Meet Alyn Breed

Will Wade has his first roster addition in Raleigh, and not surprisingly, it's a McNeese player following him to his new school. You knew there would be a few, and Alyn Breed is the first. Breed is a 6'3 guard from Powder Springs, Georgia who has spent time on and off the ball in his career He played for Providence for three seasons and at McNeese for one, where he redshirted following a season-ending injury after just two games.

Quick career numbers

• 4.5 PPG

• 26% 3-pt shooter

• 44% 2-pt shooter

• 81% free throw shooter

• 1:1 assist-to-turnover ratio exactly

• 16 minutes per game

Breed is a power-conference level athlete at guard. He’s got good burst and short-area quickness, and he’s capable of creating advantages off the dribble and creating space for himself and his shot. He’s a good leaper, and he shows pretty good body control in the air with an ability to take contact and still finish. 

Those are definitely his strengths as a ball-handler. He can create rim pressure and generate paint touches, and did so against quality teams like Alabama. His change of speed ability is an asset in the pick and roll. If you can put at-the-rim scoring and a threatening mid-range game on your scouting report, a hesitation move becomes deadly against drop bigs protecting the rim. That's a move that's naturally in his bag. He has the physical components of a quality ball-screen operator, and that pushes the ceiling up. Let's look at some examples.

Breed uses a hesitation off the screen to briefly freeze the drop big, then accelerates to the rim and creates enough of an angle to finish around him.

Breed wins off the dribble and gets his defender on his hip. The ghost action looks to get the big out of position, and then Breed is able to hang in the air and finish through contact at the rim.

Off another ghost action, Breed makes a guy fall down and creates a ton of space for himself to shoot.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that he has a lengthy college history and has pretty much always been inefficient. He’s never shot better than 28% from three and he’s never shot better than 49% at the rim. That's not really good enough and must improve. An explosive on-ball guard like this is going to see a lot of defenses play under screens and sell out to cut off driving lanes if he can't keep them honest from three, a problem that State fans should remember from roughly a month ago.

He's had some stretches of quality mid-range shooting, albeit in small sample sizes. He needs to make shots at all three levels at a higher clip than he did for most of his time at Providence. If Breed wants to shoot like he did during his 80-minute stretch in a McNeese uniform, that will certainly do.

He’s also historically been prone to turnovers, and this is something that shows up on his tape. Breed can be sloppy and wild with the basketball, and it’s a legitimate concern with on-ball usage. Let's look at some examples of that.

This is an example of both his strength and weakness. Breed creates an advantage off the screen and gets into the paint, drawing help under the rim. He then throws a wild pass that's behind the big in the dunker spot and it gets picked off.

Breed tries to cross over after the Bama guard blows up the ball screen, but runs into his own guy and can't collect the basketball.

Breed can certainly play fast, but sometimes he can be out of control, and it leads to stuff like high turnover rates. I'd worry less about this if he was an otherwise very efficient offensive player, and maybe he can be in Raleigh.

During his two games at McNeese, his usage exploded and he also got significantly more efficient, shooting 12/23 from the field, scoring 17.5 PPG, and shooting 60% at the rim. He still managed to have eight turnovers, but all around was pretty good. This was not against the Calcasieu County YMCA either. He was good against Alabama, but this is still a mere two games we’re talking about. 

If Wade can unlock a more efficient scorer who can take care of the ball, you may have found a creator at a serious bargain here. If his historical numbers prove to be who he is, then he’s not a major contributor at the ACC level. We'll have to wait and see.