swiss theory article
ohnny Furphy is a 19-year-old freshman who is currently starting for the 2023-24 Kansas Jayhawks. Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, Furphy comes from an athletic family deeply rooted in sports. His father, Richard, made a career as a professional Australian rules football player, while his mother achieved bronze in the Junior Olympics for diving. His older sister plays soccer for Santa Clara and his older brother played basketball and is now a professional Australian football player.
Growing up in such a competitive household, where sports were a way of life, had a significant impact on Furphy. Johnny’s brother, Joe, who is five years older, played a pivotal role in sparking Johnny’s interest in basketball. Johnny Furphy started by playing pick-up with his older brother and his brother’s friends. Being undersized and the youngest for the longest time, Furphy gained an edge that you can see flare consistently when he’s on the basketball court.
For the longest time, Furphy was one of the smaller players on the court. Basketball was always the sport he enjoyed the most, but Furphy played other sports like Australian rules football and cricket during his time in school.
At the height of the pandemic, things drastically changed for Furphy. He was a late bloomer, but the former 5’ 8” guard had grown to 6’ 8” in a short time, a massive growth spurt as reported by Shreyas Laddha of the Kansas City Star. However, due to the strict COVID restrictions in Melbourne, Furphy could not play organized basketball for nearly two years.
Essentially losing his early high school years of basketball, Furphy had to get used to his new body, especially in the context of basketball. Furphy had to get his new body up to speed with all of the ball skills and feel he gained as a small guard. Barely making state teams before his growth spurt, Furphy got his chance to develop his game and body in his senior year with Australia’s Centre of Excellence, a training program for future national Australian basketball players where we’ve seen recent top-ten picks like Dyson Daniels and Josh Giddey come through.
Furphy was a relative unknown in basketball circles due to this development curve he’s been on, but he truly made his name in the summer of 2023 at the NBA Academy Games where he broke out in front of multiple pro scouts and college coaches. The college offers started pouring in, fast forward a couple of months and Furphy is a high-level contributor to a 21-8 Kansas team.
He may only be 19 today, but Furphy’s roller coaster ride of a start to hoops makes him pretty young in terms of high-level basketball experience. His ‘basketball age,’ is far lower when you compare him to the average 19-year-old. The growth spurt made his development curve steeper, and even with the lack of experience and time to grow into his body, he’s been extremely productive in a scaled role as a freshman. Similar to Jalen William’s late growth spurt, Furphy’s newfound size opened up far more pathways as a basketball player. This is one of the reasons why I believe Furphy is a false-ceiling prospect.
Furphy’s Chain of Skills
Before getting into Furphy’s production, let’s take a look at his skills, attributes, and how they intersect on the court.
Standing at 6’8”, potentially reaching 6’9” in shoes, Johnny Furphy possesses prototypical NBA size and length for the forward-wing position, complemented by a long wingspan spanning between 6’11” and 7’0”. Still gaining strength and weight, Furphy weighs a reported 202 pounds. At 19, he has a skinny frame, but this has not deterred him from being aggressive and physical on the court.
Watching him play over the past couple of years, you can see Furphy has high levels of touch and that translates to his most bankable NBA skill: shooting. Furphy is a pretty advanced shooter considering his experience, shooting with high volume and versatility that includes shots off of movement, off the dribble, above the break in transition, and catch-and-shoot. His mechanics have developed over the years, oftentimes having to accommodate for his lack of lower-body strength with a wider base. Today, Furphy’s shot is a 1.5-motion jumper with a high point of release, even mixing in no dip threes when extremely hard closeouts come his way.
The strongest facet of his shooting has been catch-and-shoot, but the capability to add different shots to his arsenal in a short period is a massive sign that he could be a high-level shooter.
I’ve compiled his shooting throughout these past couple of years, and you can see Furphy’s mechanics were initially accommodating for upper and lower body strength. A wider base, low release, and his knees protruding forward are different parts of his mechanics accommodating to larger distances. Even off movement, his stability was not great and self-organization was extremely slow, often needing a rhythm dribble to get into his shot. In just a year, Furphy has gained core strength and improved stability throughout his body, leading to better energy transfer throughout his kinetic chain and that is shining through in his efficiency.
Furphy adding this versatility while shooting with high volume is a proxy for the growing shooting confidence that he and his coaches have in him. What makes this truly impressive is that Furphy has dealt with a weaker lower half since he had his growth spurt, and has not been able to make massive strength gains here due to dealing with minor shin injuries before being recruited to the Centre of Excellence and a severe case of shin splints before his season started at Kansas. The injuries added an extra obstacle to developing his lower half strength due to being in the rehab process.
Even with his weaker lower half, Furphy has explosion and a quick load time off of two feet. He doesn’t cover a lot of distance vertically but this is where his length helps him extend into finishes, which is further strengthened by his ability to explode over the top of defenses off of his back foot. You can really see this in Furphy’s offensive rebounding, drives/cuts to the rim in the halfcourt, and when he attacks the rim in transition.
Give Furphy an open lane to build up momentum and it becomes really difficult to stop him at the rim due to his physicality, functional strength, and leaping mechanics. This intersection of athletic traits and shooting touch gives Furphy a baseline as a high-level play finisher in the NBA, weaponizing it when given space and attacking defenses that are in scramble mode.
But what about his ability to create at a higher degree? This is where his feel kicks in. Furphy already has an advanced understanding of spacing, constantly relocating off the ball and cutting into space for finishes and offensive rebounds. When he does have the ball in his hands, he’s shown to make one-level reads with relatively quick processing.
A 6’ 9” shooter with bounce and connective passing at 19 is a great baseline but to project even higher forms of creation, it requires an NBA player to be able to self-create half-court drives on volume. This is the weakest part of Furphy’s chain of skills on the offensive end, where a weak handle hampers his creation reps.
As a driver, Furphy does have one unique aspect: lower body flexibility. Although he’s a large player, Furphy is consistently able to get lower than players on drives and leverage his physicality. This is in part due to his shin angles, allowing him to get lower and use his shoulder as a lever to manufacture space.
Furphy doesn’t create his advantages on drives in orthodox ways using burst, it’s a pure combination of lower-half flexibility and strength. When he can get deep in the paint, his explosive last stride, touch off the glass, and length help him finish these drives. The problem is what happens in between those two events.
His handle limits so much of his drives, unable to react effectively to stunts and digs, causing him to gather extremely early on drives and rely on his last stride and touch. Furphy has to look at his handle consistently on drives too, which is another reason why he’s slow to react to help with his handle.
Similar to freshmen Bane in that way, it isn’t a death sentence to Furphy’s upside as a creator. Like Bane, he has tools that will help him work the handle issues in NBA margins. Furphy has already added handle counters like deceleration, behind-the-back crossovers, and jabs out of triple-threat situations in the past year. What he needs to work on is his ball control, introducing more changes of direction and different stride lengths to freeze defenders, all things he’s capable of athletically with improved lower body strength.
When lack of space is the constraint given to Furphy’s handle, his issues there become far more emphatic but in transition, he’s able to problem-solve with his handle in space and bring the ball up the floor functionally.
As someone who can grab an offensive rebound or create a steal by getting into passing lanes, Furphy’s aggression in transition offense while being able to weaponize his feel and touch from the three levels of the court gives Furphy a unique intersection of skills on the court. Skills that thrive off of each other, enabling him to carve a role early regardless of competition.
Furphy’s Role Malleability
A lack of experience would have faltered most young players when it comes to adapting to different roles, Furphy on the other hand has shown he can be productive in a wide range of roles. Even before he truly started playing high levels of competition, Furphy was able to relatively master transition offense due to his background in another invasion sport, Australian rules football. Gaining reps where you have to cover massive amounts of ground over a gigantic field gave Furphy the offensive skills to be aggressive in space. As a contact-heavy sport, this is where Furphy’s functional strength comes from as well because he would have to consistently absorb contact and finish plays in football.
As he gained more opportunities to play basketball after his growth spurt, Furphy was put in a number of offensive roles throughout various levels of competition. Playing mostly off-the-ball early on, he honed his off-ball feel and scoring in those roles which eventually allowed him to start running second-side pick-and-rolls when the primary action failed. Experience polished his skills, allowing him to eventually run pick-and-rolls as the primary ball-handler in limited reps. This forms a parallel with how Franz Wagner would often adapt effectively to various off-ball roles at the same age, but when he was used as the primary pick-and-roll handler he was still productive in those limited reps (fifteen possessions) in his final year with ALBA Berlin. Similarly, whether it was game to game or possession to possession, Furphy’s productivity in multiple roles was apparent.
Are there any areas where he has not been productive? I haven’t spoken about Furphy’s defense yet but there is a reason for that. College teams have consistently attacked Furphy in space since he’s been hit-or-miss when it comes to containing drives. Furphy also has issues navigating screens as a bigger player but I believe there is a common reason for both.
You guessed it, it’s lower body strength. Due to his lack of strength, he’s unable to get low enough in defensive positioning and stay with players laterally. This also limits him in screen navigation as he’s unable to get low enough, turn the corner, and explode back into the play. Furphy is role-versatile when it comes to defense but I would not say he is malleable enough in this area. He can play a multitude of roles on this end, whether it’s at the point of attack, in gaps, or even some deterrence at the rim but he does not truly thrive in any of these roles outside of being a nail defender. There is some low-hanging fruit with the lower half development, allowing him to become more stable on closeouts and stay laterally with offensive players, but his ceiling on the defensive end is dependent on the degree of strength he’s able to add.
egardless of the defense, Furphy has been extremely productive in a scaled off-ball role at Kansas. Playing in a high-major system like Kansas, there are far fewer on-ball flashes for Furphy in this role. Due to how their system operates, I believe Kansas would rather Furphy use his gravity on the perimeter to space the floor and do not want him to drive more in their half-court offense with creators like Kevin Mccullar able to take on that offensive load.
Conclusion
While I believe Furphy will be a good NBA player in most contexts, like most prospects, reaching his upper-end outcomes as a creator will need an optimal development environment. An NBA team with cemented creators and a DHO big will enable that team to leverage Furphy’s off-ball value early on. The creators can help his handle limitations stand out less, while a DHO big will find him on cuts and in handoffs as a shooter. Letting Furphy become comfortable at the NBA level will then open up his creation pathways. There is a case that Furphy’s intersection of skills will allow him to develop his handle as an off-the-catch scorer, attacking tilted defenses like Desmond Bane did with the Grizzlies early on. This should give him the time off the court and the space on the court to fix the weaker links in his chain of skills.
The skill intersection, the ability to play on and off the ball, and his current development curve give Furphy the ability to scale to most basketball contexts with the ability to take on more of a workload as a creator when experience builds up.
He’s a false ceiling prospect for these very reasons. In most draft classes, a young dribble-pass-shoot wing with the potential for above-average defense would justifiably be a top-10 pick. In a class, where that archetype is not only rare but the top of the draft is wide open, I believe it is justified to take Johnny Furphy with a top-5 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft.
