This year the NBA mock drafts seem to have more of a consensus than is typical. So rather than just repeat where players are expected to be selected, let’s take a look at some of the college stats of the projected picks. In the following lists, I am mostly focusing on players projected to go in the first round of the draft. But I will throw in a few other names just to make things interesting.

Vexing this project with their incomplete college stats:

1. All the international players

2. Nerlens Noel - hideous knee injury

3. CJ McCollum - injured a year after upsetting Duke

4. Glen Rice Jr. - D-league last year

5. Ricardo Ledo - never eligible

6. Myck Kabongo - ineligible most of season

The story prior to the combine was that Cody Zeller had short arms that caused him to get his shot blocked more often than you might expect for a 7-footer. But his arms measured out to the same height as his frame. So maybe the story was that he was a below-the-rim player. But his vertical leap wasn’t terrible either when tested at the combine. Maybe the answer is just that Zeller does a good job of getting under players and drawing contact. Among first round picks, Zeller was the best at getting to the line last year: 

Best free throw rate, most FTA/FGA

1. Cody Zeller 0.73

2. Mason Plumlee 0.69

3. Nerlens Noel 0.63

4. Jeff Withey 0.60 

I’ll give Noel a bit of a pass because of the short season, but if he is going to live at the free throw line, he needs to start making a higher percentage of his free throws: 

Worst FT%

1. Steven Adams 44%

2. Nerlens Noel 53%

3. Gorgui Dieng 65%

4. Tony Mitchell 68%

Interestingly, all four of these bad free throw shooters were also elite shot-blockers: 

Best Block Pct

1. Jeff Withey 14%

2. Nerlens Noel 13%

3. Steven Adams 11%

4. Gorgui Dieng 9%

5. Tony Mitchell 8%

I think this says something about player development. If you have always been an explosive player in high school or college, you have never needed to put in major hours working on your shot. But the NBA game now emphasizes skill over physicality and if Noel, Adams and Dieng ever want to be stars, their scoring touch will have to evolve to match their elite defensive ability.

Withey’s shot-blocking is truly remarkable and someone is going to get a very nice defensive piece at the end of the first round.

Having looked at bad free throw shooters, here are some of the better free throw shooters: 

80%+ from the FT Line

1. Ben McLemore 87%

2. CJ McCollum 85%

3. Tony Snell 84%

4. Allen Crabbe 81%

5. Trey Burke 80%

6. Pierre Jackson 80%

7. Kentavious Caldwell Pope 80%

The real problem with college data is the small sample sizes. A player can get hot from three-point range for 15 games, declare for the draft, and it is hard to tell if his shooting skill is a mirage. That’s why some people view free throw shooting as the real shooter’s metric. If you put in the time and have a natural touch at the line, there is a better chance you will eventually become a quality perimeter shooter in the pros. Thus even though there is some variation in the three point shooting percentages for players like Pierre Jackson and CJ McCollum, the fact that all seven of the above players were good at the line suggests they are all natural shooters. 

College three-point percentages are less interesting for guys that rarely take them. (I am looking at you Victor Oladipo.) Thus in the next table, I am only showing the top three point shooters if they made a lot of threes. 

Over 70 made 3's on the year, best percentages

1. Erik Murphy 45%

2. Reggie Bullock 44%

3. Ben McLemore 42%

4. James Southerland 40%

5. Trey Burke 39%

Erik Murphy is projected as a second round pick right now and that is probably fair. But 6’10” guys who shoot over 40 percent from beyond the arc for three years in a row usually at least get a chance in the NBA. The same comment applies to Southerland.

I’m not convinced Victor Oladipo is really a natural outside shooter. But he is undoubtedly a hard-worker, and he was one of the most versatile defenders in college basketball. He had the second most steals among projected first-round picks: 

Most Steals

1. Michael Carter-Williams 109

2. Victor Oladipo 78

3. Shane Larkin 71

4. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope 65

Michael Carter-Williams and Victor Oladipo were both relatively tall guards at the college level which allowed them to get their hands on more passes. But I worry a little bit that Carter-Williams great steal numbers were a product of playing in a zone defense. In a zone, dipping into passing lanes and cheating off your man is more common. I’m also a little worried that Carter-Williams led all projected first round picks in DQs last year: 

Most likely to foul out

1. Michael Carter-Williams - 5 DQs on year

2. Alex Len - 4 DQs on year

Maybe Carter-Williams is a little too aggressive in some games, but he only averaged 2.3 fouls per game, so foul trouble wasn’t a common occurrence. In fact, none of the consensus first round picks looks particularly foul prone at all.

And of course what makes Carter-Williams' size all the more special is that he is a PG with elite passing skills: 

Best Assist Rate

1. Pierre Jackson 41%

2. Michael Carter-Williams 40%

3. Trey Burke 37%

4. Shane Larkin 26% 

No one can match Trey Burke’s assist-to-turnover ratio however: 

Best Assist to Turnover Ratio (PGs)

1. Trey Burke 3.0

2. Pierre Jackson 2.1

3. Michael-Carter Williams 2.1

4. Shane Larkin 2.0

Burke’s performance is even more impressive given how many freshmen he played with last year. He turned a team of young players into a Final Four team with his outstanding decision making. 

And don’t overlook the passing of some of these non-PGs too: 

Best Assist to Turnover Ratio (non-PGs)

1. Reggie Bullock 2.3

2. Otto Porter 1.8

Porter’s strength is his shooting and passing, not his play-making and driving. On the flip side, these guys are black holes: 

Worst Assist to Turnover Ratio

1. Tony Mitchell 0.3

2. Shabazz Muhammad 0.5

3. Jeff Withey 0.5

4. Anthony Bennett 0.5

At least Tony Mitchell had the excuse that he was playing in a non-power conference and he was almost always the best player on the floor. But Shabazz Muhammad might have helped his team by passing once in a while. There is an interesting correlation in the fact that Shabazz Muhammad selfishly lied about his age for all those years and selfishly never passes the ball to teammates. 

Having looked at the great three point shooters earlier, here are the bad ones: 

Wait, why was he taking a three? Over 70 misses, worst percentages

1. Jamaal Franklin 27%

2. Michael Carter-Williams 29% 

I’m not sure how Franklin’s game translates to the NBA. A guard who struggles with his outside shot is going to be exposed pretty early. But Franklin was a dominant player at San Diego St. in a lot of ways. At 6’5” Franklin had the best defensive rebounding rate of any of the projected first round picks. Franklin’s defensive rebounding rate was even better than the forwards and centers. 

Best Defensive Rebounding Percentage

1. Jamaal Franklin 26%

2. Mason Plumlee 23%

3. Gorgui Dieng 22%

4. Anthony Bennett 22%

Gorgui Dieng was dominant on the glass on both ends of the floor.

Best Offensive Rebounding Percentage

1. Steven Adams 15%

2. Alex Len 13%

3. Gorgui Dieng 13%

4. Cody Zeller 12%

Offensive rebounding was Adams best offensive skill, but the rest of his offensive game needs a lot of work. And Adams didn’t play nearly as minutes as some of the other elite players. It is pretty baffling why some of these players declared given that they hadn’t even earned major minutes at the college level yet: 

Fewest Minutes Per Game

1. Grant Jerrett 18 MPG

2. Dewayne Dedmon 22 MPG

3. Steven Adams 23 MPG

4. Amath M'Baye 25 MPG 

On the flip side, Shane Larkin absolutely was an iron man for Miami, playing the most minutes per game of any projected first round pick. And the reason for all those minutes is that Larkin was one of the most improved players in college basketball this season. (For those of you less familiar with college data, ORtg is a measure of points scored per 100 possessions.) 

Big improvements in efficiency

1. Shane Larkin ORtg improved from 99 to 117 while using 3% more possessions

2. Alex Len ORtg improved from 99 to 113 while using 6% more possessions

3. Trey Burke ORtg improved from 106 to 121 while using 2% more possessions

4. Victor Oladipo ORtg improved from 107 to 122 while using 1% fewer possessions

5. Reggie Bullock ORtg improved from 118 to 128 while using 3% more possessions

6. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope ORtg improved from 104 to 113 while using 4% more possessions

There are so many more names I could include on this list. Murray St.’s Isaiah Canaan deserves a lot more praise. Even though his team did worse, Canaan had a brilliant season personally. On the flip side…

Not improving

1. Andre Roberson ORtg fell from 109 to 100 while using 2% fewer possessions

2. Phil Pressey ORtg fell from 114 to 101 while using 3% more possessions

3. Cody Zeller ORtg fell from 127 to 119 while using 2% more possessions

None of these guys was terrible. Roberson was still a dominant defender. But when you tread water in college basketball, NBA scouts start to downgrade your potential. Zeller treaded water and didn’t improve and his draft stock has fallen quite a bit. From Z to Z, from Zeller’s free throw rate, to his declining ORtg, that’s a quick look inside the college stats.

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 There's no magic to it.  It's basketball.  It's not that complicated. -- Gregg Popovich

Over the course of the NBA Finals, the lineups on the floor have become progressively smaller. In Game 1, Udonis Haslem and Tiago Splitter started while Matt Bonner and Chris “Birdman” Andersen came off the bench. In Game 4, Erik Spoelstra took out Haslem for Mike Miller. In Game 5, Gregg Popovich responded in kind, taking Splitter out for Manu Ginobili. Bonner and Birdman, meanwhile, are nowhere to be found. The result has been beautiful basketball: two skilled teams playing 4-out for 48 minutes.

Both San Antonio and Miami are built to exploit the geometry of the floor. They attack defenses all 94 feet. If you let up on either team for a second, the ball can find its way to someone spotting up for an open corner three, the most dangerous shot in the game. When their offenses are clicking, all five players are moving in unison to create an open shot for a good shooter. The ball flows freely around the court. This is what coaches mean when they talk about The Way The Game Was Meant To Be Played.

While there hasn’t been a close finish since Game 1, it hasn’t been for any lack of dramatic back-and-forth action. In the playoffs, every stretch of the game is crunch time. And with both teams going small, any lack of offensive execution can snowball quickly. When either misses shots or turns the ball over for 4-5 minutes, it gives the other too many chances for run-outs and transition 3’s. It’s two boxers in the middle of the ring trading wild overhand punches. Eventually, someone connects.

In Game 5, the Spurs landed the first blow, with a 12-0 run in a 3-minute stretch at the end of the first quarter. The floor spacing of the Heat was terrible: Haslem, Norris Cole and Ray Allen around Dwyane Wade and LeBron James. Allen is the only guy San Antonio doesn’t feel comfortable leaving open outside of 15+ feet. LeBron and Wade started missing long two-point shots because there was no room on the floor, while Parker treated Cole like a turnstile on defense.

Miami was able to make a comeback, but they had expended too much of their energy getting back into the game. You could see it by the end of the third quarter, when LeBron and Wade were missing a number of easy shots at the rim in transition. The Spurs didn’t win the game in that 3-minute stretch at the end of the first, but they did remove almost any margin of error for the Heat. In this series, it only takes one false move to dig yourself into a pretty deep hole.

San Antonio essentially played flawless offense on Sunday. They scored 114 points on 60 percent shooting, with an offensive rating of 119.4 per 100 possessions. All five of their starters had at least 16 points. That’s hard to do against a bad team in the middle of December playing the second night of a back-to-back, much less against the defending champions on the biggest stage of the sport. Were it not for their 18 turnovers, the Spurs might have had some truly jaw-dropping point totals.

Much of the credit for that will go to Popovich and his offensive system, but as he’s said in a million times, there’s nothing all that complicated to what he’s doing. The Spurs run pick-and-rolls with a lot of movement on the weakside of the floor. A good portion of their game is played in semi-transition, which is probably the “purest” form of basketball, with players reading and reacting in space and flowing into open shots rather than running set plays.

At a really basic level, it’s just having a lot of shooting on the floor. If defenses have to defend four players all over the three-point line, they are too spread out to effectively help each other. If they don’t respect a player’s outside shot, they can pack the paint. There are ways to score when there’s traffic around the basket, but it’s much easier to make plays when there is space in the middle of the floor. Any coach can look like a genius with LeBron or Tony Parker operating in space.

With enough space, even a marginal player can look like a superstar. Danny Green was the No. 46 pick in the 2009 draft and he was cut three times in his first two years in the NBA. Now, he’s averaging 18 points on 66 percent shooting from three in the Finals and is one of the front-runners for series MVP. It’s no slight on Green to say there are players just as talented as him in Europe. How would Wayne Ellington, his more celebrated teammate at UNC, have done in Green’s role in San Antonio?

If a player can’t consistently stretch the floor, he can become a liability quickly. There just aren’t many places you can hide a player who can’t shoot against modern defenses. In four-out basketball, either you are a center or a three-point shooter. As a result, anyone can look mortal without a jumper. The Spurs realized they didn’t have to play guys who could run with LeBron and Wade; they could just play shooters who could give them three feet of cushion.

In the modern NBA, a non-center who can’t shoot is becoming an endangered species. The old cliche was that the game slowed down in the playoffs, but the reverse is happening these days. Neither team could afford to play this small in the regular season. With floor spacing so crucial in the Finals, defensive liabilities like Gary Neal and Miller can be hidden in ways that offensive liabilities cannot. In the nine minutes Haslem played in Game 5, the Heat were -20.

The lesson for young basketball players is clear. If you want to play basketball at the highest level, you had better be able to shoot the ball. It doesn’t take a ton of athletic ability to be a good shooter. It just takes good mechanics and a strong work ethic. Shooting is as important to basketball as hitting is to baseball. No one’s calling up minor leaguers to the show who can’t hit. If you’re in the D-League and you’re not shooting three-pointers, you’re doing it wrong.

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To paraphrase George Orwell, all NBA Finals games are equal, but some are more equal than others. After splitting the first four in what’s been a back-and-forth series, the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs are set for an epic Game 5 on Sunday. It’s essentially a must-win for San Antonio. A loss would mean winning Games 6 and 7 in Miami against a team that hasn’t lost consecutive games in months. The stakes couldn’t be higher, particularly for the two all-time greats set to take the stage.

Even in a series with future Hall of Famers all over the court, LeBron James and Tim Duncan stand out. The seemingly ageless Duncan, a first-team All-NBA center at the age of 37, is averaging 15 points and 11 rebounds in his fifth NBA Finals. LeBron, a 28-year-old at the apex of his powers, is averaging 21 points, 12 rebounds and six assists a game ... and people want him to do more! How many NBA Finals have ever featured two of the ten greatest players of all-time?

All transcendent basketball players share a few things in common. They have the size and athleticism to dominate at multiple positions and they don’t have any holes in their game. Duncan helped usher in a new era as multi-dimensional 7'0 power forward, although age has caused him to slide down to center. LeBron, a 6’9, 270 point guard/center hybrid, is something we've never really seen before. Both can score, pass, rebound and defend at an elite level. In this series, their only weakness has been an inconsistent jumper.

Unselfishness is what separates them from many of the NBA's pantheon players. Over the course of their careers, both have consistently been fantastic teammates. They don't force the action and let the game come to them. It’s impossible to imagine either getting into the type of locker room struggle that eventually broke up Shaq and Kobe. There isn’t a team in the history of the league they couldn’t seamlessly fit into. They're all-time great players who play the game “the right way”.

From a historical perspective, the great tragedy is they never faced off at the height of their powers. When they met in the 2007 Finals, LeBron was only 22, still years away from his prime. A prime Duncan, meanwhile, would change everything about the 2013 Finals. Rather than serving as a ball-mover and secondary option, he would have dominated Chris Bosh in the low-post. On defense, he would have shut down the paint, forcing LeBron and Dwyane Wade to play as jump-shooters.

As great as LeBron is, there’s very little he could have actually done against a 28-year-old Duncan. Duncan has four titles on his resume and he’s this close to having many, many more. He’s literally two plays -- Derek Fisher’s 0.4 shot in 2004 and Dirk Nowitzki’s and-1 in 2006 -- from winning five straight titles. He faced a Lakers team with two all-time greats in their prime and defeated them twice. Were it not for Shaq, Duncan could have had a Bill Russell-like run through the 2000’s.

For Duncan, a title in 2013 would be the capstone to one of the greatest careers in basketball history. The awards speak for themselves: 14 All-NBA teams, 13 All-Defensive teams, two MVP’s, three NBA Finals MVP’s. He would be the first player since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to win a championship as a first-team All-NBA player in his early 20’s and his late 30’s. David Robinson and Tony Parker are great, but they aren't Oscar Robertson and Magic Johnson.

For LeBron, a title would be be the capstone for one of the greatest three-year runs of all-time. Russell won championships as a player/coach, but no one has won as a player/GM before. Practically every important player in Miami -- Wade, Bosh, Udonis Haslem, Mike Miller, Shane Battier, Ray Allen -- took less money in free agency in order to play with LeBron. If LeBron becomes a GM, he will probably be more Larry Bird than Michael Jordan.

No matter what happens over the next week, winning in 2014 will be a tall order for the Heat. No team has made four consecutive Finals since Bird’s Celtics. Climbing the mountain every year takes a toll, physically and mentally. LeBron and Bosh are their only core players under 30. Everyone else has shown signs of wearing down. And with rumors flying about Chris Paul and Dwight Howard, they may have to face the ultimate challenge in 2014: a superteam created in their own image.

In that respect, a loss to the Spurs could sink any realistic chance LeBron has of “catching” Kobe, much less Jordan. Regardless of whether it's fair or not, the Big Three will be judged by the standard they gave themselves three years ago. More than any team since the Shaq/Kobe Lakers, if the Heat ain’t first, they're last.

The pressure surrounding the team, both on and off the court, is palpable. Everything that happens to Miami is the biggest deal in the world, one way or the other. It’s crazy.

That may be the biggest difference in the way Duncan and LeBron approach the game. No one who unironically calls himself “King James” and has “The Chosen One” tatted across his back can say he doesn’t have an ego. Duncan, in contrast, might as well be a Buddhist monk when it comes to operating without one. He loves basketball, but it’s his job, not his identity. You don’t get the sense he spends too much time worrying about legacy or Q rating.

LeBron, unlike Duncan, has transcended the sport he plays in. He’s as famous as any one person can possible be. Until you see it in person, it’s hard to grasp the level to which his life has become a reality show. During timeouts, one of the ABC cameras follows him around the court, to the complete exclusion of anything else going on. It’s a good metaphor for how people view the series. Duncan will probably be remembered mostly for being “boring”, but the older I get, the more I see why that isn’t such a bad thing.