Jamir Watkins Scouting Report
Jamir Watkins has a clear path to stick in the NBA. But there are areas to clean up, especially on defense. As a fifth-year guy, he holds lots of untapped potential. Here's why he'll get drafted:
Jamir Watkins (#1, Florida State): Senior, 6'7"
Pure Wing: 210 lbs, Born: Jul 6, 2001 (23 years old)
Introduction
While scoring over eighteen points per game, Watkins earned All-AAC Second Team honors. After attending last year’s NBA Draft Combine, Watkins focused on improving as a passer and playmaker while solidifying his three-point shooting on a higher volume. He has been a stout defender throughout his career, but the offensive end is where he struggled to grow into a sustainable role.
A positive is that after missing his sophomore season due to a knee injury, Watkins has played a hundred games in a row, proving his durability. That’s a big relief for NBA scouts. Regardless, the combination of ball touches while effectively supporting a team’s offensive rating has been the worry in his profile. Watkins’ valuable experience, on top of the potential scalability of his role, is the main emphasis of this scouting report.
Physical Profile
At 6-foot-5 in socks, Watkins is an incredible athlete with great positional size. His wingspan adds value to his bursty and twitchy game style. He officially measuring out at 6’10.75” at the 2024 NBA Draft Combine. He has fully grown into his body, filling his frame. With his broad shoulders, Watkins can play physically, while relying on his speed and burst. The defensive versatility is the main selling point of his physical profile.
His long arms, big hands, and good awareness help to use his twitchiness to his advantage. He’s impacting passing lanes while offering a degree of help-side rim protection with his good verticality. Watkins’ toughness and positioning helped him develop into an above-average rebounder for his position. Despite being an older prospect, there’s much more untapped potential for NBA coaches to develop in the next few years.
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Defense
Catch-and-shoot
Watkins’ verticality and length are what NBA teams need to respond to ball motion by opponents, leading to wide-open threes. That’s an area to grow into a niche defender. However, Watkins’ decision-making is too slow to consistently close out properly, and his positioning is the main reason. He’s using two long strides to close the distance between the paint and the shooter at the elbow in the first play below. Athletic plays like these are common for Watkins, but he’s making it complicated due to a lack of positioning.
In the second possession below, Watkins is dialed in and keeps one foot inside the paint to keep his options flexible. On this occasion he can quickly close out to the corner, effectively contesting the shot. However, in the third play below, he’s responding to motion around him, moving closer to the strong side with two feet deeper inside the paint. This made the closeout on the kickout pass harder for him from the top of the key.
Another area of development is Watkins’ lack of effort in the last play below. He’s rotating baseline, but the kickout pass didn’t lead him to try to close out on the shot, nor did he box out for the defensive rebound. Possessions like these can be potential red flags for NBA scouts, making his habits while using the consistency of his motor as an area to work on at the next level.
Catch-and-drive
Watkins’ quickness and burst are major difference-makers in his draft profile. However, his decision-making on closeouts is way below average. He’s often biting on pump fakes, and it seems as if opposing scouting reports mention Watkins’ too-quick decision-making, which they then use to their advantage. The positioning, as also described above, is a vital part of his development, but against scorers, his mindset has to change. He’s such a great athlete that making ball handlers beat him off the dribble should add comfort to his game. Instead, Watkins bails scorers out by jumping in the air, making it inevitable that he’s getting burned, and thus, his interior defense collapsing.
In the first play below, the last step wasn’t there as Watkins went all-in that the shooter would pull up for the shot while being out of balance. These types of reading of a scorer’s footwork should lead to him improving on that end. He’s also not closing out at 180 degrees, often giving away driving lanes. In the second possession below, this led to him using his arms to respond to a potential shot, but the weak side driving lane was completely open for the scorer to utilize.
In the third possession, Watkins has two feet inside the paint and his positioning completely shuts down the passing angles to the weak side, taking away a potential ball reversal. He’s good at rotating to the entry pass near the high post, whereafter he’s yet again jumping in the air, getting burned from the ground. In the last play, the simple jab step again puts him in the air while he’s getting burned on his closeout defense. The unnecessary jumping is a major red flag in Watkins’ defensive profile, taking away most of the value of his great athleticism and physical tools.
Pick-and-roll
However, it’s feasible Watkins will improve in the next few years. His decision-making may be subpar, but he’s good at using his physical value and feet when taking the earlier-mentioned approach of forcing scorers to beat him off the dribble rather than constantly react. As a pick-and-roll defender, Watkins has decent screen navigation. It’s mostly based on his physicality while he can fight through screens, as his awareness needs some areas to clean up. Regardless, he was mostly used in the second line of defense at Florida State, making it an area where he could switch from the screeners to the ball handlers. This versatility is a good sign of what NBA coaches can expect from him.
He’s much more composed in the pick-and-roll than when he’s closing out. In the first play, that led to the ball handler struggling to make the right decisions against Watkins, who was in his neck but also kept enough distance to respond to a potential dribble penetration. In the second play below, Watkins needs to either be more aggressive in the horns play or fully commit to helping his team secure the defensive rebound, while in reality, both weren’t visible. These small habits can impact a team’s defensive rating negatively. Most NBA games are won by the margins, and these worsen the margins with Watkins on the floor.
A difference-maker in Watkins’ profile is his toughness. He’s actively switching on ball handlers, and when his feet are set, he’s good at drawing contact when scorers drive into the lane. The third and fourth plays below show examples of Watkins drawing the charge. The common denominator in both plays is Watkins keeping his composure and sliding his feet well before making the two winning plays. Those are feasible flashes that he can improve his decision-making in the next few years.
Cuts
The combination of negative body language and reactive defense makes Watkins struggle when guarding away from the ball. He has good awareness and is less likely to get burned by backdoor cuts. But as a rotating or help-side defender, his struggles immediately stood out. That’s not a good recipe for a team’s defensive rating in a faster-paced, ball-motion-heavy NBA game. In the first play below, it sums up everything. Watkins is the rim protector in this sequence, and his body language while letting his arms hang didn’t promise much good. Instead of either keeping the tag on the play-finisher or fully committing to the dribble penetration, Watkins didn’t choose one. Instead of getting the ball, he stood there, showing negative body language. That’s not a good look on his end.
In the second play below, Watkins does very well in serving as the weak side defender. He’s closing space with good positioning while not actively ball-watching. That eventually led to him poking the ball away for a potential transition move. At over a steal per game for a third straight season, the numbers support Watkins’ defensive playmaking by playing the passing lanes. The last play below shows another good sequence, followed by a bad habit. Against dribble penetration in transition, Watkins throws his body in and changes the course of the play. With the play-finisher struggling to finish, Watkins should have focused on the box out, focusing on the two other opponents in the paint, which didn’t happen. The lack of boxing out takes away value from Watkins’ rebounding, as he could have flirted with averaging double-digit rebounding numbers this season with consistency in both effort and boxing out.
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Offense
Pick-and-roll
For the NBA, Watkins’ burst, change of pace, and strength are three vital weapons they can use to give him some scoring load off the bench. He has tight enough handles to create out of the pick-and-roll, using his craft and strength to find paint touches. Contrary to his defense, Watkins’ habits on offense click and make sense. He’s good at using jab steps and changes of pace to create angles for himself. The area of development is that he’s not always as aggressive as he should be, as he tends to bail defenses out with midrange shots. At close to a dunk per game while finishing over 60% at the rim, Watkins shows good returns as a fifth-year senior.
In the first play, Watkins comes off the ball screen and immediately decelerates. However, instead of launching the contested midrange shot off the dribble, a bounce entry pass to the low post would have been a better option to force defenders to rotate while they already committed to Watkins. In the second possession, Watkins comes off the screen and throws a deceleration to ensure the five drops his coverage. Hereafter, Watkins aggressively attacked the defender’s chest, who moved backward. That’s a good habit of completely erasing rim protection, as he drew the foul. At close to eight free throws per game, drawing fouls and putting opponents into foul issues is one of Watkins’ main strengths.
He’s also creative with jump-stops. In the third play, Watkins plays himself out of the ICE, where he attacks the strong side and creates an angle with the jump-stop, getting both feet inside the arc. Hereafter, he popped quickly to finish the lay-up. However, being such a creative scorer, Watkins proves himself a disservice by settling for a tough, forced midrange shot, with the last play below being an example. Those are the types of attempts he has to filter out of his profile to ensure he can be a positive factor for an NBA team’s offensive rating.
Catch-and-drive
As a closeout attacker, Watkins lacks consistency in making the right decisions to either pull up from the midrange, make the extra pass, or ensure he gets two feet inside the paint. The creativity of using shot-fakes and jab steps to punish a lack of balance with his great burst is the main ingredient for his scoring prowess on an NBA floor. However. He’s often forcing his offense, bailing defenses out as they know providing early help doesn’t always ensure Watkins makes the extra pass. He’s playing with the mindset of always proving his worth. That’s a positive, but not if it comes at the expense of playing through the team’s structure. At over 31% usage, Watkins has shown that he shouldn’t carry a ball-touch-heavy role at the next level.
The first play is an example. He’s using his burst to blow by his assignment. Hereafter, he gets two feet inside the paint and three defenders committed to him. He had the elbow shooter in his pocket but decided to finish the play himself. An NBA scout should question why he’s not making the extra pass here. However, a positive is that he’s keeping his shot as leverage to continue to find his paint touches. Scorers who are hesitant to drive downhill are predictable. But Watkins does well in balancing his shot profile with the number of needed attempts from three to keep the defense guessing. Despite the miss, the attempt in the second play below was a positive. In the third play, the shot-fake was the defense-collapsing play where Watkins did well to aggressively slash inside before trying to bank home his floater. But again, the extra pass to the elbow here was a decision he should have made.
Catch-and-shoot
At over five attempts per game, Watkins nearly doubled his volume compared to last year. His 32.1% is below-average, but this will improve in the NBA. The shot process is decent, while Watkins does well in setting his feet. Everything else after that lacks consistency, which hurts his numbers. He’s still in the process of evolving into a volume shooter, where his role prior to his senior year consisted of slashing and making sure he’d collapse the defense using his athleticism. Therefore, it’s vital to put his numbers into the right context.
A consistent line in his shooting off the catch was Watkins forcing his shots, often pushing the ball. Therefore, he couldn’t ensure the right release. He’s also releasing the ball a tad too early, taking away from a potential higher-arcing form. The process of evolving into a volume shooter often succeeds when players can ensure their feet are set prior to the catch. In the third play below, there’s such a sequence where it’s crystal clear the ball goes to Watkins, but he still had to set his feet after the catch, making a wide-open three a lightly contested one. Florida State was a below-average three-point shooting program, making it more difficult for Watkins to ensure good returns, considering he’s still working on becoming a volume shooter. The right NBA context will help him sustain better returns as the process is decent and imminent for improvement.
Passing, ball-moving and playmaking
Watkins got closer to averaging a neutral assist-to-turnover ratio as a fifth-year senior. But that metric isn’t a good one to use, as the turnovers largely came off of Watkins’ scoring-heavy profile at over 30% usage. Regardless, averaging less than three turnovers per game is a positive. However, the other side of the coin is Watkins leaving many potential assists on the table, as mentioned earlier in the scouting report. Due to a lack of guard play at Florida State, he’s forced to carry more playmaking duties than an NBA team will ask him to do. Regardless, his passing, ball-moving, and playmaking are all positives he can bring to the next level to ensure he can sustain a team’s offensive rating.
In the first play below, Watkins shows his creativity as a passer while mastering the gravity he has built up as a scorer. He recognized the cutting action through the middle and changed from facing up to a post-up play to hit the cutter with the timely pass. His creativity and touch as a passer stand out with the wraparound pass in the second possession below. Watkins did well by decelerating while using the ball screen, which fully opened up the passing angle. His habit of changing his pace to ensure the defense commits to him is better shown in the third play below. That process helps him to execute basic passing reads more consistently. With more teams looking for pick-and-roll creators, Watkins fits in that role, considering how well he meshes with a screen-and-dive-five with the fourth and fifth plays below showing two examples.
NBA Draft Projection
Based on the strengths and areas of development mentioned in this scouting report, I project Jamir Watkins to be a lock in the second round of the 2025 NBA Draft. He’s a prime candidate to sign a two-way contract to earn his NBA future while continuing to develop in the G League. Being on the older side gives him the advantage of signing his second deal by the age of 26, but the risk is that he can fall outside the league easier. That’s the other side of the coin for staying in college for his full five seasons of eligibility.
Regardless, his athleticism and physical tools will always intrigue NBA scouts. Watkins’ role will be as a wing and guard defender, where his consistency with fewer ball touches will be the main thing for him to prove he can stick in the NBA.
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