2022 NBA Draft Breakdown - Ismael Kamagate
Another 2021 early entrant who improved his stock this year. Is he being underrated?
We’re finally touching on the international group of potential draftees in this class and I couldn’t be more excited. This is a really interesting group of players that doesn’t have anyone that is a consensus lottery talent, with the closest being Serbia’s Nikola Jovic or the NBL’s Ousmane Dieng, but there are tons of guys that have the chance to be either draft-and-stash guys, late first-to-early-second guys or both.
Ismael Kamagate is a guy that I would expect to be selected in the late first/early second round as someone that might not come over originally but signs on down the road. In general, I’m not a fan of drafting and stashing players if you aren’t certain that guy’s coming over to play, but I understand it from the team perspective especially in this class. In the first round, look for San Antonio at No. 25 or Golden State at No. 29 to take a stash guy. In San Antonio’s case, do you think that head coach Gregg Popovich wants to add three rookies to his team in potentially his last year? And for the Warriors, that team is going to have an abnormally large tax bill and reportedly aren’t looking to add a first-round rookie contract to that billing. Kamagate could make sense for both teams, especially San Antonio.
Kamagate is an athletic, long-armed center coming in at 6-foot-11 in shoes and boasts a near-7-foot-4 wingspan. Kamagate played for Paris Basketball in the LNB Pro A League last season, averaging 11.3 points, 6.3 rebounds (2.4 offensive) and 1.6 blocks while shooting 64.3% from the field.
Kamagate knows where and when to get to his spots and is a great roll man and lob threat that would pair nicely with skilled passers, akin to the other pure centers in this class like Duke’s Mark Williams or Memphis’ Jalen Duren. Kamagate is extremely skilled in the post, more so than you would be led to believe. He has some acrobatic layups and some nice spin-around mid-rangers in his arsenal, something he could potentially develop further in the NBA, even though he didn’t take any threes this season. Kamagate can also back guys down in the paint quite easily, which is a must for bigs to go in the first.
Even though the French big is quite raw, he has some tantalizing potential to bring his game out of the post. Kamagate hits cutters in stride frequently and even though he finished the year with a low per-game average, he was playing in a league where his team regularly didn’t finish the passes he fed them. Kamagate is a smarter passer than advertised and that might end up leading to a first-round grade for some teams. If he impresses enough, his age (21) could bring him over to the league sooner than expected.
On the defensive end, Kamagate is going to be a stellar interior defender but he’s also a strong perimeter defender, regularly chasing guys out of the paint and hounding them on one-on-one possessions. There are many clips of Kamagate recovering and blocking a jump shot, it’s fantastic to see.
Kamagate is a borderline first-rounder for me, given that he needs to be less passive on offense and he isn’t an elite rebounder unlike some of the other bigs in this class. Kamagate also has a tendency for some ugly fouls and sloppy defensive plays. However, we’ve seen bigs taken in this portion of the draft go on to do great things. Look no further than Boston’s Robert Williams III.
As an aside, Kamagate played with some interesting names this past season. He played next to Boston’s 2021 second-round stash in Juhann Begarin, as well as Axel Toupane, Kyle O’Quinn and N.C. State’s DJ Funderburk.