Kasparas Jakucionis has risen toward the top of many 2025 NBA Draft boards with his early season play. Illinois’s 6’4 freshman guard especially impresses as as playmaker — he’s averaging 6 assists per game with a whopping 33.4% assist rate. That assist rate leads all high major freshmen (per Bart Torvik). At the moment, it’s the 17th-highest assist rate of any college freshman since 2008.
To learn more about Jakucionis’s playmaking, I hand-tracked all (almost) all of his passes through his first eight games using Synergy, similar to what I did with Dylan Harper’s finishing. Here’s the data I collected that we’ll deep dive into (does not include his most recent game vs Wisconsin):
i hand tracked (almost) all of kasparas jakucionis’s passes so far this season, here’s the data i collected
all data via synergy and definitions below. very impressive passing profile pic.twitter.com/EHQl1NbTcI
— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) December 10, 2024
I aimed to capture aspects of playmaking that traditional box scores and advanced stat keeping don’t track. How many high-level passes does a prospect make? Are they successful under heavy pressure? How often does a prospect pass with their weak hand? These are all questions I hoped to begin to answer for Jakucionis.
Through those first eight games, Jakucionis totaled 114 “passing chances,” including all assists, potential assists and passing turnovers. Not all passes are equal despite every assist being worth the same. Pro Football Focus’s “Big Time Throws” inspired the “Big Time Passes” metric, subjectively measuring passes that require a high degree of skill and create high-value chances.
Kasparas Jakucionis is a big-time playmaker
Jakucionis throws high-end passes quite often. So far, 21.1% of his total passing chances and 24.5% of his potential assists charted as “big-time passes.” These are passes that display Jakucionis’s NBA quality, vision, timing and anticipation and create high-value layups, dunks and threes.
Take this pass for example, where Jakucionis pumps to the corner off of the catch and throws a no-look, one-handed pass for a wide-open dunk. Jakucionis displays impressive processing speed, manipulation and skill to deliver this one:
kasparas jakucionis sports absurd vision, creativity and manipulation as a passer. clearly processes the floor at a different speed than everyone else, felt like he had 20+ potential asts in this one
40.8% assist rate, 2.3 assist:turonver through three games are hilarious stats pic.twitter.com/trWNiOLU23
— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) November 15, 2024
Some of these are obviously special plays like this next pass. Jakucionis drives into traffic, leaps into the air and zips a pass with his left hand for an open 3-point attempt. The vision and skill here are ridiculous:
totally absurd lefty whip pass to the top from kasparas jakucionis here pic.twitter.com/mU0RtIO28c
— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) December 11, 2024
How does Jakucionis deal with pressure?
All NBA primary handlers, especially stars must handle pressure. Teams often blitz, hedge and trap high-octane guards to force the ball away from them and Jakucionis will be no different. Of his 114 passing chances, 21.1% of them came “under pressure,” defined as two or more heavily contesting/crowding defenders (counting the baseline/sideline if needed).
Jakucionis found outlets on 16 of the 24 pressure possessions and turned the ball over on 8 of them. That’s solid for an 18-year-old guard managing his team’s offense early into his college career. Hard traps can limit Jakucionis due to his ball control limitations, but his height, decision-making and processing against pressure are strong for his age.
Of Jakucionis’s 29 turnovers, 16 of them resulted from passing attempts. The other 13 came via handling errors, traveling or other causes (which is a notable concern for Jakucionis, but not the subject of this analysis). Nine of those 16 passing turnovers came due to poor passing execution and three from poor decision-making. I felt the other four turnovers shouldn’t have been attributed to him,Passing accuracy, timing and choosing the right window all tend to be coachable. It’s tougher to develop processing speed and decision-making, two areas where Jakucionis excels. His tendency to limit bad decisions will pay dividends once his ball control improves.
Analyzing Jakucionis’s passing skill
Digging into Jakucionois’s 98 potential assists helps us learn more about his granular passing skill. He’s an impressive left-hand passer, capable of firing pick and roll passes, mostly to the exterior, with that left hand. Many teenage passers don’t ever utilize their weak hands. He’s a capable live dribble passer with both hands with 12.4% of his potential assists coming from a live dribble.
I define “manipulation” as any passing chance where a player moves defenders with his eyes, body language or any other tactic. Nearly all elite passers have this trait and Jakucionis displayed it on 7.1% of his passes tracked. For example, the first clip above would get points for manipulation.
It’s important to measure how many of a player’s passes lead to easy chances at the basket and how many come from a paint touch they created. Jakucionis tallied 14.3% of his potential assists as rim potential assists (I did not include passes to the paint that led to contested post-ups or layups). A similar 15.3% of those 98 chances came from paint touches Jakucionis created. The first clip above is an example of a rim assist and the second clip is an example of a paint touch assist.
This tracking is far from an exact science as most of the measures are inherently subjective. A different scout tracking the same plays for the same parameters may come up with slightly different results. Despite the small sample, charting like this can help us learn about the details of a player’s toolkit. Hopefully, I will do more of this tracking for different prospects so we can compare data and learn more about these values and frequencies outside of a vacuum.
