Kofi Cockburn: Dominance Omitted

Disallowing the Fighting Illini legend onto an NBA court up to this point is historically inconsistent.

Kofi Cockburn: Dominance Omitted

Disallowing the Fighting Illini legend onto an NBA court up to this point is historically inconsistent.

Bigs who produced to the degree he did at the NCAA level end up as lottery selections. Posting 17 points and 9 rebounds over an 80-plus game sample while leading top-25 ranked teams has been completed by ten players since 1948, marking a historically dominant feat by some of the game’s most integral legends.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Shaquille O’Neal, and Tim Duncan are titans of the game and require no preface. Bill Cartwright, Ralph Sampson, Tom McMillen (1970 Mr Basketball USA), and Mike Gminski (averaged 15 and 10 as a freshman at Duke as a 17-year-old, because high school ball was too boring) were all speculated to join those ranks before finding varying degrees of success at the professional level. Zach Edey, my #1 player in the 2024 NBA Draft class, is a player I expect to fall towards the legendary end of this spectrum.

All nine players were top-ten picks in their respective NBA Draft classes. But that’s only nine. 10 players fall under this query.

Cockburn went unselected after the 2022 NBA Draft with bigs like Khalifa Diop, Moussa Diabate, Ismael Kamagate, Karlo Matkovic, and Yannick Nzosa drafted instead of him without any semblance of on-court production as justification for their selection. Neglecting impactful, dominant basketball players while hunting for prospects with aesthetics and ‘potential’ on their side is disappointing from the NBA’s standpoint, but Cockburn was not a prospect without fault. A 22-year-old junior/23-year-old rookie with a career 0.3 AST/TO ratio/1.1 STL%/sub-5 BLK%/0 3PA/100 combination has a limited NBA outlook under most circumstances.

Justin Hamilton, Jericho Sims, Samardo Samuels, Dewan Hernandez, and Aron Baynes are the five Bart-era players who fit the description to make it onto an NBA floor.

Cockburn’s production, size, and team success as a primary option were so far past their performances, it’s still not understandable that he’s played zero NBA games with his age-25 season looming.

Cockburn’s size/athleticism/production/team success combination draws parallels to only one other player in the 21st century, this being his conference rival (and NileHoops’ #1 prospect in the 2024 NBA Draft class) Zach Edey.

>275 pounds

>9 ft. standing reach

=<12.5 sec. Lane agility

since 2010

Donovan Clingan and Zach Edey both hit these marks in the 2024 combine.

Cockburn posted the 2nd and 3rd highest max verticals of the sample, only behind an 18-year-old Andre Drummond (weighing 278 pounds, to Cockburn’s 290+.) None of this is logically surprising. In an athletic game centered around placing the ball in a fixed rim 120 inches from the ground, players possessing an overwhelming crosssection of height, bulk, and run/jump athleticism have advantages that cannot be easily overpowered by those who do not. Once again, all players in this lofty group with Cockburn were selected with top-10 draft picks.

A six-game Summer League stint with the Utah Jazz, where he posted 6 points and seven rebounds in 18 minutes per game is currently his lone NBA appearance.

His initial post-NCAA season found him within the Japanese B.League with an underperforming Nigita Albirex.

On an individual level, he did not underperform, ending the season 3rd in total OREB, 6th in total REB, and 16th in Player Efficiency Rating (23.4) in his age-24 season before moving onto the KBL, where no player under 25 had posted a 28+ player efficiency rating in the league’s history until Cockburn.

Cockburn steps onto a basketball court, outproduces the field, rinse, repeat.

KOFI-VISION

A resounding flaw in Cockburn’s game before being undrafted was a lack of passing skill. Illinois posted average/above-average team assist% when he was on the floor all three seasons.

Still, his figures are historically low, punctuated by a sophomore season where he registered an inconceivable 1.3 AST%. Even for dominant interior forces, this is a figure that not many non-freshman bigs can post and proceed to have successful offensive careers.

Festus Ezeli, Nick Richards, and Cory Jefferson are the only NCAA bigs since 2003 to post <2 AST% over a non-freshman single season and be drafted, with undrafted notables including Tarik Black, Amidah Brimah, and Cockburn (who did this in 2021 while posting a 31 player efficiency rating and 6.7 offensive box plus-minus versus the thirteenth-highest strength of schedule in the country.)

To further emphasize how infrequently a Cockburn pass ended up as an assist, we can return to Stathead querying for another Certified Nile Banger.

6'11+, >=25 USG%, <=7.5 AST%, <=16 TO%, 90+ games played

The only relevant players in the nine-player sample are former Purdue giant Isaac Haas and Alec Brown out of Green Bay.

Adding these two into the player pool, the following charts visualize Cockburn’s remarkable, outlier playmaking improvement during his post-NCAA career, and indicate that he’s materialized a moderate skill out of what was once a massive flaw in his game.

Being neglected by the NBA until this point, compounded by being an older prospect on draft day, his age is now even more of a motivation for teams to disregard him as an NBA prospect.

Luckily, I can prove this would be a fallacy of a decision by tracking bigs that started their NBA careers at 25 years old (like Cockburn would if he made his debut in the 2025 season.)

Even with the admittance that ACB/Euroleague performances are more rigorous than KBL production due to league quality, Cockburn’s performance should not continue to be denied. The trendline of successful older rookie bigs aligns well with success in the final pre-NBA season, with an admitted small sample.

From all reports, Cockburn wishes to return to the US to pursue his basketball career. I have presented an overwhelming case that a player with his profile should have been coveted by a handful of NBA teams looking to add a remarkable, dominant talent to their franchise, specializing as an offensive glass monster (2nd highest career OREB% among high-major 7-footers in Bart era behind Edey) and drop coverage/rim deterrent, indicated by sustaining some of the lowest defensive rim volume/highest defensive midrange volume/lowest defensive FTA in the NCAA all three seasons at Illinois. Everything that makes me believe that Zach Edey is a future All-NBA performer aids me in believing Cockburn will be a productive frontcourt contributor to an NBA team. The convergence of size and skill in the NBA calls for a relatively mobile, 300-pound big with a 7'4 wingspan if only to be a dominant force on the glass and an effective release valve as a rim finisher.