Cling Kong

When I was looking at a list of potential ‘most improved player’ candidates¹, I stumbled across a season that’s being overlooked. Perhaps because he’s playing in the Pacific Northwest for a .500 team (might as well be Skull Island), but there’s been a notable lack of chatter about just how good Donovan Clingan has been this year. And I was excited to look into it, because there’s nothing I love more than confirming my priors.

Let’s start from a bit of ‘first principles.' More possessions are good. If I were to break down who the most underrated players in the NBA were, it’d be the ones who don’t turn it over and who do get offensive rebounds.

Here are the top 3 offensive rebounders² through Sunday (3/22):

Offensive rebounding is awesome⁴, and an easy way to become a useful offensive player quickly. But Clingan doesn’t only scale tall buildings, he also fires from deep — shooting 4.1 3PA/36 (well above the 2.9 3PA/36 positional average). Now I’m not saying he’s some sort of sniper, but he’s making 33% of them, and 68% of his FTs, and the fact that the team wants him to take them (while trying to win games!) shows me what they think of his prospects from there.

Should he be standing at the top of the key firing 3s? Well, the Blazers are an anemic offense (23rd) in need of spacing, and his offensive rebounding has stayed elite, sooo... sure? It’s good to have a bit more optionality, and someday it could be extremely valuable.

But big guys should do big guy stuff, like protect the rim, which Clingan is very good at. Per NBA.com, here are the top players in the league at the difference between the opponents' FG% and their actual FG% at rim.

This is a fairly unsurprising list of some of the best rim defenders in the NBA. Of course there are more granular ways to express this, but we're keeping it simple and broad here: he's an elite rim defender. Although I don't have specific data on this because rim protectors with this kind of pedigree are fairly rare, it feels like a low variance skill to improve. He'll always be huge, he'll always try hard, and he'll only get better at timing and recognition. I could imagine Clingan's overall defensive impact not being as high as Gobert due to his lack of foot speed (switching on defense is a massively underrated skill of Gobert's), but it would be surprising if it wasn't in the same stratosphere. And there's only upside on offense, especially for a 22 year old.

Speaking of his age, let's try to get an idea of where this is going.

In my pre draft article, I mentioned Gobert as an upside case. That seemed reasonable: Gobert is a 3x All Star, 4x DPOY, 4x All-NBA, and perpetually one of the most underrated players in the league. He's played in 84 playoff games, including back to back conference finals appearances in the loaded West.

But I'm updating my prior: at this point it would be disappointing if Clingan wasn't better than Gobert. Gobert was probably an underrated offensive player in his prime, featuring some offensive rebounding and above the rim spacing, but he wasn't a very versatile one. He had no outside shooting, he struggled on the short roll with his lack of passing, and his FT shooting was so bad he's gotten hacked intentionally at various points.

Clingan's most likely outcome at this point? Probably something like Marc Gasol, who peaked as a fringe top 10 player; a defensive anchor and an offensive hub. He'll be a different kind of player, but it's a reasonable comparison.

I’ll leave you with one final thought: The Hornets passed on Donovan Clingan at 6 in 2024 for Tidjane Salaun. I'd imagine that's going to sting for a while.