After a season at BYU, star prospect Egor Demin’s NBA future looks tantalizing, but fragile

There was maybe no more telling indicator of the likelihood BYU men’s basketball would win a game this season than the play of young Russian Egor Demin.

Like BYU generally, Demin started the collegiate season fast, with scintillating performances in a weak non-conference schedule. Demin himself ended up near the top of prospect lists, challenging the best young players in the world for top-5 consideration in June’s NBA draft.

The spotlight hit Demin. Then the conference slate hit him harder.

The 19-year-old freshman, and BYU by extension, struggled, with losses to Providence and Houston as the roughest spots. Both player and team looked overwhelmed.

But as the calendar hit February, BYU started to put it together, and Demin found his role — not as his team’s star, but as a significant contributory piece. As BYU enters postseason play, Demin feels more confident than ever about his role in the squad and what the Cougars might do together.

“I’ve talked to coaches a lot about this,” Demin said. “To be honest, it’s not pressure from the outside as much as it is pressure on myself. I just want to be as effective as I can be for this team.”

But questions about Demin’s role at the next level still significantly linger. While Demin found a path for himself at BYU, his goal in coming to America has always been bigger — to play in the NBA. In that context, NBA teams see a player with substantial tools but even more substantial work left to be done.

Where does Demin stand after a season at BYU, and where might he go in the NBA draft? Let’s dig in.

The intersection of height and vision

In recent years, the NBA game has built itself around tall playmakers. They come in different packages: Nikola Jokic from the block, directing traffic as cuts whirl around him. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Luka Doncic, herky-jerky slithering down the lane at 6-foot-6 or 6-9, respectively, then finding the lob. Giannis Antetokounmpo or LeBron James physically moving through opponents, drawing help until an open shot is found.

The reason: Being tall helps you both survey the court and deliver passes much more easily than the traditional shorter point guard.

Demin might be the best tall passer currently not in the NBA. At 6-9, he’s terrific at delivering passes all around the floor. Inside, outside, to rollers, to shooters, to people behind him if the defense collapses, it’s all great. To be sure, there are times when he misreads the situation, but by-and-large, he has better feel than 95% of young players, with the height advantage only further opening the world of the passes he can hit. You only see a few dozen players in the world consistently make passes like these.

Watching him in person, there are a couple of other ways the feel really pops. On offense, he’s very smart about where he stands on offense, spacing the floor sometimes, using his size to screen in others. And on defense, he’s a good communicator. He significantly helps the rest of BYU set up their scheme against opponents.

Weaknesses that must be addressed

Well, nearly everything else is still in need of significant improvement for Demin.

The biggest weak point is his shot. Demin has only shot 27% from 3-point range this season.

Watching him warm up for a game, the shot form actually looks pretty good. He can hit relocation threes, standstill threes, and so on. In games, though, the form gets a little bit stiff and a little bit heavy. He also, frankly, has taken a lot of threes this season that are bad ideas, not within the flow of the offense for a shooter that hasn’t had in-game success. It’s in pretty sharp contrast to the rest of BYU’s offense, which usually flows much better.

I think some of the shot issues come down to confidence. It’s clear Demin knows this is, to critics, his biggest Achilles heel, and it almost looks like he’s trying to prove the world wrong on each shot.

“I’m feeling better and better, game to game,” Demin said about his shot recently. ”I was trying to find that moment of confidence as I had in the start of the season, where I wasn’t even thinking that I’m going to miss it."

But he also struggles going to the rim and finishing as well, despite the height. Where players like Gilgeous-Alexander and Doncic mentioned above are slippery, Doncic moves extremely predictably. Even less elite guards can generally get to where they want to on the floor, but Demin can struggle with it. If there is a defender on his shoulder, that player will slow him down. He’s not a great finisher, and only drew a couple free throws per game.

He did clearly improve at that talent over the course of the Big 12 schedule, though.

His defense isn’t bad, either. He’s not a monster on that end, but he uses his size and moves his feet well.

Where might he end up?

The result is a player that frankly, despite his prodigious passing gifts, struggled to reliably generate good shots for himself or even others in Big 12 play through large stretches of the season. Most players with Demin’s statistical profile do not turn out magically to be good NBA players after struggling against collegiate competition.

However, most players don’t have Demin’s combination of height, youth, and feel.

So in the end, Demin is a project from an NBA perspective — unlikely to help right away. But he is also probably only one skill away from being an extremely valuable NBA player.

Improvement could come one of two ways. If he improves his shot, he can be a floor-spacing connector in the mold of Hedo Turkoglu, or perhaps even former Jazz player Joe Ingles — not a primary pick-and-roll threat, but as a secondary creator for others.

Or if he improves his slipperiness and handle, then he can play at the level of a Josh Giddey, a Kyle Anderson — players who you don’t have to really guard from deep, but can play important roles throughout the season and in certain playoff matchups.

And if he improves both, well ... Demin’s ceiling is almost as high as it gets.

Players like this used to stay in college to develop their skills, but Demin still looks likely to go to the NBA. That makes sense for Demin, because connected draft prognosticators see him still being selected in the first round, and likely in the top half of it. ESPN’s most recent mock draft, for example, slated him eighth. Fox Sports’ March mock had him 13th.

It would be hard for Demin to pass up the opportunity to play basketball full time for even more money than he’d make at BYU, even with the chance to play with No. 1 recruit A.J. Dybantsa next season.

The Jazz, currently slated to have the No. 2 and No. 21 overall picks, might end up seeing Demin go too low for one pick and too high for the other. It’d be ironic, though, if Danny Ainge picked Demin — he could be the best NBA player from BYU since, well, Danny Ainge.

Ultimately, whether or not a specific team drafts him or not, should depend on their belief in their player development system. Teams that pick Demin should have a specific plan for, and a track record of, giving previous prospects the specific traits he needs.

Demin could be a good one — if he finds the right new home to call his own.

Tribune writer Kevin Reynolds contributed to this story.

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