YouTube Gold: Tyler Kolek No Passing Fancy?

Tyler Kolek was a baller at Marquette, but can he cut it in the NBA? Early results suggest that yeah, he just might.

How often do you look at a draft and think wow, how did that guy not go sooner?

There are the easy ones like Michael Jordan going third or Nikola Jokic falling to the second round. Dennis Rodman and Manu Ginobli were second round picks as well.

Tyler Kolek was a second round pick as well and while it’s early, he’s showing signs that people might regret passing him over.

In summer league play, Kolek has shown that he can pass at a very high level. Doing it in the regular season is different of course, but when you see him making smart, sharp passes like he does here, it’s incredibly impressive. You can teach a lot of things in basketball. You can teach rebounding, you can teach defense, you can teach shooting. But you can’t teach vision and Kolek has that. Look at the first play on this clip on X and it’s pretty breathtaking.

Of course vision isn’t enough. Ed Cota and Kendall Marshall were superb point guards who just weren’t gifted enough to play the rest of the game. In sum, they were liabilities despite their superb court vision.

And that could be the case for Kolek too. But for right now, he’s unbelievably fun to watch.