Wooga Poplar Scouting Report
The Indiana Pacers prove why toughness and rebounding are essential to winning championships and rings. In draft context, that shines a light on guys like Wooga Poplar. Here's why he gets drafted:
Wooga Poplar (#5, Villanova): Senior, 6'5"
Shooting Guard — Born: January 5, 2003 (22 years old)
Introduction
After a Final Four run with Miami as a sophomore, Poplar has had a disappointing junior campaign despite doubling his volume of three-point attempts while sustaining his numbers at 38% on average. Regardless, this led to him exploiting his status as a top portal target. Hereafter, he returned home to Philadelphia to commit to Coach Neptune and the Villanova Wildcats.
While scoring over fifteen per game, Poplar earned All-Big East honors and gave NBA scouts valuable feedback on his ability to thrive on more than just shooting. His ball-handling duties and secondary creation open the conversation for his NBA role. Poplar is a proven shooter, and the gravity of his shooting is the emphasis of this scouting report. As someone who believes toughness and rebounding are the two essentials to win basketball games, Poplar has a legitimate case to satisfy what NBA scouts look for.
Physical Profile
At 6-foot-5 in shoes, Poplar has excellent positional size to play as a two, his natural position. He has a strong upper body and broad shoulders, and did well to fill his frame throughout the years. He’s a strong yet crafty athlete who worked on investing his shooting gravity in exploiting advantages and mismatches inside the lane.
At 202 pounds, Poplar uses power and strength to make a difference rather than relying on athleticism. He has decent length with a confirmed 6’6.5” wingspan. He has good footwork and lateral quickness but lacks true burst. He’s a decent vertical athlete, winning most of his rebounding battles with positioning and muscle.
The positive in Poplar’s body is his core strength. His improving footwork helps him to sustain balance, which helps him on both ends of the floor.
Offense
Catch-and-shoot
With back-to-back seasons on different teams and over five threes per game, the 38.5% and 38.7% returns show consistency in his shooting. That’s Poplar’s calling card in the NBA. However, for shooters to succeed, they must show they can leverage their gravity to impact winning in other areas. This is the development Poplar has shown at Villanova, where he was the team’s second option and most essential guard.
The jumper translates to the NBA. His process is consistent, and Poplar shows a healthy shooting stroke with a high-arcing release despite barely leaving the floor on his jumper. That’s an area where he reminds me of André Miller. Poplar sets his feet seamlessly, whether on jumps like in the first play or movement in the second possession below. The consistency comes from him pivoting strongly with his right to ensure that he has options to fake and attack closeouts. That’s the leverage his shooting gravity holds.
The process is consistent despite Poplar moving his feet after the catch. He’s not lowering the ball much, which compensates for the time between his moving feet and the release. The third play shows an example. The development of his upper body strength helped him to extend his range as well. Combined with his pivot foot, the fourth play shows the result of his high self-confidence as one of college basketball’s best shooters.
Running off screens
Poplar’s added value for NBA teams comes from the sets they’ll run to bank on his shooting gravity. At Villanova, this often led to curls or misdirection curls in getting Poplar open. However, the other side of the coin is Poplar forcing shots, which led to sloppy ones, like in the first play below in the baseline out-of-bounds play. However, Poplar got much better at recognition angles, combined with help from defenders coming at him.
In the second play, that led to his excellent pump-fake before throwing his body into finish through contact. The physical aspect is the differentiator because skinniness is the common denominator with most shooting specialists.
In the third possession, Poplar banks on his gravity and feels for the game by throwing in fakes after his last step. He has three seasons where he converted over 85% of his free-throw attempts, with the emphasis being that he’s getting much better at collecting trips to the charity stripe. However, he’s forcing offense too often. The fourth play shows an example after the penetration via the pump-fake. He must pass out of his advantages more often, and with less than two assists per game, the numbers confirm his score-first mentality on that end.
Making plays out of closeouts
Poplar prefers rim pressure above everything with his closeout plays. He’s often reverse pivoting to help his burst to compensate for the lack of speed. However, the second compensating part comes from his toughness and aggressiveness in pushing the ball ahead until he gets downhill. His upper body strength helps him in that end. At 18 dunks this season, the numbers show his aggressiveness while generating deep paint touches.
In the first play, Poplar uses his craft and strength to create the wide-open driving angle before dunking it home. He keeps his head low and leverages his strength with constant pressure in attacking a defender’s chest. The second play is shown twice to point out the importance of a timely reverse pivot in closeouts, as it led to Poplar blowing by his man completely. Despite gaps closing, his aggressiveness is rewarding as he’s forcing his will on defenders. That’s the trait closeout scorers need to sustain a team’s offensive rating.
This helps him collect trips to the foul line as well. In the fourth play, Poplar explodes to the rim after the pass fake to the corner. He follows it up with the crossover on the elbow before again collapsing the defense. This makes it feasible that his foul-baiting translates to the NBA, as he holds multiple ways to create angles and unbalance opponents before attacking their chest. The common denominator in the story is that Poplar has to pass more out of these advantages, which is something NBA scouts must keep in mind.
Ball-moving, passing, and playmaking
This leads to the 1.5 assists per game despite playing at over 25% usage. However, for NBA scouts, it’s essential to see how Poplar creates and executes his passing reads rather than the result of it. The reason why the passing numbers matter less is the halfcourt-heavy game Villanova played on top of Poplar’s role, where he had to carry a large chunk of the Wildcats’ offense.
Poplar is a natural ball-mover. Certain traits point toward him not being a born playmaker. The first one is the lack of passing the ball ahead immediately in transition, as shown in the first clip below. On top of that, he’s not creating advantages with most of his passes, as they are to keep the ball moving or bail himself out when he can’t get the angle to attack the rim. The second play shows an example.
However, he’s consistent at creating passing angles when he’s attacking the rim. The third and fourth plays show an example. The creativity is often there, with the pass fake to the right before the kick out to the left corner. Poplar has decent handles, but not tight ones. That’s an area of development for the next few years, as it’s essential to tighten his handles to express his creativity as a scorer while banking on his leverage as a shooter. His passing numbers will be the result of his improved decision-making to pass or score out of his advantages. The positive for NBA teams is that his advantage creation off the dribble has shown a consistent pattern in his senior year at Villanova.
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Defense
Pick-and-roll
Poplar is not a good screen navigator. However, his strength and toughness compensate for a part of it. He looks to miss the feeling of dropping or going over when having to choose how to deal with the ball screen. He’s comfortable picking up ball handlers on the perimeter, but teams often placed ball screens toward the interior to keep Poplar inside or to immediately punish him if he tried to go over screens.
He doesn’t rely on drop coverage in the slightest. In terms of a mindset, that’s a positive trait. In the first play, Poplar goes for the ball handler in the ICE. By pivoting on his last step, he ensured he could slide his feet when he got attacked to the rim or pop to the ball handler pulling up for the elbow three. Despite the uncalled moving screen in the second possession, which shows Poplar's vulnerability when he steps back when he sees the drag screen. The stepping back made it easier for the screener to go with the lockup instead of Poplar adjusting to the screener to make it easier to avoid it.
The third play shows another example of him colliding on the elbow because he moved before the screen was set. That makes it easier for teams to focus on Poplar in screen-and-roll sets. Despite the lack of boosting a defensive rating with his screen navigation and decision-making, the strength will help Poplar to improve once he develops in navigating around and fighting through screens much better.
Closeouts
Poplar’s defensive footwork falls behind his offense. However, there’s a base to grow into a better closeout defender once he improves his last step and shows good decision-making against fakes. As of now, he’s forcing his closeouts, giving ball handlers options to fake him as he’s making the first move. That’s not sustainable for a team’s defensive rating.
In the first play below, Poplar loses his balance after the gather but recovers decently before the average shot contest. The effect trickles down when considering Poplar’s lateral movement. In the second play, he’s not comfortable staying in front of his man because he pivoted too far out on the last step, getting burned via the strong side. In the third play, we see a similar outcome as Poplar was caught with an early reaction as the helper, which puts his closeout to the elbow in danger as he is out of balance. Eventually, he felt like gambling on the jumper before getting faked and burned.
Regardless, when he’s closing out properly, Poplar can stay in front of his man if he’s physical early in the process. The fourth play shows an example. However, his closeouts are not reliable now, and it’s likely that better NBA athletes will cause problems for Poplar at the next level.
Catch-and-shoot
Closing out gets easier for Poplar when he can focus on shooters. His style of closing out at 180 degrees. But positioning himself to the side hedges some extra risk of his getting attacked. He’s more comfortable when he knows opponents will shoot. The better Poplar can read closeout attackers, the better he’ll perform. His toughness translates as he’s closing out with a hard hand in the shooter’s face. He doesn’t have great length, but uses his wingspan for good as he’s making long strides to the perimeter before his jumps.
NBA spacing is being seen as something good. But the other side of the coin is that for non-explosive closeout defenders, it’s more difficult to close out against more space in a faster-paced game. With the NBA’s reliance on threes, Poplar should improve to a decent closeout defender once he reads defenders better. The four plays below show the level of comfort when knowing the shot will be the decision. He’s rotating well on all plays while showing urgency in the quickness of his closeouts.
Defense away from the ball and against cutters
Poplar shows a lack of assertiveness when he’s defending away from the ball. His fundamentals are decent, as he uses tags and contact to keep his assignment in control. However, his rotations are timely but often not positioned in the right way. Poplar shows consistency in positioning himself closer to the perimeter. Especially when he’s defending inside the lane, he’ll rotate and position himself on the outside of the play-finisher rather than establishing contact to protect the rim or interior.
The first play shows an example where Poplar does well to lock the five in his back to avoid getting sealed off. But when he’s rotating, he’s not diving to the rim, more toward the play-finisher, as his positioning didn’t put him in an optimal position to contest the layup. The second play shows the same thing, where Poplar is caught watching the ball for a second before ending in the play-finisher’s back. We see a similar outcome in the third play when he tries to compensate for the backdoor cutter, finding two feet deep inside the paint.
The NBA relies on motion offenses and ball movement. Therefore, it’s feasible that Poplar will struggle to adjust to the NBA pace. This makes it, together with the aforementioned issues, unsustainable for a team’s defensive rating if he plays heavier minutes early on in his career.
NBA Draft Projection
Based on the strengths and areas of development mentioned in this scouting report, I project Wooga Poplar to be a late second-rounder in the 2025 NBA Draft. His shooting prowess and accomplished game by leveraging the jumper give NBA teams a much-wanted depth piece to sustain their shooting and offensive rating. However, defensively, there’s room for improvement in the most vital areas, making it less likely he’ll see NBA minutes early in his career. His shooting prowess is the unique selling point, which makes a bidding war in undrafted free agency less likely, as his archetype fits on various rosters.