Which Baylor Lottery Pick Goes First in the 2024 NBA Draft?

Between Ja'Kobe Walter and Yves Missi, the Baylor Bears were not short on elite talent at the top this past season. Who sets up better for an early pick?

Mar 24, 2024; Memphis, TN, USA; Clemson Tigers forward Ian Schieffelin (4) drives to the basket as / Petre Thomas-USA TODAY Sports

Baylor is no stranger to elite basketball talent.

After all, the Bears have had their fair share of success in the sport, hoisting their first National Championship trophy in 2021 under Scott Drew, whose unprecedented success has turned a small private school in Waco into one of the premier programs in all of NCAA hoops.

When talking about well-respected coaches, Drew's name is at the top of the list, but his loyalty to Baylor has created a generational stability. Just ask Kentucky, who came knocking in an effort to lure Drew to Lexington themselves, unable to pry him away from Central Texas.

With this stability, Baylor has also recruited incredibly well considering their old facilities. 2023-24 was no different, as the Bears started two freshman: Ja'Kobe Walter and Yves Missi, two young stars that couldn't be more different as players.

Walter, a native of McKinney, Texas, played his senior year of high school at Link Prep in Missouri, a powerhouse program that produces NBA talent with regularity. The 6-foot-5 plays off-guard as well as wing, but with a 6-foot-10 wingspan, he's able to guard taller players on the perimeter.

This past season at Baylor, Walter put up 14.5 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 1.4 assists while starting over a 35-game stretch, and though his shooting really suffered down the stretch, he demonstrated much better splits early on.

The other player, Yves. Missi, is a Belgian-Cameroonian rim-running big, an athletic 6-foot-11 center that blocks shots and finishes plays as well as anyone in college basketball this past season. After playing at Prolific Prep, he came to waco and averaged 10.7 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 1.5 blocks per game as a true freshman, doing all of this in 22 minutes per game.

So which player will hear his name called first?

Taking team need out of the equation, both players have a shot to be lottery picks. The differentiating factor between the two players would be polish – which player is more "raw," more of a "project?"

The surprising answer is that Ja'Kobe Walter is the player with more development needed to make an impact early in the league. At the end of the season, Walter finished with a final shooting percentage of 37.6% from the field. Part of this can be explained with his 6.3 3-point attempts per game, but part of it was that he just began to lose steam, and regress back to Earth.

It's interesting because typically the more raw guys are bigs, but Missi, like Dereck Lively II a bit, already has his role figured out, and what he's good at, scouts and coaches have already seen him do consistently.

The one concern would be just 5.6 rebounds per game, but then again, Lively II averaged even fewer in his freshman season at Duke than Missi did at Baylor. But overall, Missi is more of a plug-and-play center that will work in nearly every system as long as he's not asked to do more than he's capabe of doing.

For that reason, Missi will be the higher pick in the draft, though, as previously mentioned, both players will likely find themselves in the lottery.

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