Machine Gun: Mississippi State’s Josh Hubbard and his Imminent NBA Success

Mississippi State’s Josh Hubbard is an outlier talent whose frame and skillset don’t align with the NBA meta. He will still suceed.

Machine Gun: Mississippi State’s Josh Hubbard and his Imminent NBA Success

Between 1916 and 1917, one George Kelly Barnes enrolled at Mississippi A&M University, now known as Mississippi State University. After an unimpressive freshman semester, applauded only for physical excellence, Kelly moved on to the professional level, a one-and-done ninety years before the NBA instituted the policy. Of course, Kelly did not move on to the NBA; the league’s origins came forty years later. He was not an athlete at all, in fact. His physical grades did not come from a draft combine, but rather a ‘Physical Hygiene’ course, the only subject he passed in his college career.

It took about a decade for Kelly’s nickname to come about, via his weapon of choice, a volume-shooting rifle that led to dominance in his field. Machine Gun Kelly ravaged the American landscape with crime, specializing in bootlegging, robberies, and kidnappings across a decade-long career.

Starkville, Mississippi has another prolific shooter on campus 108 years later, swapping 30-round drum Thompson submachine gun assaults on Midwestern banks for 30-point outbursts versus the most competitive and talented conference college basketball has ever seen. In a league made up of the greatest outliers of skill and processing, Machine Gun Josh Hubbard’s lack of love from niche online draft groups surprises me.

Watching players without stylistic parallels is the baseline to the game’s cult favorites and lottery pick superstars alike. Watching a player bomb contested threes on a fully self-created diet versus the best competition in the nation is a visually aesthetic, mesmerizing style of play.

The difference in an entertaining player being a viral sensation and an NBA contributor is often the influence on team success, and Hubbard has now provided a two-season sample of rarified excellence from the guard spot.

As rare as this is, we can also see that there’s little NBA translation from these NCAA heights, outside of Kyrie Irving’s injury-shortened speedrun at Duke. The case that Hubbard is to be greater than Uliss, Burke, Howard, Edwards, and Dillingham before him is of mandatory relevance. It’s most important to find where Hubbard is a further outlier among this group, and what makes him an anomaly worth fawning over.

Among some of the best shooters in the world, Hubbard leads in shooting volume, Moreyball diet (rim and threes/no non-rim 2s), and FT%, the latter providing an indicator for an eventual rise in 3PT efficiency that would lead to game-breaking outputs. This next level of shooting excellence has been tapped into over a few instances in his underclassmen career at Mississippi State, and provides a glance at just how crucial this shit will get at some point. Take his nine-game in-conference run from 1/21/2025 @ Tennessee to 2/22/2025 @ Oklahoma:

At ‘only’ 36%, a tick better than his career mark, Hubbard was the second-highest underclassmen in PRPG!, surrounded by and surpassing the production of lottery picks during the heat of conference play.

Hubbard exhibits an additional superpower, unlike his predecessors, that further isolates him from the field. Directly related to his ability to self-generate such an incredible volume from behind the three-point line, he has circumvented the offensive end of the all-important turnover battle. A shot attempt, make or miss, is better than a turnover in virtually every instance. Accounting for offensive load, this is one of the most turnover-averse guard prospects we have seen in the BartTorvik era, if not ever.

This doesn’t come with much NBA proof because no one has ever done it before. Belief in Hubbard as an NBA player requires an openness to win in ways rarely attempted at the highest level. That he’s gotten this far with two seasons of Mississippi State rosters at a talent deficit relative to their SEC opponents is proof in itself that this is a sustainable measure. Building an offense around Hubbard attempting as many threes as humanly possible and running an all-out blitz on the offensive glass is a lesson in ingenuity by Chris Jans and staff (shoutout to HoopVision68) that has a distinct player/team statistical footprint.

A detractor could insist that Hubbard’s gargantuan on-ball utility is indicative of ballhogging, never allowing teammates a chance to showcase their offensive skills. Mississippi State played 300 possessions without Hubbard on the court versus top-80 opponents in 2025, and were 13 points worse than their team baseline.

How could a team’s offense be this much worse if their shooting percentages are higher?

One may observe that the Bulldogs’ offensive TOV% goes from an 80th percentile rate to the worst in the nation without Hubbard. If he shoots so many threes, why does the team’s free-throw rate also crater to the worst in the country when he’s off the floor? This may be a news flash, but a high-major post-heavy offense led by KeShawn Murphy, Riley Kugel, and Cam Matthews does not have the gravity to bend defenses to the point of fouling.

Hubbard is a load-bearing offensive general, one of the handful of NCAA players who can propel harshly defensively-slanted units to truly elite offensive status.

In 2024, a freshman Hubbard played with a somewhat competent handler in Dashawn Davis for just over 500 possessions versus t80 comp, with impressive results.

This proves his heliocentrism is an elite trait, summoned when needed to maximize team success, rather than being a flaw in his process.

Size is naturally the next major datapoint to negate Hubbard’s NBA case, but he’s an outlier, even here.

Remember the Power Guard Pyramid with Eric Bledsoe and Talen-Horton Tucker?

Josh Hubbard is a Power Guard.

Where Bledsoe and Horton-Tucker’s status was based on elite athletic gifts at young ages, Hubbard’s frame raises his ceiling in comparison to his historically featherweight small guard counterparts.

Mississippi State lists him as 6'0 ", 190 lbs going into his junior season, making him a tank compared to someone like Dillingham or Markus Howard. The only similarly stocky, volume-three shooting guard is Carsen Edwards, who’s been extremely productive at the highest levels that European basketball has to offer.

Related to his frame, notably low steal and rebounding numbers are not inconsequential, but there’s precedent yet again for NBA success.

Jalen Brunson and Cam Thomas are two of the most prominent offensive guards in the league currently and share identical red flags with Hubbard. When a player is this good, at this volume on offense in college, with a sturdy build (unlike weaker/projected weaker NBA contributors like Monk and Tre Johnson) to boot, one should be as lenient as possible with the flaws and instead welcome the way that a one-man offense allows for creative, slanted lineup construction to thrive.

Another line of thought is that having such a substantial offensive load (accounting for playmaking, foul-drawing, and the foul aversion that comes with being a team’s offensive engine) and producing the output of Hubbard’s 6 offensive box plus-minus or better doesn’t leave much energy to force turnovers. NBA precedents from Trae Young, Ja Morant, Jimmer Fredette, DJ Augustin, and more show that a positive NBA defender is not a likelihood for Hubbard; his predecessors also prove that success at the NBA level will come from transcendent offensive play, a concept we have already conceded.

Hubbard is not inherently a ‘portable’ prospect, and integrating him into an offensive system requires an agreement with his style bordering on obsession. In a world of ‘plug and play’ prospects being overdrafted for their ability to blend into any vanilla spinoff of basketball scheme, I submit Hubbard as a peacock, a beacon of standout resiliency able to dually captivate all witnesses and contribute to an ecosystem. Defaulting to HubbardBall is truly a lofty ask from any NBA franchise, but for a team seeking offensive support whose identity is already based on physical wing defense and rebounding like Mississippi State’s has been over the past two years, his abilities could potentially cause rifts leaguewide.

As potent as Hubbard’s statistical profile is, analysts on both amateur and professional levels are not actively seeking a sub-six-foot guard in the league of giants. I agree that bucking the status quo is only suitable for the most gifted of smaller players, and I implore all to understand that Hubbard is worthy of this consideration.

Nile!

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