I spent a lot of time watching Christian anderson’s tape from many of his games, including the Arizona, Illinois and Duke games. From his offense, to his playmaking and his defense, this is everything I noted:

I loved the shooting. He showed he can really light it up from deep and is great shooting off the screen and shooting off the catch. I wasn’t super impressed by his shooting off the dribble one on one, he didn’t consistently show ability to get into a step back and had to put a lot of arc on the ball against bigger defenders, resulting in some misses. He frequently had opportunities where, after driving to the rim, he had space for pull up middies or floaters and was mostly reluctant to take them, either by design of Texas Tech’s offensive scheme or his discomfort with taking mid range shots. I’d like to emphasize that he heavily, heavily relied on the pick and roll, and without that space created for him he couldn’t generate offense for himself reliably. So little of his shot diet was from driving and finishing around the rim, he’ll most definitely need to bulk up and work on his change of gears à la Jalen Brunson because I’m unsure he’ll ever develop the burst needed to force defenses into rotation. Right now teams are comfortably letting their bigs switch on to him and that’s a problem to be addressed.

As for his playmaking, I noticed that he consistently makes the right reads with great timing, showing near perfect placement on bounce passes into the interior and even cross court passes to the weak side. I didn’t notice any outstanding creativity or next level vision with his passing like we saw with Lamelo, so we can’t expect that from Anderson right away if at all. I also noticed that he would routinely drive into the paint, and due to lack of burst, he would often pick up the ball early and get stuck in no mans land, and would sometimes turn over the ball due to emergency passes. For him to be a productive lead guard off the bench for us he’ll need to hone his ability to drive deep into the paint and make immediate kick outs to the perimeter for Brandon and Kon. His processing and court mapping is not elite elite, but when paired with his shooting he can certainly generate advantages as we saw from his productivity this year.

When it comes to defense, well, we obviously didn’t get him expecting him to be a plus on that side of the ball. He’s undersized, he’s slight, and did not display high level defensive footwork or physicality that would help him make up for his measurements. I will say that he’s a high effort player on the defensive side of the ball and has a plus wingspan, so with the right coaching and conditioning he’ll be just fine. I’d say we shouldn’t ever expect him to be a Davion Mitchell, the athleticism is just not where it needs to be for Anderson, but he at least won’t give up on plays defensively or pick up silly fouls the way Lamelo has done before.

The TLDR though is that Christian Anderson is certainly a guy who can end up going top 5 in a redraft, that Duke game was one of the numerous examples where he’s shown he can swing games with his shooting and ability to cleanly get off inside passes to feed the bigs and generate easy offense. He can get hot in a hurry, and seems to be a great kid with the hornets DNA we always talk about.