, but it’ll likely come with some growing pains given his current up-and-down tendencies with the ball in his hands.
That said, it’s hard to teach speed, as speed creates advantages – and even the most basic NBA passers can turn advantages into open looks for their teammates. Carter is far from a lost cause in this category.
Closing Thoughts
This isn’t a “Jared McCain vs Devin Carter, who is the better pick?” article because there is simply too little known about the draft and what the Sixers plan to do to pit the two against one another.
Despite being the younger prospect and slightly less productive player, McCain seems like the safer bet to stick in the NBA between the two. Of all their translatable skills, none is more certain than McCain’s three-point shooting. There’s overwhelming proof that he’s a top tier marksman.
Carter, however, has more of the high upside qualities teams look for with these post-lottery picks. He’s a great run-and-jump athlete who seemingly can get his own shot and cause havoc on defense. I’m always reserved when it comes to older prospects, as it’s usually concerning when a guy isn’t a draft prospect when he was younger, but then became a big-time one after he got older and more physically developed than everyone he was playing against. However, for Carter, his improvement came not because he was older, but because he significantly changed the way he played, which means something. Seeing year-to-year growth is encouraging.
All the same, these are two quality prospects, either of which Sixers’ fans could easily and very understandably talk themselves into should they be the selection come June 27. There’s plenty of other options — such as picking a potential backup center replacement for Paul Reed (AU strangled me after I wrote that sentence), or taking a bet on any wing body type who’s still available at that point. With such uncertainty around what the roster will look like next season, there’s no specific position the Sixers need to target. It should be used on the best player available and/or best fit next to Maxey and Embiid available.
Again, this all presumes the pick stays in Philadelphia’s hands, which might just be wish casting on my part. But I’m totally cool with that. The NBA Draft is awesome, and having scouted both Jared McCain and Devin Carter, either would be a thrilling addition to the team come draft night.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
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