The appeal with Fox is that his weaknesses (shooting, strength) can be developed with time and effort and he's got strengths (speed with the ball, first step, defensive intensity, leadership ability) that are impossible to teach. He's not a perfect prospect of course. He doesn't have John Wall's incredible combination of speed and power for instance or Lonzo Ball's almost superhuman ability to get the ball in exactly the right spot from all sorts of angles but what I don't question with Fox is his commitment to doing whatever it takes to win and his knowledge of the game. Listen to this guy's interviews, he's thinking the game on a level that very few 19 year olds are capable of. When you watch him on the court and see how he picks up full court defense on every possession and how impossible he is to stay in front of when he has the ball and you add to that his off the court personality and intensity and I think that's a guy who would help us a lot. Something that tends to get forgotten every year as we rank these guys based on their skills is that a team isn't just made up of basketball players, it's made up of people with personalities. And that's what makes me such a big Fox fan. He's more solid starter than superstar but to the extent that team chemistry is a factor, I think he's a good fit for us.
I really pushed for Elfrid Payton and Emmanuel Mudiay and I can see where the lack of success those two guys have had so far would give people pause when it comes to evaluating Fox. Payton hasn't been bad, he's actually been quite good at times, but he hasn't been able to contribute consistently and his shooting percentages are really holding him back overall. He's a valuable player though who could actually be one of the better PGs in the league if he learned to shoot with consistency. Mudiay is a little harder to figure out. His shooting hasn't just been bad it's been awful to such an extent that it overshadows everything else he does. I watched him a lot leading up to the draft and most of his production in High School and the year he spent in China came from driving to the basket and finishing around the defense, pulling up for midrange jumpers, or kicking out to shooters. The difficulty for him has been the increased size and athleticism he encounters in the paint against NBA defenses. He hasn't been able to finish inside, he hasn't been able to create enough space to get clean midrange looks, and he's turning the ball over at an alarming rate trying to force passes that aren't there. Things couldn't be going much worse. Ideally you'd want to see him in an uptempo offense with lots of off the ball movement so I don't think the team situation there is doing him any favors either.
What does this mean for Fox? Well first of all, I think Fox is already a better ballhandler than either Payton or Mudiay. We've seen with Jimmer and Ben in particular how important ballhandling ability is for a guard. If you can't get to where you want on the floor without turning the ball over than it's hard to get in any kind of a rhythm offensively. Conversely, Tyreke Evans won rookie of the year primarily on the strength of his ball handling and physicality. The good news for Fox is that his driving and finishing ability was so good as a freshman in college that he's unlikely to struggle the way that Mudiay and Payton have. Fox also has a nice pull-up floater in his arsenal that would do wonders for those two guys. Ultimately there's no way to know, but I think if you look at Fox's speed, ballhandling, and finishing ability in the paint he already has some elite skills on offense which give him a higher floor as a scorer than both Payton and Mudiay. Add to that his off the charts intangibles and you've got a PG prospect worth getting excited about I think. He absolutely has to be better as a jumpshooter than we saw this year but in the context of the draft where every pick carries some risk, I think that's an acceptable risk in this case. If you're looking at Isaac and Smith Jr. at pick 5, both of those guys have higher overall potential if they put it all together but can you teach aggressiveness and situational awareness in Isaac's case or defensive intensity and leadership ability in Smith's? Those seem like riskier bets to me. And neither one of them has blown up social media promoting Sacramento as a basketball destination either.
