Variable Lottery Ticket Pricing: AJ Dybantsa
Evaluating the Top of the 2026 NBA Draft with Incomplete Information
There is still much information to collect before the 2026 NBA Draft day but midseason top-of-draft-class evaluation is nevertheless an opportunity for sharp NBA front offices to harvest more value by “thinking like a trader” by updating and acting upon limited information for post-deadline strategic direction. Teams have already started what is shaping up to be the most blatant tanking race in NBA history.
My midseason Cam Boozer evaluation and midseason Darryn Peterson evaluation suggest that the 2026 NBA draft is at least doubly tank-worthy. Let’s find out whether it’s triply tank-worthy by analyzing AJ Dybantsa.
Stats as of 2/11/2026
19.4 draft day age
6’9” in shoes and 7’1” wingspan1
Torvik BPM: 11.5 overall (top 15), 9.9 offense, 1.6 defense
Miya BPR: 9.8 overall (top 15), 7.3 offense, 2.5 defense
Hoop Explorer RAPM: 10.8 overall (top 15)
My own model has Dybantsa as a top 6 player in college basketball
(Another) KD Comp
This isn’t the first time a highly-touted scoring freshman big wing has been compared to Kevin Durant. That comp was also liberally thrown around when discussing Ace Bailey last year, but my Ace analysis resulted in ranking him much lower than consensus on my final pre-draft big board. Ace is still very young, so he has time to make my evaluation look silly, but as of mid-2025-26 he hasn’t done anything in the NBA to make me move that far off of my pre-draft evaluation.
Ace Per 40:
Dybantsa Per 40:
KD Per 40:
Ace Torvik:
Dybantsa Torvik:
But there are key differences in the freshman stat lines of Ace vs. Dybantsa. Dybantsa blows Ace out of the water in AST/TOV, getting to the free throw line, dunk rate, rim finishing ability, and impact metrics, though Ace played his freshman season at a younger age.2 Ace blocked way more shots, but 2024-25 Rutgers didn’t have any true rim protectors so maybe Ace’s block rate wasn’t quite as generalizable as it appeared. Overall, Dybantsa’s stat line is clearly much better than Ace’s.
That being said, Dybantsa doesn’t appear to be quite at KD-level. The one major factor in Dybantsa’s favor is much better AST/TOV. But KD had much better defensive box score stats, was a much better shooter (especially considering Dybantsa has only put up 6.1 3FGA per 100 possessions in today’s three-happy environment), had much better length,3 and was a similar scorer despite playing his freshman season at 18.7 draft day age.
So overall, before diving into the film, while KD projected better due to his younger age, better shooting, and better length, Dybantsa’s stats are good enough for a freshman big wing that some kind of lite KD-ish upside isn’t crazy in the same way it might have been for Ace Bailey.
Ace Bailey-ish Tendencies
But while Dybantsa’s stats are way better than Ace’s, we’re talking about a potential number 1 overall pick, a bar high enough that nitpicks are necessary. And on film Dybantsa does display some worrisome tendencies.
While Dybantsa was still a high schooler, an NBA team scout told me that, while his evaluation was still subject to change, he was relatively low on Dybantsa, in part due to Dybantsa’s game being so heavy on just shooting mid-range jumpers over the top of defenders, as opposed to using his size, length, and athleticism to get to and finish at the rim; and finding open teammates as he bends the defense. This is consistent with Dybantsa’s 247 pre-college scouting report, in which Adam Finkelstein wrote “the bread-and-butter of his individual offense has always been his mid-range pull-up,” and not once mentioned Dybantsa’s passing nor vision in the same writeup.
Shooting tons of mid-range pull-up jumpers is one of the textbook signatures of a player whose actual impact is lesser than his scoring reputation. As I explained in Sources of Edge in the NBA Draft Market, low-efficiency volume scoring without creation for others gets progressively more overrated as a player progresses from high school to college and from college to the NBA. Dybantsa’s physical tools are not as valuable if all they do is allow him to create a marginally-better-than-the-average-mid-range shot over the top of defenders as opposed to bending the defense and creating true high-quality shots for himself and his teammates. A former NBA team analyst had a similar general take when evaluating Ace Bailey:
Shooting x size is overrated and IQ/playmaking x size is underrated. Shooting x size gets you to a lot of Michael Porter Jr / Jabari Smith (but better) outcomes in upside scenario, which is obviously a good player but I think hard to be a true impact-level player unless at the very least also borderline elite rim protection like Kristaps Porzingis
Ironically, KD is one of very few players across NBA history who score efficiently at volume off a large diet of mid-range jumpers. But we’ve already seen that, compared to Dybantsa, KD was a much better shooter at a younger age and had much better length to generalize his mid-range proficiency over the top of NBA defenders. There is substantially more uncertainty in Dybantsa’s shooting ability than his top-line stats might indicate, but for now I’d certainly bet against him developing into one of the best shooters of all-time a la KD.
So Dybantsa’s evaluation, or at least an evaluation of his offensive upside matching Boozer and Peterson, really hinges on his playmaking and basketball IQ as opposed to his mid-range artistry. If he can convert his scoring gravity into opportunities for his teammates and/or find his way to the rim more often then it would make more sense to rank him in the same tier as Boozer and/or Peterson as a potential offensive superstar.
Creator or Finisher?
While Dybantsa’s assist rate is promising for a big wing, Dybantsa isn’t really a true primary initiator within BYU’s offense. Rob Wright handles the ball the majority of the time for BYU and Dybantsa is used more as a slasher and isolation player as opposed to running pick and roll and/or probing the defense.4 Rather, Dybantsa loves to receive the ball at the wing and take a 1-2 dribble drive + spin to the middle of the court, at which point he can:
Use his long strides and length to get to rim, even in traffic
Kick out to open shooters as the defense collapses upon him
Use his height and length to shoot mid-range jumpers over the top of one or more defenders
Dybantsa’s upside depends on being able to primarily execute options 1 and 2 while limiting turnovers; and to flip option 3 from being a go-to to being more of a counter based on what the defense gives him. As opposed to the mid-range bread-and-butter that so many scouts are enamored with, his most effective move might actually be his high sweep move, using his length to shield the ball above traffic and finish at the rim:5
So it’s worrisome that he has shown Ace Bailey-like non-passing flashes, especially earlier in the season, and it’s somewhat worrisome that he has been more mid-range-happy in conference play.67 That adds up to a real risk that Dybantsa’s offense ends up more like a cross between DeMar DeRozan and Andrew Wiggins — players whose raw points per game totals overstate their actual impact on winning — as opposed to KD-lite.
Off-Ball Effort and Basketball IQ
Even if Dybantsa isn’t able to actualize his full offensive creation upside and ends up more as a play finisher, he still theoretically has more leeway as a prospect than Boozer and Peterson as he has the tools to be a switchable defensive menace — before the season started BYU head coach Kevin Young compared Dybantsa to Paul George. But while Dybantsa has overall been a positive defender according to the impact metrics, he hasn’t been the lockdown defender the Paul George comp might suggest. He has at times fallen asleep on the defensive end of the floor and has trouble navigating screens:8
Low-Feel or Work-In-Progress?
Dybantsa’s general theme of feel for the game, basketball IQ, and/or effort questions may be best summarized by the following quote from Adam Finkelstein’s 247 high school scouting report:
Dybantsa has been a celebrated prospect since before he entered high school, and has avoided many of the pitfalls of early stardom by consistently improving his game at each step in the process. Still though, he’s become accustomed to playing to the camera and can go through spurts when it becomes more of a show than a game.
What Finkelstein points out is concerning as a theme that ties together Dybantsa’s areas for improvement. But, paradoxically, it’s also optimistic. Young stars who have been the center of every environment for years can have a steeper learning curve when asked to defend, screen, relocate, and make winning plays when they don’t have the ball in their hands. And this might be especially true of a player who has been hyped for years and received the largest college basketball salary ever.9
A similar sentiment was echoed to me during the 2024-2025 season by a member of a coaching staff for a rival top 25 power conference college basketball team:
How good BYU will be in 2025-26 will hinge upon whether they try to play winning basketball or just let Dybantsa do what he wants so he says nice things and they get more top recruits.
For what it’s worth, before the season started Kevin Young identified defense and playmaking as areas of improvement for Dybantsa, but his public statements came across as more measured than direct or challenging:
So one could hypothesize that perhaps Young was unwilling to truly coach Dybantsa as hard as necessary for optimal improvement, at least out of the gate, due to prioritizing the bigger long-term picture for BYU basketball.
And the bulk of Dybantsa’s off-ball mishaps that I can remember occurred near the start of the season — or even in preseason exhibition games. It’s plausible that, like most freshmen, it took time for Dybantsa’s general awareness / basketball IQ / feel for the game to develop. And maybe Dybantsa’s case was a slower burn than the typical freshman progression due to Kevin Young taking a measured, relationship-savvy approach to slowly coax the longtime-hyped star into making the improvements necessary to reach his full potential.
And despite all of the above, Dybantsa has clearly been one of the best players in college basketball, so perhaps the feel for the game concerns are really just more untapped upside as opposed to fatal flaws. After all, Dybantsa has shown adequate passing feel later in the season, though mostly on simple reads. And it’s likely easier to fix “doesn’t know how to distinguish a good shot from a bad shot” as opposed to “can’t get to the rim with subpar handle.”10
Evaluation
Overall AJ Dybantsa does have a legitimate shot of ending up as something like a lite version of KD, Paul George, and/or Jayson Tatum offensively, depending on the development of his shot selection, ability to get to the rim, and ability to make both simple and complex reads off of his drives and post touches. And just how good or bad of a shooter he really is will also play into how much of his offensive upside he can eventually reach. He also has the theoretical upside to become a Paul George type of defender. For all of those reasons he is a legitimate number 1 overall-worthy talent.
But there is also non-negligible risk that his offensive game generalizes to the NBA considerably worse than his stellar college performance so far, resulting in something more like a better version of DeMar DeRozan or Andrew Wiggins. Interestingly, at the next level, Dybantsa’s below-median cases for offensive efficiency, creation for others, and off-ball defense are likely all correlated with each other, as they seem to all be dependent upon the same theme of underdeveloped coachability and/or feel for winning basketball over hype show.
Therefore, while in my estimation Cam Boozer has a tight distribution of outcomes and Darryn Peterson has more of an average distribution of outcomes (mainly due to injury/motivational risk), I think Dybantsa’s distribution of outcomes is wide. My Dybantsa evaluation is much more subject to change between now and draft day relative to my Boozer and Peterson evaluations, even with Peterson’s strange injury situation. Even so, my midseason estimation is that Dybantsa has the EV of a 50th percentile best-in-draft-class prospect. In other words, this draft is triply tank-worthy.
A Premortem on Why My Evaluation is Incorrect
My evaluation of a 50th percentile best-in-draft-class prospect seems to be below the current scouting consensus. But it is also quite a bit higher than the most contrarian of Hipster Draft Twittersphere takes on Dybantsa. So it’s hard to pinpoint what kind of outcome would result in my take being “wrong,” but I think my analysis is bookended by the following:
Dybantsa’s defensive, shot selection, and playmaking downsides are all correlated as they all stem from his underdeveloped feel for the game.
Even if you get a 25th percentile or so outcome, you still end up with something like a bigger, better DeMar DeRozan, which is underwhelming for a number 1 overall candidate, but still a very good player over a long NBA career.
So really I think the most likely potentiality for my analysis being incorrect is something like:
I’ve anchored too strongly to wanting to be contrarian about how Dybantsa projected coming out of high school with a skillset that seemed likely to be overrated by scouting consensus. This has resulted in me inappropriately under-weighting his stellar college performance so far such that I’m too low on Dybantsa now.
Dybantsa’s shooting is actually way better or way worse than his college sample so far, pushing his projection up/down, respectively, from my evaluation.
Even if Dybantsa’s NBA offensive role is more of a finisher than a creator, I’ve nevertheless underrated his superstar likelihood in the mold of a worse version of Paul George, who has demonstrated superstar value through play finishing, defensive impact, and solid but sub-elite offensive creation for others.
18.9 draft day age for Ace compared to 19.4 draft day age for Dybantsa
KD has a 7’4.75” wingspan, or 7’0” “effective height” based on my wingspan-to-height translation. Compare that to Dybantsa’s reported 7’1” wingspan mapping to about 6’9” “effective height.”
Sam Vecenie has an excellent explanation in his 1/29/2026 article:
Dybantsa’s handle is not all that good in a crowd. He struggles to keep his dribble alive when he’s inside the arc, meaning he doesn’t separate as well as you’d want. He often picks up his dribble on his drives to try to gather and get to the rim or to pivot for a jumper. He doesn’t break defenders down often off the bounce. Rather, he relies on his physical tools to out-stride them and either finish around them or over the top of them or draw a foul.
See 2:39 - 2:47 of the Floor and Ceiling breakdown video below.
Also from Sam Vecenie’s 1/29/2026 article:
So what’s going on with Dybantsa against good teams? The tape shows that he has been getting to the rim much less and is being forced to settle in the midrange more. According to CBB Analytics, Dybantsa is taking 26.2 percent of his attempts at the rim in seven Big 12 games, a marked drop from his nonconference mark of 36.4 percent. He’s also taking more shots inside the paint but outside of five feet in conference play, and his shooting percentage on midrange jumpers has drastically declined from nonconference play, as he’s being contested by bigger, longer, stronger defenders.
That being said, in general I think people overreact to power conference players’ entirely foreseeable dips in unadjusted-for-opponent-quality statistical output. But I hold this estimation in relatively low confidence and would love to see data that contradicts me here.
From Matt Norlander’s reporting:
BYU, North Carolina and Alabama were all able to meet the asking price, which was approximately $5 million, according to sources at schools on Dybantsa’s list of finalists. That deal is considered the largest for any college basketball player ever.
Adapting Ben Falk’s can’t/won’t/doesn’t know how framework for evaluating defensive issues.
Thanks for the shoutout!
In your Peterson and Boozer evaluations, you ranked them in comparison to other prospects in the last 15 years in tiers. Where would you place Dybantsa?