I still like Grayson's long-term NBA prospects, but last night seriously recalibrated my short-term thoughts on his NBA future. For Grayson, I don't think the problem was that he played badly. That happens from time to time. And, frankly, I'd say Ingram was almost as ineffective as Allen. However, unless Grayson goes on to completely dominate against elite competition, I do think last night's game may have irreparably harmed his chances of going anywhere in the top 20-25 spots this season because of what it exposed -- i.e., that he doesn't handle the ball well against ball pressure and has no midrange game at all. In particular, when a team with NBA-length took away the one thing Grayson is really good at (putting his head down and attacking the rim hard), he really had no answers for how to score. He just kept doing the same thing and getting the same results. And what that tells me is that Grayson isn't long/athletic enough to go over NBA-sized bigs and doesn't have the type of midrange game / creativity around the rim to get his shot off against bigger, more athletic guys. That's really a fundamental flaw in his game that every NBA team is going to focus upon during the draft process. While I think Grayson can certainly improve on the weaknesses that were exposed last night, I don't think there are any quick fixes for what we saw last night.
As a comparison, while I think Ingram was also bad, reality is that his problems were that he (i) missed some makeable shots, (ii) made some dumb mistakes on offensive fouls, and (iii) didn't seem to play with enough intensity at times. While those are all problems, a lot of that stuff can be chalked up to inexperience and a bad night. Those are the sorts of things NBA scouts will overlook if it's a one night occasion. What happened with Grayson is completely different IMO. Even if Grayson goes out and dominates a lot of other games, I think a lot of scouts will look at Grayson's performance last night as exposing a larger problem with how his game / strengths translate to the next level.
Pretty much what I was thinking. Grayson was somewhat exposed last night. The only thing I would add, is that I think he was exposed some mentally too. He was visibly shaken and rattled. UK had him completely out of sorts. That's a kudos to them.