Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - Kansas Jayhawks Basketball Transfer Portal Target Deep Dive: Dayton 3-Point Specialist Koby Brea

Starting point is 00:00:00 On today's Locked on Jayhawks, Kobe Brea, the Dayton sharpshooting transfer, deep dive into the man who's shooting 50% from three. You are Locked on Jayhawks, your daily podcast on the Kansas Jayhawks. Part of the Locked on Podcast Network, your team every day. I'm Derek Johnson. You can give me a follow on Twitter at DJohnsonRadio. the Locked On Podcast Network, your team every day. I'm Derek Johnson. You can give me a follow on Twitter at DJohnsonRadio. You can find our show here with Locked On Jayhawks anywhere you get your podcast, including on our YouTube page.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Please like and subscribe to the show. Helps us out on our end of things. On today's edition of Locked On Jayhawks, we're deep diving into Kobe Brea. There's some latest news about Kobe Brea connecting him with Kansas among a long list of some other esteemed schools. So we're going to deep dive into him, a scouting report, how he'd fit with KU. Would it be a take? How would it affect everything else? And other decisions still to come possibly for KU this off season and the rest of the latest in the transfer portal. First, today's episode of the

Starting point is 00:01:04 show is brought to you by GameTime. Download the GameTime app, create an account, and use code LOCKEDONCOLLEGE for $20 off your first purchase with GameTime. So we're going to start with Kobe Brea. Who is Kobe Brea? What's the latest news on him? First of all, spells Kobe a little bit differently. Spells it with a Y as opposed to an E.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Appreciate the little bit of a difference there. But he's a 6'6 guard slash wing. He played the two and the three for Dayton this past season, about 205 pounds. Originally from Washington Heights, New York, he went to Dayton for four seasons. One of those was the COVID year. So he has one year left of play. According to Dushon London of 24-7 Sports and CBS Sports, he tweeted this earlier today, at least, I guess, yesterday from when you're listening to this, but,

Starting point is 00:01:50 Dayton transfer Kobe Brea has completed Zooms and is considering the following schools. Kansas, Duke, North Carolina, UConn, and Kentucky. Now, it's not a guarantee when you have a bunch of really good schools that the player's going to automatically be good. Nick Timberlake, right? But with Brea, I think there's even more there with stats doing it. Like the Atlantic 10 is a whole other level from where you're kind of talking about the jump there.

Starting point is 00:02:14 But anyway, that is a nice laundry list of schools. And the reason why you can never have enough shooting. And when you're talking about a player like Brea, you know, sometimes it's like you have to bring on a player. And it's like, well, this player is a good shooter, but I don't know about some of these other things. And they're going to want to be a starter. And it's like, well, the beauty with Bray is he was coming off the bench at Dayton. So if he's transferring up to an even higher level, is he still coming off the bench? Now he's playing starter level minutes.

Starting point is 00:02:37 So maybe that's a little bit different. But point being, you can convince every school if we're bringing on a bench player who can shoot threes, why would we not want to add that? Like, what is the harm in adding that? You know what I mean? And giving more to yourself there, because this is the headline. He shot forty nine point eight percent from three this season on six point one attempts per game from three point range. Kansas. I mean, how many games would we see?

Starting point is 00:03:01 Can this go six of 14 or I don't know. That was like the good games. But you 14, 15, 16 threes in a game. He was taking, you know, basically 40% on a lot of what games the Kansas would take as a team. That's how many he was taking per game. And he was shooting them at 50% this past season. And yes, this was his best year. So, you know, it'd be easy to say, well,

Starting point is 00:03:23 what are the odds he shoots 50% from three again? Yeah, probably not great. He shoots 50% from three again, because that takes a lot of things to go in. But even if he reverts to the career average, 43.4% from three on 4.6 attempts, you take that too. So overall, he averaged 11.1 points per game last season, 3.8 rebounds, 1.2 assists, came off the bench in 29 of the 33 games for Dayton. That's a Dayton team that was pretty good this year. They finished, I think, 10 spots behind Kansas and Ken Palm. They were a seven seed and made the second round of the NCAA tournament before losing to Arizona. And yes, it's mostly, I don't know, I hesitate to

Starting point is 00:04:03 call it like a one-trick pony because there are other things where he's at least proficient at here, and we'll get to that here in a second. But, like, it's basically the teams who are trying to add Kobe Bray, it is for the one thing. It is for the shooting. He is that good at it, though. And guess what? Shooting is very important in basketball.

Starting point is 00:04:18 Turns out three-point shooting is very helpful, not just scoring, but opening up the spacing for your offense, which makes him extremely valuable. And in the NCAA tournament, he was really good. He had 15 points on five of eight from three in their win against Nevada. And he was big in that they had kind of a crazy last second comeback to get there. He was big along the way there. He also had 14 points, four of eight from three in their loss to Arizona. So in total, 14 and a half points per game in the two NCAA tournament games on 56% from three. Now, obviously the Atlantic 10 isn't as good as the Big 12, but it is a league that's

Starting point is 00:04:50 ranked higher than the American Athletic Conference or the West Coast Conference or the Missouri Valley Conference on Ken Palm. And when you don't just look at the NCAA tournament, which is against the better teams, you look at the entirety against Ken Palm top 100 opponents this year, Brea shot 50% from three over the course of 16 games. That's almost half the team's games. It's still 50% from three. And then there are eight games that Dayton played against Ken Palm top 50 opponents. He shot 57% from three. So it's not like he was just picking on lower opponents to get this done. How about some of the in-depth numbers? How about some of the synergy numbers, the analytic numbers, all that sort of stuff? Well, this is going to be really fun for me. 99th percentile in spot-up shooting.

Starting point is 00:05:36 He shot 52% on spot-up threes this season. Now the year before, this is what we were talking about earlier, right? There's no guarantee that you're going to have the same success rate because that is such a high success rate that, you know, it's almost like a hitter who hits 360 one year. Well, the next year they could revert to the mean and still hit 330. You know what I mean? So, like, he can go down. But the year before he was at 34% from three on spot-up threes.

Starting point is 00:05:59 The year before that he was at 38% on spot-up threes. Now, you do get better as you go on in college. So, you know, are you going to get the guy that closer to that? Either way, any of those numbers are, would be good enough to help KU. He was also in the 98th percentile on pick and roll because he went 20 of 40, 50% on threes. He was 90th percentile off screens because he went a lowly compared to those other numbers, 43% from three off screens, a 99th percentile transition that was just 20 attempts so not a ton of numbers to look at there but uh he was 100th percentile on all jump shots so

Starting point is 00:06:31 this guy basically had the best jump shot in college basketball this past year he was 100th percentile on catch and shoot he went 53.8 so basically 54 from three on catch and shoot opportunities uh by the way i figured out the uh spot up versus catch and shoot stuff spot up means you're just spotting up waiting for the ball the ball comes to you you could shoot it or you could you know pump fake and then drive to the rim you could be spotted up catch it you know pump fake it the guy to blow by take one dribble in take a mid-range shot right you could just drive after spotting up there's a lot of things you do catch and shoot is literally you know you just after you catch it it could be off the move or it could be spotting up you catch it and you shoot it right

Starting point is 00:07:12 so uh 54 on on catch and shoot opportunities at dayton last year 100th percentile and on those if you divvy those out he was 51st or i'm sorry he he was a 51% from three on guarded catch and shoots. So even if you guarded the catch and shoots, he still made them a 51%. And he was 59% on unguarded catch and shoot threes. That is ridiculous. Year before that he was 36% on catch and shoot threes overall year before that he was 40% on catch and shoot three. So again, so again you could say well what if we get the guy who he was as his junior year that's still proficient shooter 36 on catch and shoot threes but i again like you're gonna get better year in and year out in college basketball i'm not saying you're gonna get 50 if you land this kid or whoever does land him but could you get 40 could you get 45 yeah that is very much in the ballpark here. He was also in the 96th percentile in dribble jumpers.

Starting point is 00:08:06 He went 42% from three off the dribble. And he was also 100th percentile at the rim and 99th percentile in layups. Didn't take much of either. Very small sample size of both. But the point there is that he knew when to slice and dice the defense. You go watch some highlights. There's some times when he did a really good job of seeing, hey, a defender's trying to face guard me. I'm going to back cut him when he's not expecting it. And I'm going to get a wide open layup from it. And even though it's not something

Starting point is 00:08:31 that, you know, you're doing twice a game or something like that, even that one time you're doing it in a game or one time you're doing it every other game, like that free layup basically is a nice thing to have in your back pocket. Now you might be wondering, okay, really good shooter. A lot of times guys who are really good shooters, maybe not the best defenders. Well, how does he grade out on the defensive side of the ball? Kind of split opinions based on what number you're looking at here. Because if you're looking at synergy,

Starting point is 00:08:59 it actually liked what Kobe Brea did this past season. And, you know, sometimes the defensive the defensive stats, I don't know, it's a little bit harder to gauge. I still don't think we have perfect defensive stats and metrics out there. We have things that we can go off of and reference and try to pull together. But anyway, on synergy, he actually ranked in the 75th percentile defensively last season. So like he was a good defender last season, but is some of that team context related is some of that, you know, he got carried by having a guy like Doron Holmes who really good big man down low. And that's, you know, certainly going to help him out there.

Starting point is 00:09:37 When you look at some of the other numbers, like when you look at D rating, so the points per 100 possessions, when you're on the floor versus kind of when you're off the floor, he was basically middle of the pack on the team. And then when you look at his defensive BPR on Evan Miyakawa's website, like he was 49th in the Atlantic 10. So he was like, I guess if you're saying he's a top 50 defender among a conference, I don't know. How many does the A-10 have at this point? I know you would think, oh, the Atlantic 10 has 10 schools, but I bet you it's like 14 or 15 at this point. So if you're talking about,

Starting point is 00:10:08 you know, seven kids in the rotation, eight kids in the rotation on average for every school, then you're talking about basically middle of the pack defender, you know, among 120 kids, your top 50, I guess like,

Starting point is 00:10:20 so it just kind of depends where you look, but I will say on synergy, he was also 49th percentile the year before, 77th the year before that. If he's just an average defender and you're coming off the bench and you're a sniper from three, that's good enough. And I know I've said that all about a lot of guys, and eventually you hit a point where it's like,

Starting point is 00:10:36 if you have too many of those guys, maybe that's not great. But I guess where I'm at is after this past year where Kansas really struggled on offense, Bill Self very rarely has a defense. That's not like in the top 25 and you have to be able to score, especially in today's day and age in college basketball. And I mean, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:10:54 It's just more exciting. It's more fun to like, that's part of it too. But anyway, he was at least proficient enough on defense. So that answers that question. Let's get on to his fit with KU. And,

Starting point is 00:11:03 you know, obviously there's your limited amount of scholarships. What would this mean? Rylan Griffin, waiting that decision, all that sort of stuff. Let's get into that coming up in just a moment on Locked on Jayhawks. First, this episode of the show brought to you by GameTime. GameTime is now an authorized ticket marketplace of Major League Baseball, which makes getting tickets even faster and easier.

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Starting point is 00:13:00 So how does Kobe Brea fit in with Kansas? And what would this mean in the hierarchy and the pecking order of decisions KU has to make with their scholarships and players being brought in and, and this and that, well, let's start with the fit with KU. So I think what's interesting here with Kobe Brea, he only started 21 games over his four years at Dayton among the 113 he played at Dayton,

Starting point is 00:13:21 which he was playing basically 29 minutes per game this past year, Dayton, which basically starter level minutes. So does it really matter? No, not really. But I think that's interesting because I think a lot of times you see a guy transfer comes off the bench and the immediate assumption is he wants to be a starter or you see a player transfer from another school and maybe they were playing big minutes and they were a starter and they want to be a starter at the next school. You know, I don't know what the idea here is for Kobe Bryant. Maybe he does want to be a starter at the next school. Maybe that is part of it.

Starting point is 00:13:48 But when you're coming off the bench for school and you're transferring up in competition, like I think that would be an easier sell to be like, hey, listen, you know, you are going to still come off the bench, but you're going to be in a bigger situation or a better situation or whatever it is, right? So clearly, I guess the point here is that he was okay coming off the bench for four seasons. That did not bother him.

Starting point is 00:14:11 And so, yes, if he comes into Kansas and beats out some of the other guys he would be in competition with to be the starting two guard or three guard or whatever, then that's great. But if he's having to come off the bench, clearly he showed in his past that that's not going to be something where it's going to turn into some locker room issue where, you know, there are certain guys where if they're coming off the bench, they are going to be an issue in the locker room. And so he's also not someone who needs the ball in his hand a ton. He had just a 16% usage rate last season. Out of reference, Kevin McCullers was at 28%. Hunter Dickinson's was 27%. KJ Adams was almost 19. Nick

Starting point is 00:14:46 Timberlakes was almost 19 and so on. So like taking out the walk-ons, he would have ranked sixth on Kansas last season in usage rate. He's not somebody who just like, he's going to pound the ball into, and that's perfect. That makes him the perfect complimentary piece, right? Because Hunter Dickinson's going to have the ball a lot, shoot the ball a lot, assuming he's back. AJ Storr, he's going to have the ball a lot, shoot the ball a lot, assuming he's back. A.J. Storr, he's going to have the ball a lot, shoot the ball a lot. DeJuan Harris is going to be handling the ball a lot. You need somebody who's competent at playing without the ball in their hands and is not somebody who just needs to dribble the ball into the court at all times to make an impact,

Starting point is 00:15:17 and that's what this kid does. He obviously adds shooting. He obviously adds scoring. He adds floor spacing. He adds gravity on the outside. He makes the other players around him better by being on the court offensively. You put him on the court with Hunter Dickinson, that helps Hunter Dickinson. You put him on the court with KJ Adams, that helps open up driving lanes for KJ Adams.

Starting point is 00:15:34 You put him on the court with DeJuan Harris. He now has more space to operate and try to weave into the lane and drive and kick or maybe make more layups than we saw this past year because maybe there's less pressure around the rim. Whatever it is, he maybe there's less pressure around the rim, whatever it is. He makes the other players better around just by having him on the court. In addition to that, you're going to get a lot of made threes.

Starting point is 00:15:52 He could start at the two or three could come off the bench and play the two or three. I think the floor here is he's, you know, let's say he has one of, by his standards, more down year shooting the three ball and the defense doesn't totally translate. Maybe he's still 15 minute per game guy who's shooting 35% from three. That's still

Starting point is 00:16:10 useful to have on a team. That's still useful to have coming off the bench. What's the ceiling look like? It's 40, 45% from three as either like a fifth option as a starter or one of your first guys off the bench who is just an absolute assassin coming off the bench and giving you more bench production from him individually than Kansas got as an entire team last season off the bench so like the and maybe the median outcome is just yeah he's your your seventh man who's giving you 20 minutes a game 22 minutes a game and he's shooting 40 45 percent from three and he helps you in late game situations where you need threes. He helps you over the course of the game to open things up for the rest of your offense. So this is a definitive take for me, but there, as we've discussed different levels of the take, there are the

Starting point is 00:16:55 take of you take right now and you make everything work around it. There's the next level of take, which is, well, you would take him, but it depends on what happens with this decision or that decision. And then there's the next level where it's like, yeah, but you need a lot of decisions to happen before it kind of comes to that point. I think this one is in that second range probably where it's like, okay, KU, you know, right now, I guess you're awaiting the Johnny Furphy thing. We still don't know, you know, I guess they they're flexible whether they can play with 12 or 13 scholarships. We're waiting on the Ryland Griffin stuff, right?

Starting point is 00:17:29 But if Johnny Furphy stays in the NBA draft, and let's say they added Ryland Griffin, they'd be full up on scholarships at that point. So the obvious answer would be, well, you can't bring on Kobe Bryant. I don't know, probably only a matter of time before a team pays a player to come in and just gives them enough NIL money to cover the scholarship that it doesn't really matter whether they have that extra scholarship play or not. I don't know that that would be the case of something Kansas would want to do, but eventually that is going to happen for some school. Maybe it already has. I don't know. if you bring on Ryland Griffin and get that commitment and then you get a commitment from Kobe Brea, there's probably a good chance that somebody would transfer away and be like, Hey, I'm clearly going to get less playing time now. And the scholarship situation would work itself out.

Starting point is 00:18:13 And so there are ways that you could make this work that to me, he is someone that I would almost just say, like, obviously I, I would take Ryland Griffin over Kobe Brea. I think there's a chance Brea is maybe even a better three-point shooter than Griffin, but Griffin might be better at like everything else than Kobe Brea. So I would take Griffin over Brea. I, like Wiko said, I would take Griffin over AJ Storr if that was kind of the conversation just because of the fit and what that would mean. So it's not that I'm saying that, but I am saying that i i guess with with brea he is such a good like you could argue he was the best jump shooter the best three-point shooter in college

Starting point is 00:18:50 basketball last season i would be willing to just like say let's just bring this kid on if he's interested and we'll figure out the scholarship thing later like i said there's enough workarounds you can get through chances are somebody would transfer um worst case scenario you do the nil work around i don't know there's ways to work around. Just amass the talent you can, right? You just had a season where things were very thin. And as much as you would like to play politics and say, hey, we don't want to over-recruit here where another kid wants to leave and it leads to a domino effect. At the end of the day, I don't know. I go back and forth between these two things because that is unfortunate when it happens,

Starting point is 00:19:25 but like there was another part of me where it's like, well, this is Kansas basketball and you shouldn't be afraid of competition. So I don't know. I bring them on, bring them on more three point shooting the better. All right. Let's finish up latest portal news for KU and around the transfer portal on

Starting point is 00:19:38 this edition of locked on Jayhawks. First, this episode of locked on Jayhawks is brought to you by Monopoly Go. The scoreboard's not looking good. You might be feeling low, not sure you or your team can pull out a win. It's when you dig deep, lift your head up, and say to yourself, time to get back in the game. Pull off some bank heists and take as much of your friend's money

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Starting point is 00:20:28 and in tournaments get extra rewards and climb the leaderboard if you do want to play more with your friends as opposed to against them. So get back out there, put on your game face, and download Monopoly Go now free on the App Store or Google Play Store today. What's the latest in the portal? Well, we're still awaiting Ryland Griffin news, at least as of time of recording this, I feel like that could happen at any point. It seems like there's a lot of people pointing to expecting that to happen still, I guess, the longer it goes from the visit ending where you don't get a commitment, maybe the more you start wondering,

Starting point is 00:21:00 oh, what could happen here? Because I do think it is as much as a lot of, I don't know, there are a lot of people connecting the dots that it's close to happening, I guess would be the way of putting it. And obviously, you know, things don't always happen super fast, so you shouldn't stress out about it or whatever. Still, at the end of the day, there is probably in the back of your mind, you remember back to last offseason, it felt like Kansas was getting McKenzie and Baco. It felt like Kansas was getting Harrison Ingram. It felt like Kansas was getting McKenzie and Baco. It felt like Kansas was getting Harrison Ingram. It felt like Kansas was getting Spencer Jones, right?

Starting point is 00:21:28 And a lot of these things were rumored to happen, and then they didn't happen, right? So things do fall through, and it is entirely possible the longer we go. But who knows? But I guess the point being, we're just waiting on some decision from Ryland Griffin, and if that does happen, we will talk about it. Jeremy Roach, I don't think that was ever really a target for KU,

Starting point is 00:21:44 but Hunter Dickinson went on Twitter and made people wonder if it was. He's going to Baylor, so they'll actually play against each other. Indiana's making some moves. So is Baylor, so those will be kind of interesting. This one, kind of interesting, a name that entered the portal about a week ago. Max Shulga, he is a shooting guard who was at VCU this past season, like 6'4", 6'5", shooting guard. Was at Utah State before that.

Starting point is 00:22:06 He's originally from Ukraine. Shooting guard who shot like over 40% from three this past season. I can't help but wonder if, let's say you bring on Rylan Griffin, and then let's say because of that, one of your other guards decides to transfer or not come to KU or whatever. And then as a result of that, you're like, okay, well, we'll use that scholarship to try to get Kobe Brea. But then Kobe Brea is like, no, I'm going to Yukon.

Starting point is 00:22:31 I'm going to Kentucky or whatever it is. Maybe Max Shulga would make some sense. You know, good three-point shooter, not quite as good as Kobe Brea, but good three-point shooter. I don't know if there's any relation with Svi and him and some sort of like grassroots basketball for them growing up playing in Ukraine. Obviously he's younger than Svi and stuff. And I don't think they're from the same town or anything,

Starting point is 00:22:49 but I don't know. Certainly makes you wonder. And maybe another name to keep an eye on, but maybe we'll do a deep dive on that. We'll see. We'll see later in the week. All right. That'll do it for this episode of locked on Jayhawks.

Starting point is 00:22:59 You can find our show anywhere you get your podcasts, including on our YouTube page. We'll see you next time with LOJ.

Locked On Jayhawks - Daily Podcast On Kansas Jayhawks Football & Basketball - Kansas Jayhawks Basketball Transfer Portal Target Deep Dive: Dayton 3-Point Specialist Koby Brea

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