Cedric Coward: The Memphis Grizzlies have a Gem…

Cedric Coward: The Memphis Grizzlies have a Gem…

With the 11th overall pick in the 2025 NBA draft, the Portland Trailblazers drafted and traded a forward out of Washington State University to the Memphis Grizzlies. This guy has incredible upside, professionalism, size, defensive capability, and shooting ability, and really much more than that. And his name is Cedric Coward. Welcome to Basketball Intuition. I’m your host, Ethan Simon. Today, we’re going to be talking about Cedric Coward in the Memphis Grizzlies. Cedric Coward is a very interesting prospect, and I’m excited to tell you what I think. I want to start with his build and his frame. Okay, so this is one of the main things that you are drafting for and it is his body. He is 6’6 with a 72 wingspan and a 8’10 standing reach. He is very long and he plays much bigger than 6’6. You would think that the way that he looks on the court and the way that he plays he is at least 6’8 and a part of that is because number one that crazy wingspan and number two he’s got a crazy vertical with 38 1/2 in. So when you put those long arms and that vertical together I mean you just have a specimen. He’s 21 years old turning 22 in September. He is very mature. He’s a high IQ basketball player. He seems like a very good teammate. And this is a guy that cares a lot. He’s got a huge motor, lots of effort. And we’ve seen him get better at every single level. We’re talking about a guy that started out at division 3, then ended up division one, then committed to Duke and then ended up getting drafted in the lottery. And I will say it makes me feel a little bit better about him because the Memphis Grizzlies are the ones that actually picked him up. They have done a very, very good job at developing talent. You look at guys like Gigi Jackson, Vince Williams, Scotty Pippen Jr., Santi Alama, Desmond Bane. They have done a really great job at developing young talent. So, it makes me more confident about him and his growth. I want to talk about some of the hesitations that you can have with Cedric as a prospect. Number one, his age. He is already 21 years old coming in as a rookie. One good thing that comes with that, he has much more experience than the other rookies in the class. Number two is going to be the competition that he played against. He finally got to Washington State University, then got hurt after only six games. And number three is that nasty shoulder injury. That is the reason that he is not playing in summer league right now. So, that is a major red flag you can have about him. And I’m going to leave it up to you how you feel about it, but I wanted to at least bring that up. The main one out of these three that I’m not worried about is the competition. We just had the same conversation about a man in Assar Thompson coming out of OT. These guys are freakish athletes with ridiculous builds. Cedric Howard is in the same boat. Okay, now to the shooting. When it comes to the shooting, I thought he had a really nice shot. It could definitely be a little bit faster. He has a super clean catch and shoot motion. Um, and on top of that, he’s a very confident catch and shoot shooter. He wants to shoot those threes. Okay, so if we go through his shooting splits in college, his freshman year on three attempts, he shot 45%. His first year at Eastern Washington, he shot 39% on only one attempt. The next season after that, he bumped it up to four attempts per game at 38%. And then his last season at Washington State University, he shot 40% on five attempts. Not only can he just shoot the three ball, he can also shoot in the mid-range. I liked it, especially when he was in the middle of the defense. This kind of plays into his playmaking and stuff, but when he is in the middle of the defense, I thought he was very versatile and deadly. He can make some really nice passes. He’s not the focal point of an offense, but he can make some very nice passes, some good reads. He can punish his way to the basket. He can pull up in that mid-range area. He can put his back to the basket and go to work on you with his footwork, his pump fakes, his head fakes, his fadeaways, his stepthroughs, and also just be a distraction. But yeah, I really did like his mid-range game. I like his back to the basket game more specifically, like I mentioned. Um, one bad thing that you can say when it comes to his shooting is that he is not a shot creator really unless his back is to the basket. But other than that, just dribbling on the perimeter, he is not going to be creating for himself very often. He is going to be a catch-and-se guy. And with all the upside that he has for a rookie, you are okay with that. And also you got to think about his fit with the Grizzlies. Jaw is going to get him a lot of catch and shoot opportunities. And they have a few guys on that team that are high usage and ball dominant. So he’s not going to need to have the ball in his hands all but so much. He is a lower usage percentage guy. He’s a high volume but also highly efficient. So what I’m saying is is he’s not going to need the ball in his hands to be effective. And you know what that makes him? I’ll tell you what that makes him. That makes him the perfect offball player in the NBA. He can knock down shots. He’s effective off the ball. He plays great defense. He’s the prototypical player for any organization to want to have him on their team as long as he turns into what he’s supposed to, of course. Um, but obviously that’s something you want him to grow and become more comfortable with. I actually think this is where we’re going to transition over to passing and playmaking cuz I want to talk about some of these things that he needs to get figured out. Number one, he needs to be a better ball handler. He needs to be tighter with the dribble. His dribbles need to be faster, especially with that left hand. He was a little too loose with that left hand. Another thing is he has good vision, but his accuracy isn’t great. I definitely think he has better vision than accuracy. Uh, another thing is whenever he’s getting blitzed off of a screen and when he’s being pressured, he let the pressure get to him a little bit too much sometimes. And also there were times where he was picking the ball up too early and it was leading to bad turnovers, jump pass turnovers and just stuff like that. Some bad turnovers. He definitely had some really bad turnovers that need to get cut down on. But one thing that I do really like about his playmaking and his ball handling and stuff like that is like I just mentioned, he’s not ball dominant, but he was still getting almost four assists a game. He has such good vision and feel for the game. He is not going to be a ball dominant passer, but if he picks up a loose ball or gets an offensive rebound or gets the ball in a good position to find an open man, he’s going to find the open man. So, at his position, and his role as a playmaker, he is definitely high tier. And that’s one of the things that you’re drafting for. You’re hoping that, you know, with his development with his ball handling that he will continue to grow his playmaking ability, which will just make him a Swiss Army knife and be able to do literally everything on the court. Now, let’s get to the finishing. He has very good touch around the basket. There was some really tough shots that he made. I thought he took really good angles around the rim. He was also extremely efficient inside the ark. I don’t have the exact percentage. I just know it was somewhere between like 60 and 70%. One of the main things that you really like about his finishing is going to be his back to the basket game. He’s a strong finisher with that nice turnaround game. Like I mentioned, he was just so good in post-ups. He was in the 90th percentile of scoring in post-ups with, like I said earlier, those head fakes, pump fakes, and footwork. One great thing about him finishing on the inside with his crazy length is that he was getting easy layups in the restricted area. If he’s going up to get an offensive rebound, it’s so quick and easy for him to put it right back in. Those are easy layups. Whenever he has a forward that’s around his size, he has way longer arms, so he can finish over them easily. And if he has a guard on him, again, he can outpower them and finish over top of them. If he has a big man on him, he can use his footwork and his fades. And he’s crazy athletic. He can rise up and just dunk on you. Also, I thought he looked pretty good when getting downhill and attacking closeouts and stuff like that. Obviously, you’d like to see him grow it more as he gets his ball handling better, but as of right now, creating his own opportunities getting downhill. Of course, it’s going to help whenever he gets better ball handling, but right now it’s pretty good. And now, let’s go to the defense. He has the size to be an extremely switchable and versatile defender. Really great shot blocking for his size with his length. He definitely needs some more weight to be a more NBA ready defender. Actually, on the court, the defense doesn’t jump off the page. His body is what really jumps off the page. But as a one-on-one defender, his on ball defense, it was very solid. It wasn’t anything crazy. I feel like people were kind of gassing his defense a little bit too much. It is very good and he’s got great size and he has all the tools in the world that he needs to be a really good defender. I didn’t feel like his defensive mechanics were anything crazy or generational. I did think he was really nice and sneaky on the help side with those super long arms. Um, another thing that, you know, kind of plays into defense, rebounding. He is an exceptional rebounder at 6’6. If we look at his game log at Washington State in those six games that he played, nine rebounds, eight rebounds, seven rebounds, 12 rebounds, and then two and four. And you know, this is kind of what I’ve been saying the whole time, like you can teach a guy how to be a great defender. You can teach a guy how to handle the ball better, but you can’t teach a guy how to be how to have a 8 foot 10 standing reach. You can’t teach a guy how to have a 7 foot eight wingspan and be 66. Um, his build is ridiculous. He probably has the craziest build in the entire class. I mean, Ace Bailey’s build is pretty crazy, too. He is so long. One of those two. But those those guys build and their frames is just ridiculous. One of the last main things I wanted to talk about is going to be his transition game. I think that regardless what happens, he’s going to be good in the transition. He can affect it in so many different ways. His athleticism as a finisher, his passing and his vision as a playmaker, his shooting ability to be able to just pull up in the transition. That’s another thing. And also his unselfishness to make the right play for the team. And that’s really all I had to talk about. I wanted to talk longer and I wanted to be able to tell you more of about what I thought about his game, but there was only so much film that I could get my hands on because he played at a lower level and then he got at Washington State University and then he just played six games and then he didn’t play no more. You definitely get the point. You are drafting a guy with heavy upside and shown that he can grow as a player. He’s extremely professional and mature for his age, high basketball IQ, and he has the body of just a freak. So, I want to know what you have to think about him in the comments. The people down here have voted for a 2K series. So, we’re going to bring a 2K series, but I don’t want to do it on this channel because it just might mess up the algorithm of everything and I like having, you know, all the things I have on this channel. So, we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to make the 2K videos on a separate channel. If you want to find it, the channel name is Ethan Intuition. There is a link in the community post. That’s why I’m here. You just go to the community post, scroll down, click this link, it’ll take you over to the page, hit sub. I’m trying to decide when I’m going to drop the first video. I have not quite decided yet. Maybe whenever that account hits like 50 or 100 subscribers or maybe whenever we hit 5K subs, which is going to be sometime this week. But yeah, go over sub to the second channel if you want to be there for the 2K content. Whatever team is leading in the poll whenever you know I go to make that video, that’s just the team that we’re going to rock with. Now to the comment of the day, very last segment before we wrap it up. This is going to be very quick. If you don’t know what the comment of the day is, is my favorite comment from the previous video. It’s the best segment of the day. Today’s comment of the day is not a typical one. It is from a while ago. It’s not from the previous video. It’s from JJ that. Like I said, this is an old comment. JJ’s been watching my stuff for a while now. I really appreciate you. But he’s the guy that really initially put me on to Cedric Howard’s game initially. Why are my dogs barking? Why? But yeah, I just wanted to give JJ a shout out cuz he was the guy that really put me on to Cedric’s game that put him on my radar. Um, and I know this is like two months later, but I I finally got the video out for you. And uh, yeah, we’ll wrap it up here. Thank you very much for staying to the end of the video. If you enjoyed it, make sure to hit the like, the comment, the sub, the post notifications if that’s what you want. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Free will. You can do what you like. Make sure to go sub to the second channel, Ethan Intuition. We’re going to do more than just 2K on there. Like, right now, it’s just going to be 2K, but I’m gonna bring everything to that channel. But yeah, I hope you’re all doing well. Unless your name is Kyle Kosma. I love each and every single one of you. Again, unless your name is Kyle Kousma, and I’ll see you on the next one, man. Peace out.

Today we cover Cedric Cowards game! From D3 to NBA Lottery pick Cedric has shown his ability to grow and adapt. We cover things from his shooting, finishing, playmaking, defense, rebounding, and more!

Shoutout to @JJ-od4jm for comment of the day! Sorry it took me so long but I finally got you haha

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