Ten Olympic players who deserve a look from the NBA (2024)

Surrounded by his NBA peers, Yabusele was nonetheless one of the best players on the silver medal-winning French team. Rudy Gobert, one of the world’s best defensive players and the face of the French team, played only 12 minutes in the gold medal match against the USA largely because Yabusele made him unnecessary.

A first-round draft pick of the Boston Celtics back in 2016, Yabusele signed with the team one year later, yet managed only two seasons before having his rookie contract terminated early. Notwithstanding what they thought of him as a prospect, the aspirational Celtics had more immediate plans in mind for their finite roster spots and resources, and so after a stint in China to earn money, Yabusele has since been back in the Euroleague, where he has spent the last three years with Real Madrid. Last season, he averaged 10.5 points and 4.9 rebounds in 23.6 minutes per game of Euroleague play; perhaps most importantly, he did so with 46.3 percent three-point shooting on a good volume of attempts.

Blessed as he is with a massive frame, extremely strong lower half and soft hands, it would be a waste if Yabu was to only use these tools to shoot jumpers. But he does not, doing work with the ball in his hands and down low to provide a versatile offensive presence, and – it turns out – also having the ability to do the biggest poster dunk on LeBron James since Britton Johnsen’s effort back in 2003.

Yabusele played his way back into NBA contention with his performances in these games. And he knows it, too.

Been waiting for a 2nd chance.. I’m ready 😤🧸

— Guerschon Yabusele (@yabusele28) August 11, 2024

The Olympics was not Lessort’s breakout performance, but merely the further continuation of a couple of seasons of rapid growth that has made him one of the Euroleague’s very best.

Last season, playing for Greek giants Panathinaikos in the Euroleague (the best club competition outside of the NBA), the soon-to-be-29-year-old Lessort averaged 13.9 points, 6.3 rebounds, 1.0 steals and 0.9 blocks per game on 62.4 percent shooting. He earned 5.7 Win Shares in only 41 games, was an All-EuroLeague 1st Team selection for the second year in a row, and was arguably the best player on the team that won the title. Always a good athletic specimen, Lessort has paired it with ever-greater discipline, decision-making and defensive presence, and is a skilled roller and finisher within the paint to go along with the pesky defense and excellent rebounding.

If he were to try and join the NBA, Lessort’s options are limited to one. By virtue of being the 50th overall pick back in the 2017 NBA Draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, and having had those rights subsequently passed along three times via trade, his rights now belong to the New York Knicks, and have done since 2020. And while the Knicks would certainly love someone to provide some two-way versatility in the style of the recently departed Isaiah Hartenstein, it is not automatic that Lessort will be it – stuck between positions without ideal size for an NBA five or the jump shot now required of a four, his hustle-based game would make him a role player.

Nevertheless, with the last two seasons he has had, there is a chance that he has value beyond the usual token presence that unsigned second-round pick draft rights usually are in trades. Lessort has done enough to keep himself on the NBA radar, even after seven years.

The man with the least-Greek name on the Greek roster, Walkup has been on the NBA’s radar since his college days, but the Stephen F. Austin product has yet to play a regular season game. He has instead steadily risen the ladder in Europe, a journey that has taken him to Greece, where he has been suitably successful and popular so as to become a nationalized Greek man himself.

Walkup’s game is best defined by his defense and his unselfishness. He was voted the Euroleague’s best defender while playing for Olympiacos last season, and his team-leading 4.7 assists per game average also ranked 13th in the competition. The perfect embodiment of Walkup as a player came in the semi-finals of the 2022/23 Euroleague Final Four, when he played 18 minutes and put in one of the best zero-point performances ever seen. His team won. Such is the way.

It would be fair to say that, as a primary ball-handler with great size but not great athleticism, and with on-ball pick-and-roll play rather than off-ball potency, Walkup is better-suited to the less-athletic Euroleague than the more uptempo NBA game. This is particularly true given the improved speed of the ball-handlers he would be asked to defend, which would somewhat mitigate his great hands. Just because he hasnot made the leap, though, it does not mean that hecouldnot. He always could, and he still can.

It could be argued that Bruno’s stop-start NBA career has been both the beneficiary and victim of timing. Were he not as young and raw as he was when he first joined, perhaps he would have done more in his first NBA stint than be assigned to the G League 62 times and be on the wrong end of the “two years away from being two years away” meme. But also, as a supremely athletic and wiry 6-foot-10 player with verticality, rim protection and a decent-enough outside shot, perhaps his skillset would not have been properly appreciated had he come along any earlier.

Caboclo’s presence on the court is undeniable, and his value to the Brazil team as the person best equipped to try and deal with Victor Wembanyama – if not the only one – was apparent. He is a top-tier athletic specimen, and although his game has not rounded out necessarily, he has gotten better at the things that he does, to the tune of a 9.4 points per game average in only 19.4 minutes with Partizan Belgrade in the Euroleague last season. Of particular note is the even 50.0 percent he shot from three-point range. And while the sample size for that was not enormous, it was also the third time in the last four seasons that he has shot above 40 percent from the long line in all competitions.

At the same time as it covets the Bruno/Anthony Randolph types, with their magnetism on the eye and mesmeric shot-blocking abilities, the NBA also gives them fairly short shrift. Imperious, mercurial and intermittent, Caboclo has always teased, without always delivering. But the two-years-away thing does him a giant disservice. He could contribute today.

Similar to Bruno above, Petrusev is also probably wishing his NBA career had come at a slightly different time. He was still drafted, the 50th overall selection in the 2021 NBA Draft by the Philadelphia 76ers having averaged a colossal 23.6 points and 7.6 rebounds per game for Serbian prospect factory Mega Basket the year before, itself coming after a 17.7 point per game sophom*ore season at Gonzaga immediately prior. But in the 1990s, putting in that much production at that school while standing 6-foot-11 would have meant a first-round selection and an NBA career that lasted as long as his knees would tolerate.

Petrusev finally signed with the 76ers last summer, but made it only a couple of weeks into the season before being salary-dumped onto the Sacramento Kings, who waived him a couple more weeks later. Far from having a decade-long NBA career, then, Petrusev currently only has one month. He is penalized by not comporting with the new modern orthodoxy, being a mostly ground-bound paint player whose outside jump shooting is merely occasional. It is assumed, quite fairly, that he will never be a high-level NBA contributor with his limited mobility.

Nevertheless, professional basketball remains a sport of size and skill, and Petrusev’s Olympic performance reminded everyone that he has plenty of both. Ostensibly the backup to the great Nikola Jokic, Petrusev played well enough to also feature alongside him, averaging 9.7 points and 4.5 rebounds per contest in a two-headed center monster. A high IQ player, Petrusev has size, strength and touch, and there exists a chance that he makes it back to the NBA one day on his offensive game alone.

Avramovic is one of the few players on this list never to have signed an NBA contract in his career so far. But as ever, this is not to be confused with him being unworthy of doing so. As he showed with his performances against Australia, Germany and the USA – where he scored 15 points in 18 minutes – he is a disruptive player with speed, skill and tenacity. Or at least, he can be.

The Aleksa Avramovic seen at the Olympics was an excellent two-way player. Full of spirit, speed and shooting, he showed his ability to get past defenders with the ball in his hands, plus the moves with which to score on anyone. Last season, in a sixth-man role for Partizan Belgrade in his home country, Avramovic scored 10.2 points in only 18.6 minutes per game, an impressive Lou Williams-esque scoring rate seen less often in Europe than America. He has the bag, and, when he wants to, the defense.

About to turn 30, Avramovic is an NBA-caliber scorer who just has not played in the NBA yet. As it is, though, he will not even be playing in the Euroleague next season, signing with CSKA Moscow in Russia who remain barred from the competition. The money there will be great, but the platform on which to showcase himself will not, and Avramovic is capable of being more than just a national team stud if he wants to be.

Bonga’s time in the NBA was ill-fated. He arrived with the Lakers aged only 18 having been selected 39th overall in the 2018 NBA Draft, and while it will have been a blessing in so many ways to have had LeBron James as a teammate at that age, it also meant little game time. And although he was traded to the Washington Wizards after one season – for whom he spent the next two years, before a final one in Toronto – that was not a conducive environment for player development at the time either.

Back to his home country he went, then, and in his two years back in Europe, the boy has become a man. Bonga was already a decent defender even in his young NBA days, but he is really is one now, primarily on the wing but also serving as a player able to cover all five positions and every area of the court. With his athleticism and wingspan, he covers ground, works hard and has good footwork, and although his offensive game has not developed as much, he runs the court and hits enough corner threes to contribute in his own small ways.

Prior to the Olympics beginning, Bonga left Bayern Munich to sign with Partizan Belgrade, thus staying in the Euroleague a little longer. Perhaps he always will do. But in his time away, he has honed his craft, and become an NBA-caliber defender.

Like Lessort above, Cordinier was once drafted in the NBA, but never signed. Selected by the Atlanta Hawks with the 44th pick of the 2016 Draft and passed along as an ancillary trade piece in the Jeremy Lin trade two years later, his rights ultimately wound up with the Brooklyn Nets. However, the Nets renounced those rights in the summer of 2021, making Cordinier free to sign with any NBA team. And concurrent with that renouncement has been his semi-breakout as a two-way player.

Long and lean, Cordinier always did have the profile to be a multi-positional defender who could run the floor; the question was how he would develop offensively in the half-court game. And the good news is that, notwithstanding some striking inconsistency, he has improved that area of his game the most. More able to get to the rim and finish from a standing start than he was, Cordinier pairs this with the rake-and-take and his good athleticism to be a finisher, and even if he is not a regular go-to guy, he can still take his turns on the ball on his good days, as France and their head coach Vincent Collet utilized in this tournament.

It is unclear why the Nets renounced Cordinier’s rights when it cost them nothing to keep them. It is also unclear if, six years after his last summer league stint, Cordinier has any interest in trying the NBA again. But while he is no longer a prospect, he is also no longer a project.

South Sudan’s impressive performance, coming off the back of an impressive showing to both get to and perform in the 2023 FIBA World Cup, was one of the best stories of the preliminary round. It is not however a new development that the world’s youngest nation has been producing quality basketball players. It has been doing so for a generation.

What the country has not had is the proper frontcourt/backcourt balance. For all the quality long-limbed, lithe and skilled forwards that have come through in the 20th century – and they are myriad, far beyond what is seen merely at the NBA level – the skill level of backcourt players, and particularly primary ball-handlers, has not grown at the same rate.

The naturalization of Jones, therefore, has been huge in South Sudan’s recent rise to basketball prominence. The former Louisville and Radford product is very sharp with the ball in his hands, with high skill and energy levels working in tandem to offset his lack of ideal size.

Having already spent time in the regular season with each of the Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets and Chicago Bulls, Jones has NBA experience already, and now has a good amount of high-level international play to go with it. Going up against the world’s best, he keeps impressing. And so while the money he is earning in China’s CBA is no doubt very substantial, perhaps there is scope for him to give the NBA another shot, and properly stick in a rotation this time.

At age 29, if there is to ever be a unison between Josh Hawkinson and the NBA, the time is now. As of today, he has not had so much as a summer league appearance. But in his seven-year professional career to date, he has become one of the very best players in Asia.

Graduating from Washington State in 2017, Hawkinson went to Japan, where he has stayed ever since. He has played his way into the top tier of Japanese basketball, then became one of the best players in it, and – by virtue of earning a passport through residency – has now become arguably the best player for his adopted country’s national team, too. Last season for the Hitachi Sun Rockers, he averaged 17.0 points, 8.0 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.1 blocks per game, mixing in greater than 40 percent three-point shooting as a part of a versatile offensive package. Hawkinson can score inside and outside the paint, inside and outline the line, with and without called plays, and pairs it all with good rebounding instincts and defensive footwork. It just would help if he was a little bit more explosive.

The 2017 NBA Draft featured players such as T.J Leaf, Tyler Lydon, Anzejs Pasecniks and Ivan Rabb, all somewhat comparable to Hawkinson in their skill sets, yet also all selected ahead of the never-seriously-considered Hawkinson on account of being more athletic, bigger, or both. But none of them stuck, and two of them (Lydon and Rabb) have already been out of basketball for some years. Hawkinson, in contrast, has carved his own path and consistently improved his all-around power forward game, one built on versatility and skill rather than burst.

By being in Japan all these years, Hawkinson has not had many reps against the world’s best players, and lacks for the relevant experience. Yet he showed in this tournament that just maybe, he could do it.