AJ Dybantsa is living up to his enormous pre-NCAA hype, touted as a top prospect in a loaded class for years. His 19.8 points per game rank fourth among high-major freshmen and he’s scoring on an excellent 63% true shooting. It doesn’t require an expert eye to understand viewing a 6’9 hyper athlete with stupendous ball skills and touch as an elite NBA Draft prospect.
As a component of my draft scouting process, I created a hand-tracked, film-based “metric” for projecting impact at the next level. Click here for a more detailed explainer on my process, but here’s the synopsis — I assign credit to every play a prospect makes throughout a game and designate it as positive or negative, then total those plays for a single game/season-long average.
I do my best to account for context, lineups and competition levels, evaluating every detail of every play to attempt to quantify important aspects of prospects’ profiles that box scores and play-by-play data miss. Dybantsa unsurprisingly has charted like a top prospect through his first five college games ( six, including the exhibition game against Nebraska, for a more robust sample. I didn’t watch his exhibition game against North Carolina):
Dybantsa is an impact dynamo
Dybantsa’s 20.22 net impact plays per 40 minutes ranks him near the top of the class (minimum 60 total minutes charted). He only trails Caleb Wilson, Neoklis Avdalas, Mikel Brown and Labaron Philon, though I’ve charted more minutes for Dybantsa than any other player. Despite ranking fourth in offensive NP/40, he’s adding more value on defense than other players at the top of the offensive leaderboard.
A shift in shot selection from his pre-NCAA sample is facilitating dominant offensive impact through incessant rim pressure. He’s finally unlocking his physical and athletic gifts as a slasher, nearly doubling his half-court rim frequency from his final high school season (25%) to the beginning of his college career (50%). Constant paint pressure leads to great shots for Dybantsa and his teammates even if the shots don’t fall, which my charting accounts for.
It’s worth noting how low-level games boost Dybantsa’s defensive scores; his three highest scoring defensive games were against Delaware, Holy Cross and Nebraska in preseason. All three of his high-major games in the regular season against Villanova, UConn and Wisconsin produced defensive NP/40 totals about a point below the class average.
There’s room for improvement on defense
The data articulates what we already intuit about Dybantsa and other teenage offensive megastars on defense. Most of their impact stems from flashes and Dybantsa’s defensive highlights, especially defending the ball, are frightening. He has plenty of room to grow technically and mentally, but so many young players improve in those areas as they age and mature.
Defense is far more challenging to chart from an outsider’s perspective than offense. Defensive NP scores are lower across the board, as much of evaluating that side of the ball requires inside knowledge of coaching and scheme. I don’t know the defensive calls (usually), so I don’t assign credit plays like botched switches or miscommunications unless it’s blatantly obvious who is at fault.
Still, we can evaluate movement skills, motor, awareness, athleticism and instincts on tape and Dybantsa sports some of the strongest tools in the class. His length and size make him extremely difficult to dribble and pass around for most wings.
passing the ball around AJ dybantsa’s condor arms is not an easy thing to do pic.twitter.com/ZsWNXqoZU3
— ben pfeifer (@bjpf_) November 16, 2025
As we might expect, Dybantsa’s best games rank among the highest-scoring single games across the class. His college debut against Villanova (26.67 NP/40) is the seventh-highest scoring high-major game of the cycle so far. But for a player who faced consistency-related questions coming into college, it’s encouraging that his lowest scoring games still sit at 1.66 NP/40 above the class average.
Dybantsa and the rest of the class will shift their Net Plays scores as the season marches on. We’re a tiny fraction through the year and the sample sizes on the charting results are subject to significant changes. I’ll continue to chart and track Dybantsa throughout the season, but I’m confident he’ll remain near the top of the leaderboard.
