If you’ve ever seen Emoni Bates feign his body forward only to take a dribble behind his back before draining a step back 3 over a now-out-of-sorts defender, you’d think, “Now that’s an NBA player.”
If you’ve ever seen Emoni Bates do all of that, yet rather than rise and fire, dip his shoulder back toward the basket, cross up the defender with his left hand and drive to the rim before using a church-music soft flick of the wrist to lay it in, you’d say, “Now that’s a great NBA player.”
Six-foot-nine and uncommonly talented, there is a reason Bates was the top-ranked recruit in his class starting in middle school.