Zion = LeBron? 20 NBA Draft prospects and their comparable in league

We haven’t seen an athletic specimen like Duke's Williamson enter the NBA since James. LeBron was built like an All-Pro tight end. Williamson is built like Ndamukong Suh. The closest body comparison for Zion is a young Rodney Rogers – hence, LeBron James and Rodney Rogers.

Who is most athletic point guard in the NBA? Murray State's Morant will be compared to that guy. The Knicks' Smith Jr. gets my vote, but Morant already sees the game better than DSJ. 

Some people have talked themselves into Duke's Barrett being a James Harden- or Devin Booker-type guard in the NBA, but I don’t think he sees the game as well as they do. Drop down a peg in the play-making realm and you find guys like the Spurs' DeRozan, a four-time All-Star, who averaged 21 points, six assists and six rebounds last season. 

Vanderbilt's Garland has modeled his game after the likes of Steph Curry and Damian Lillard. His shot off the dribble and ability to catch and shoot instantly remind you of Lillard. Garland gets the poor-man’s Lillard comp (by no means an insult to Garland) because it’s unclear whether he’ll become as strong and explosive as the Portland star.

Like Duke's Reddish, Green has always been frustratingly inconsistent. He has the skills to be a superstar forward, but his team only gets superstar output every four or five games. An anecdote for Reddish fans: In 2012, Green was on the Celtics and went toe-to-toe with LeBron James in a late-season game, nearly ending Miami’s 22-game winning streak by scoring 43 points. Green’s scoring output the next three games combined? 35 points.

Like the Suns' Crawford, North Carolina's White is a 6-foot-5 point guard who can push the tempo and loves to score more than anything. If White’s play-making isn’t up to snuff, he should have a long career in a Crawford-like sixth-man role.

Texas Tech's Culver is the prospect Thunder fans hoped they were getting when they traded James Harden for a package built around then-rookie Lamb. Like the Hornets' Lamb, Culver is a spry athlete with long arms and a nice game inside the three-point arc. However, Culver is more physically mature, better with the ball in his hands and a better defender than Lamb was as a prospect.

In his prime with the Celtics, Crowder was one of the first elite three-and-D wings in the NBA. In his best NBA season, Crowder averaged 14 points and six rebounds on 46-40-81 shooting. That’s comparable to the 15 points and five rebounds per game Hunter averaged this past season at Virginia on 52-44-78 shooting.

Like the Kings' Cauley-Stein, Texas' Jaxson Hayes’ first love was football in high school. Like Cauley-Stein, Hayes is about 7-feet tall with 7-foot-three wingspan, which helped them both average over two blocks per game in their respective freshman seasons. Like Cauley-Stein, you should expect Hayes to take a couple of years to develop as a two-way force at the rim in the league.

NBA scouts always point out that rebounding is one thing that transfers from college to the NBA. Though Millsap was a prodigious rebounder at Louisiana Tech (13.3 rebounds per game), Clarke was no slouch either and actually had similar per-40 minutes (24 points, 12 rebounds, five blocks and two steals per 40) to Millsap (23 points, 16 rebounds, three blocks and two steals per 40). Expect Clarke to top-out as a super role player and fringe All-Star like Millsap.

Doumbouya, who played for Limoges CSP in France,  is a versatile, athletic forward who can run the court and possesses the makings of a nice perimeter skill set. He just needs to learn to bring everything together. In other words, he’s the Raptors' Siakam from his rookie and second year, before he made a monstrous leap forward this season. Doumbouya isn’t as long as Siakam, but he has a nicer three-point stroke.

Remember the buzz over the high school tapes of Thon Maker of the Pistons? Well, if Oregon's Bol were to stay healthy and put on muscle (and that’s a huge “if”), his game would resemble Maker’s high school game: He'd always be the tallest player on the court but would spend most of his time in the half court around the perimeter. Check out Bol’s college highlights to see what I’m talking about.

North Carolina's Little and the Hornets' Williams are built a little differently, but they both were highly-touted, top-10 high school prospects who attended North Carolina and sat behind upperclassmen on a good team. Both were more inconsistent than scouts would have liked, but Williams somehow flashed enough to get selected No. 2 overall (ahead of Deron Williams and Chris Paul!) Little is more likely to fall to the early-teens, but, like Williams, has a lot of potential as a wing in the NBA if he can develop a more consistent skill set.

People forget that the Rockets' Shumpert was a pretty intriguing prospect coming out of Georgia Tech with his long, athletic body and ability to get to the rim (averaged 17 points and six free throw attempts per game his junior year in college). Indiana's Langford is about the same height, weight and wingspan as Shumpert and also knew how to score and get to the rim (17 points and six free throw attempts per game last year as well). 

Kentucky's Washington and the T-Wolves' Taj Gibson, who played at Southern Cal, were men among boys in college. Despite being slightly undersized at 6-foot-8 and 6-foot-9, respectively, both were good rebounders and averaged around 15 points per game in their final college seasons. Washington has a slightly more modern game with his ability to hit three-pointers, but expect him to be a Tom Thibodeau-type gritty player like Gibson has been his entire career.

Much like the Morris twins -- Markieff and Marcus -- Gonzaga's Hachimura is around 6-foot-8, weighs about 230 pounds, and has the athletic ability to be a fierce two-way player in the NBA. Rui seems less menacing than the Morris brothers on the court though, so it remains to be seen if he can develop into that same chip-on-the-shoulder tone-setter in the league.

This comparison is a little too easy – both players have two-part, hyphenated last names, both players are tall, slender point guards who have tremendous feel for the game, and both were under-the-radar NBA prospects coming into college. It’s almost like these two were related…oh, wait they’re cousins! Alexander-Walker played at Virginia Tech; Gilgeous-Alexander, a Clipper, played at Kentucky.

Did you know that the Cavs' JR Smith was ready to go to UNC before an MVP showing at the McDonald’s All-American Game thrust him into the middle of the first round? Like Smith, Southern Cal's Porter Jr. also experienced a dramatic rise up draft boards -- he was getting mocked in the top-five. Unfortunately for Porter Jr., as the season progressed, he played inconsistently and had maturity issues. Does that remind you of any soup-throwing, shoelace-untying players?

Another pretty obvious comparison here. Like Atlanta's Huerter, Kentucky's Tyler is a sweet-shooting two-guard who flashed some ability to run pick-and-rolls. Both players also have T-Rex arms (their height is bigger than their wingspan). Both players rose up the draft boards late in the season and after workouts.

Standing at 7-foot-7 with an 8-foot-2 wingspan and a 10-foot-2.5 standing reach, Central Florida's Fall is a unique prospect with no true comparable. However, if you’re looking for the type of player Fall could theoretically be, look no further than everyone’s favorite big man, the Sixers' Marjanovic. Boban dunks everything he gets his hands on, grabs rebounds and takes up space. Fall can do those things in short spurts for an NBA team, but he must improve his abysmal free-throw shooting (43 percent in his college career) to justify rotation minutes.