Nolan Traore's finishing, Tony Parker, and the vice of comparisons
Nolan Traore has boosted himself into top-five conversations and is starting to draw comparisons to the last great French point guard. Here's what he can learn and why comparisons are tricky.
There is plenty of reason to be excited about Nolan Traore. The 6-foot-3 French guard is lightning-quick with a twitchy handle and is arguably the best passing prospect since Ja Morant in 2019. With how evident the strengths are, however, the weaknesses have proven concerning time and time again.
Traore’s outside shot has been the weakness most have pointed to. In the last year, with substantial playing time for Saint-Quentin and in tournaments like ANGT and FIBA Eurobasket, Traore’s percentages have been pretty middling. Just about 34% from three and 73% from the free throw line which isn’t awful, but on such little three-point volume (.300 3Pr) and the lackluster conversion at the line, it’s reasonable to see why it’s drawn the eyes as the young star’s biggest weakness.
However, Traore’s subpar finishing around the rim is the weakness that is more concerning. Purely speaking on percentages, Traore grades out as a relatively good finisher, if not just slightly better than average. While just about average point guard height and light for his position, Traore can be overwhelming with his burst. His first step is incredible, and his second step is arguably even more devastating.
He gets to the rim faster than everybody and can rise and hold his space in the air — so why is Traore just good around the rim, and how can he improve?
Oftentimes, our natural reaction to seeing an international prospect is to compare them to the last or best player from their country or region that we’ve seen with similar traits. It can be a lazy and dangerous practice. While Deni Avdija has turned out all right, the Luka Dončić comparisons were ill-founded and the occasional Killian Hayes to Goran Dragić comparison is mindblowing in hindsight.
Nolan Traore, for several aesthetic and psychological reasons, draws his comparisons to the great Tony Parker. Both are slim and slithery smaller guards who do the vast majority of their work from around the rim, dicing defenses with devastating driving and perceptive passing, and they both happen to be French.
However, it’s a long shot to compare any prospect to a Hall of Famer — especially one with four All-NBA selections, six All-Star selections and five NBA Championships to boot. It’s why I rarely do comparisons in general, because it’s easy to get carried away with similarities that don’t matter and make more of a prospect or belittle the talent of an NBA great. That’s why, as we look at both Traore and Parker, we’ll be looking at what Traore can learn from his predecessor, rather than trying to draw a comparison.
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First, let’s talk about Tony Parker.
Parker played in a different era from the one Traore’s going to be entering. In his four best years from 2011 to 2014, Parker took nearly a third of his shots within three feet and over 90% of his field goal attempts from inside the three-point arc.
This came before the spacing revolution, meaning paints were packed full, with lineups usually featuring two bigs and a burlier breed of small forwards. At six feet two inches and 185 pounds, the fact that Parker was as efficient as he was within the arc and around the rim is ridiculous.
So how’d he do it? It’s a mix of tools, schematics and years of crafted nuance that made him one of the most devastating slashers of his era. Let’s first touch on the tools, because as we mentioned, Parker wasn’t remarkably large and with a 6’4” wingspan, he wasn’t particularly long either.
Parker dominated around the rim by getting his hips by his initial defender, which he did so with absurd flexibility and burst — two things Traore also possesses.
For Parker, however, there is another factor: core strength. For Traore, while he’s capable of getting his hips by, he doesn’t have the functional strength quite yet to maintain his balance through a last-ditch bump or find himself walled up by the low man.
To counteract this, Traore will typically attempt to extend himself, contorting to uncomfortable angles, or tilt his torso away from the defense, giving himself a more difficult angle and pathway for energy transfer. Or he’ll just speed up further and give himself a shot that a feather would find difficult to throw in lightly enough. These types of adjustments don’t just make shots more difficult, but leave him susceptible to simply getting swatted by a stable-footed defender under the rim.
Here, we see just that. Traore gets his hips by his defender, but is knocked slightly off-balance and has to pick up his dribble slightly earlier than he probably could have. This forces him to try and challenge the incoming big with nothing more than that speed, lacking the strength and balance to slow down and initiate the contact, leading to a shot that sails over the rim.
How does Parker differ? His core strength was incredible. Going downhill, it was rare to see Parker get bumped off balance and when he’d rise up around the rim, his torso was almost always perfectly perpendicular to the court, giving him all the energy, strength and balance he needed to finish at impossible angles as he did routinely.
Another thing Parker did exceptionally well, and this ties into the aforementioned nuance, is keeping his dribble alive until the last second. One’s ability to maintain a live dribble around the basket is one of the differences between the great ball handlers and the best. Take Steve Nash or Stephen Curry and the way they often weave through the paint. Parker wasn’t quite at that level, but the extra step or dribble he’d take with the ball still alive was often the difference between making a shot and getting stuffed.
Here we see the process. On the initial attempt, Parker is walled off, but keeps his dribble alive, waits for the paint to clear out and attacks again, getting his hips by Westbrook, and slowing down slightly so 1.) he can initiate the contact on his own volition, and 2.) so he can maintain his balance (note the angle of his torso to the ground!).
The good news for Traore is that anybody can develop core strength. It’s easy to forget the age of the prospects you’re evaluating, especially when trying to craft comparisons to decorated professionals.
Comparisons have their place. As I'm doing here, I’ll often use them to draw parallels to skills. Say a player has a good step-back; stylistically is it more similar to James Harden’s double step-back? Is it set up with comparable amounts of deceleration to Luka Dončić’s? Or is it quick and full of twitchiness like Donovan Mitchell’s? It just makes sense to try and draw a comparison in this regard for the sake of painting a picture because every player does everything slightly differently.
Stylistically, the way Traore may weave through a screen or close a gap in the blink of an eye is very similar to Parker, which is what makes it a valid stylistic comparison, but the practice of making wholesale comparisons leaves very little wiggle room for nuanced analysis.
One such need for nuance comes in the eras comparisons are being drawn from. As previously discussed, basketball has changed dramatically over the past ten years. The game is just played differently, despite some key concepts like the pick and roll, post-up, and isolation still being prevalent and recognizable today.
This dramatic shift makes a lot of prospect comparisons — especially those to players of different eras — even more difficult. In the case of Traore and Parker, it minimizes the concerns surrounding Traore’s jump shot, which are real.
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Parker made three consecutive All-Star games during his prime making just 63 total threes in 194 regular season games played. Think about how ridiculous that sounds considering the guards who are consistently making All-Star games now. If we were to filter for just the guards who had reached a streak of three or more consecutive All-Star selections this season, that list is just Stephen Curry and Luka Dončić, both of whom had hit at least 63 threes by their seventeenth game of the 2023-24 season.
There is validity nonetheless to the comparison, but that claim takes much more nuance than simply saying “There’s a lot of Tony Parker in Nolan Traore” or “Nolan Traore is the next Tony Parker,” because there are a lot of real differentiators, both statistically and stylistically at this point.
Comparisons are a vice for a good portion of the scouting space. They eliminate the need for analytical depth and make conversations and picture-painting easy. However, the scope with which they can be made is narrow. This is especially true for foreign prospects, who are often pigeonholed into comparisons that pertain more to where they come from than to whom they match up physically and stylistically.
This isn’t a plea to stop using comparisons — they serve their purpose. However, rather than looking at a player and asking yourself “Who?” first try and look at what you like and what you don’t like, and then begin to ponder where you’ve seen something like it before.