Egor Demin Is Up For His Biggest Test Yet

The 6-foot-8 guard has been tearing up lower levels of college basketball thus far, but faces his biggest test tomorrow as he takes on Ole Miss.

Egor Demin / fiba.basketbal

It'd be an understatement to say Egor Demin has been dominating college basketball thus far. That would be putting it very lightly.

Among the likes of Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, V.J. Edgecombe, Will Riley, Khaman Maluach, and many others, it's Demin who is leading freshman in box-plus minus (BPM) so far. His 16.8 BPM is 1.6 points ahead of second place, John Mobley Jr., while playing over 20% more of his team's minutes than him.

However, his production hasn't come without its warts and question marks, mainly about the competition he's been beating up on. BYU has faced off against Central Arkansas, UC Riverside, Queens, Idaho, and Mississippi Valley St. up to this point, none of which are marquee schools by any measure.

Of course, this isn't Demin's fault as all he can do is produce against the competition that's put in front of him, but question marks will linger as a few high-production games don't entirely erase a shaky ANGT performance from him earlier this year.

The good thing is that Demin will be tested tomorrow against Ole Miss, as BYU takes them on at 5:30 p.m. ET on ESPN. While they were just the 10th-best team in the SEC last year with a 7-11 record, they're already up to 5-0 this season with a defensive efficiency ranking 86th out of 264 schools according to Bart Torvik.

Facing off against a true high-major team with a good defense will be great for Demin, especially if he produces, as it'd be a tremendous sign for his future scaling up against greater competition. Along with competition question marks, he's put up poor athleticism/physicality proxies thus far with bad rebounding and free-throw rates, so it'll be interesting to watch for that against a decently physical Ole Miss team too.

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