We’re underrating Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. Badly. Yes, I know he went scoreless in the first half of the national championship game. Yes, he scored only 11 points. It wasn’t his best night—agreed. Everyone has those nights.
Especially against Houston.
Especially when one of the greatest defensive teams in NCAA history, according to Ken Pomeroy, made it their divine mission to make sure that anyone on the Florida Gators not named Walter Clayton Jr. was allowed to score.
In ESPN’s latest NBA mock draft for the 2025 NBA Draft, they had him going as the 28th pick. That’s criminal.
Let’s do an experiment: pretend to be an NBA GM and examine these two résumés with no names.
Player A: Led his team to win the SEC (the most competitive college basketball conference that year) and the national championship in a signature tournament run. He’s a 6-foot-3 guard who weighs close to 200 pounds, is an electric ball handler and long-range shooter who shot 39% from 3-point range in his senior season. He’s also a deft finisher at the rim and has shown a mean clutch gene. He’s a first-team All-American. He’s 22 years old.
Player B: He’s 6-foot-3 and 185 pounds. He’s an electric ball handler and long-range shooter who shot 38% from deep in his senior season playing for a mid-major program. He had one signature March Madness run in which he averaged over 40% from 3 and led his team to a deep push, bowing out in the Elite Eight. He’s a first-team All-American. He’s 21 years old.
Player A is Walter Clayton Jr. Player B is Steph Curry coming out of Davidson.
The intangibles are the same. The size, skill set, age, play style—they’re all the same. Steph was even viewed as more fragile. His scouting report very famously harped on his “weak ankles.”
Steph was drafted No. 8 overall in the 2009 NBA Draft. Clayton is projected to barely make it into the first round.
It’s simple common sense. If the player profile of Stephen Curry coming out of college was worth a top-10 NBA draft pick, then shouldn’t Clayton be as well? Many have said his main knock is his older age in an era when 18-year-olds litter the draft pool. “Draft for upside,” they say.
How many of those players with “high upside” actually end up panning out in comparison with experienced products? Look at the 2020 NBA Draft. The Pistons drafted a potentially good 18-year-old point guard out of France, Killian Hayes, with the seventh overall pick. The Celtics took a 22-year-old, polished, skillfully shooting point guard—Payton Pritchard out of Oregon—with the 26th pick.
Five years later, Hayes is labeled a “bust” and toiling away in the G League. Pritchard is one of the most valuable rotational pieces in the league on a championship team. He averages 14 points a game in nearly 30 minutes a night.
Shooting is transferable. And while, yes, in theory, a younger player offers more room for growth, there’s also more room for failure. Clayton has experienced enough basketball to round himself into the player he’s going to be.
That player just torched his way to a national championship, hitting improbably contested threes and scoring clutch buckets the whole way through.
NBA teams should respect the national champion before he becomes the next overachieving role player on a contending team picked late in the draft. He’s going to make a really good team a lot better, while struggling teams take home run swings at “potentially” promising prospects.
He doesn’t have to be the No. 1 pick, and the reservations are warranted. And no, it’s no guarantee Walter Clayton turns into Stephen Curry and becomes the greatest shooter to ever touch a basketball.
The point is: if, out of college, Steph—prior to the Hall of Fame career—was worth a top-10 pick, then Clayton is too.
