A featured look at the young center playing for Barcelona, plus other Euroleague news.
To give this column more focused and relevancy to the lottery as well as hopefully making it more digestible, informative and enjoyable the format of Eurotrip will be changing so that it is centred each week on one or two players, with maybe a couple of other thoughts and highlights from Europe at the end. This week we’ll be taking a slightly deeper look at Moussa Diagne, who we looked at briefly in the last Eurotrip after a big performance in the Spanish ACB for Barcelona.
Background
The 21 year old is originally from Senegal and came to Spain at age 17 and played for Torrejón a B league Spanish team before jumping to the premier division, the ACB, to play for Fuenlabrada for two season and finally moving to Barcelona this Summer past. By the time the draft rolls around he’ll be 22 and there having been some conversation around him for previous drafts it would seem likely he’ll be a prospect this time around if not guaranteed. Even if chosen in 2016 he wouldn’t be a lock to go over for the 2016/17 season and could end up seeing out the remaining two years of his contract in Barcelona once the current season ends.
But let’s not get too caught up in the hypotheticals and focus on what we know of Diagne for now.
Scouting: Strengths and Weaknesses
The Sengalese player is a center that stand at roughly 6’11” and 220 pounds, depending on who you ask. Similarly the various draft sites and videos generally agree on Diagne’s strengths and weaknesses but discrepancies can be down to being over a several year time line as well as personal bias. The consensus is though that he is a strong pick and roll player with poor shooting, solid rebounding and shot blocking with decent defense.
Concerns over Diagne’s game and physique largely revolve around him not being physical enough to develop a post up game and a lack of shooting. This season he already seems stronger than in previous seasons and being only 21 still has time to bulk up and fill out his tall frame a bit more. Shooting can always be developed, in fact whoever decides he should develop some kind of a shot whether it be mid or long range will have an almost blank canvas to work with (for better or worse) as the young center avoids taking shots even when wide open preferring to pass it or drive inwards. So far this season the majority of his baskets have come from dunks and he has yet to attempt a three point shot.
However, with the ball in hand is where his strengths end. If he holds it longer than enough time to get a dunk, put back or quick lay-up he doesn’t look too comfortable and is searching for a way to offload the responsibility of the ball, but at the same time doesn’t panic.
From what I’ve seen on the other end of the floor he puts in the defensive effort, and isn’t afraid to get physical in the paint and does fairly well with keeping up with his man. Even on offence his movement off the ball is great, usually getting open during the pick and roll without much trouble and often finding clear lanes for the quick dunk or alley ‘oop.
The summary I gave of his highlight performance from two weeks ago reinforces the two sided coin of his scoring abilities:
“The 6’11” center put up eight points as well as two blocks. All three of his field goals came from dunks, two of which came in a fantastic 90-second stretch where the 21-year-old Senegalese player had a powerful dunk followed a play later by a huge block and then a put back dunk.”
Generally younger players in Europe, especially in the Euroleague, find it difficult to get many minutes in games, so all of this is based off of a very limited sample size. Even more so sometimes than the NBA. Part of the reason is that they can be brought into the leagues a lot younger than in the US and also that there are more established weaker teams they can build up time on or the B teams which would be the equivalent of the D-League affiliates. Diagne Moussa having done his time with second and third tier teams is now in a gray area where it’ll take time to earn his place on a competitive side that is one of the best in both Europe and Spain. His development should be fun to watch though and should he get the chance to shine a few more times like he did a couple of weeks back I’m sure there’ll be more conversation about him come the spring.
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Elsewhere in the Euroleague a new assist record was set on Thursday night as underdog Red Star Belgrade took down Bayern Munich in Munich. The record was set by Stefan Jovic with 19, topping his team mate Marcus Williams who set the previous record last season with 17. On a side note and remembering that games in Europe are eight minutes shorter, Magic coach and former player Scott Skiles has the NBA assist record in a single regular season game with 30 (per basketball-reference.com). An interesting bit of trivia considering elite passer and NBA sophomore Elfrid Payton is in his charge in Orlando.
Back to Europe, Jovic went undrafted in 2012 while that was a phenomenal performance, it almost matched his total assists for the previous four Euroleague games (21). A bit of a long shot for being brought over to the NBA but he’s only 25 so could be one to keep an eye on and see if he can facilitate consistently. In the meantime just enjoy some good basketball.
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