2024 Prospect Spotlight: Oso Ighodaro

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John Hollinger’s Top 20 prospects list

19. Oso Ighodaro



I’m a firm believer in bigs who can pass — that trait tends to indicate outsized feel that can worm itself into other facets of the game — and Ighodaro is the best passing big in the draft. He is very comfortable operating from the elbows and hitting cutters or operating dribble handoffs, and his size and leaping ability should make him at least a decent rim runner on the tail end of those actions. Ighodaro can also handle the ball well enough that Marquette occasionally ran inverted pick-and-rolls for him. While he’s not an outside shooting threat, he does have a nice floater game he can get to when the rim is blocked off.

Ighodaro grades out very well in the switching type of perimeter defense that most NBA teams demand from their bigs now. He gets up on guards, not letting them waltz into off-the-dribble 3s and instead sliding with them when they try to get to the cup. He seems almost more comfortable with that than going against players his own size; he doesn’t play with much physicality or toughness. Players who spin and stop on him, or post players who get into his body, can give him some trouble.

Ighodaro isn’t seen as a first-rounder because he falls short on a lot of the traditional big-guy stuff. He’s not an elite rim protector, with a decent but hardly overwhelming 5.6 percent block rate in Big East games, and he’s a phantom on the glass with a career 12.1 percent rebound rate in conference play. Similarly, he shies away from attacking the rim at times, settling for the floater even when it seemed he could get to the rim. Those factors turn off some scouts and could limit him to being a backup, but a rotation big isn’t a bad outcome this deep in a weak draft. That feels like Ighodaro’s floor given his other skills.

The Athletic