2021 NBA Draft Profile: Jalen Green

The headliner of the G League Ignite team’s inaugural squad, Green has the potential to be a primary scoring option for whatever team drafts him early in the NBA Draft.

Position: Shooting guard, G League Ignite

Age: 19 (2/9/2002)

Height: 6 ft 6 in

Wingspan: ???

Weight: 180 lbs.

Strickland 2021 Big Board Rank: 3

Jalen Green is a dynamite athlete. The phrase elite athleticism gets thrown around a lot, but Jalen is truly an elite athlete. It’s not simply his deceleration like Luka Doncic, or his vertical explosion like Donovan Mitchell, or his step like John Wall, but all of the above. He is a 6-foot-6 inch dynamo who is learning how to fully leverage his athletic gifts with an increasingly tight handle, improving jump shot mechanics, and a newfound appreciation for the smaller parts of defensive execution. 

In high school, Green was almost a stereotypically gifted scoring prospect: questionable jumper, questionable shot selection, ambitious but overly flashy moves, and shaky defensive projection. In the G League, he showed more aptitude for playing both on- and off-ball, leveraging his combo dribbles into space creation for jumpers and drives alike, and a newfound mechanical consistency on jump shots.

On defense, he was fighting an uphill battle as a very skinny kid playing against stronger and older athletes, but showed determination and constant effort, in addition to a solid understanding of help defense basics. He started slow, but the second half of his short season was one long hot streak that saw him ascend to become the Ignite’s biggest scoring threat. Teams drafting him will bank his high scoring floor and try to provide a canvas for him to paint a more refined game, hoping to teach him how to manipulate defenses rather than simply overwhelming them.