Bilal Coulibaly: What NBA scouts are saying about the Wizards’ youngster

This is the third article in a series examining NBA scouts’ opinions about the potential and development of the Washington Wizards’ most prominent young players.
Part 1: Alex Sarr | Part 2: Bub Carrington

WASHINGTON — Within the opening three minutes of the new regular season, Bilal Coulibaly offered a tantalizing glimpse of the player the Washington Wizards hope he will become.

The Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum dribbled the basketball on the right wing, with Coulibaly guarding closely. Tatum sped forward, hoping to drive into the lane, but Coulibaly matched him stride-for-stride and cut off his path to the basket. Tatum decelerated, delivered a bump to Coulibaly and stepped back, rising for a jumper from just beyond the foul line. Coulibaly elevated, too, challenging the shot with an outstretched right hand high in the air. The ball clanged off the front of the rim.

Forty seconds later, Coulibaly was the attacking player. He dribbled the ball on the perimeter, with Boston’s Jaylen Brown defending, blocking a path to the hoop. Coulibaly sped forward, absorbed contact from Brown and then drove to the basket, leaving Brown in the dust. Coulibaly elevated and scored on a scoop layup off the glass.

Let’s recap, shall we? First, Coulibaly halted the drive of a first-team All-NBA player, forcing an errant midrange shot. Then, Coulibaly beat one of the league’s better wing defenders off the dribble for a bucket. Impressive.

That is the vision the Wizards’ front office and coaching staff have for the 20-year-old wing/forward. The brain trust views him as someone who will stymie opponents’ best perimeter scorers and eventually will create offense for himself or for teammates.

“That’s how we’ve always envisioned him, as a guy who can make plays,” Washington coach Brian Keefe said. “There’s a learning process to that.”

The 2024-25 season will be Coulibaly’s crash course in playmaking. He will handle the ball often and will have wide latitude to learn on the fly. He will make — and already has made — mistakes, but that’s more than OK. The goal is to grow, not to be perfect, and with Washington in full rebuild mode, Keefe has the luxury, and responsibility, to experiment.

Rival scouts will watch closely because Coulibaly ranks among the league’s most interesting development stories. Although the Wizards now have a large number of intriguing prospects, including rookie first-round picks Alex Sarr, Bub Carrington and Kyshawn George, perhaps none of the other youngsters has the potential upside that Coulibaly has. If everything goes right in the years ahead, Coulibaly could become the kind of versatile two-way wing terror whom all contending clubs covet.

The Athletic interviewed four talent evaluators across the league to learn how they regard Coulibaly, and they were granted anonymity because their teams prohibit them from publicly discussing players from rival clubs.

All of the evaluators are intrigued by Coulibaly’s potential, but they also acknowledged that he is a difficult player to project. Scout A, for instance, labeled him “a promising project.”

“I think at the top end of his development, he’ll be sort of that 3-and-D guy that you can put on the bigger wings around the league and can guard multiple positions,” Scout B said. “His shooting development and his ability to finish through traffic is going to be what determines where his ceiling is in terms of an offensive skill set. But I thought he showed enough flashes (as a rookie). Obviously, where the team was (last season) and what the goal of the team was, it’s hard for any young player to really be consistent and play well all the time. But the idea of a big wing who can guard multiple positions and create his own shot is still the hope for him.”

Coulibaly’s strengths

To understand what makes Coulibaly so difficult to project, you have to understand his basketball background. A late growth spurt and Coulibaly’s relative lack of experience complicate the picture. He didn’t start playing senior-level basketball until Victor Wembanyama’s team in the French league, Metropolitans 92, called him up from their junior program during the 2022-23 season. As Sam Vecenie, The Athletic’s NBA Draft analyst, wrote on the eve of the 2023 NBA Draft, Coulibaly is a “classic late bloomer” with “completely ridiculous tools for an NBA wing.” Coulibaly rocketed up NBA teams’ draft boards, and a draft-night trade with Indiana allowed Washington to snag him at No. 7.

Now, almost 17 months later, Coulibaly’s physical attributes are even more impressive. He has grown taller and stronger. He said he now stands 6-foot-7 1/2 without shoes and weighs 205 pounds. His wingspan measures either 7-foot-2 or 7-foot-3. (Coulibaly isn’t sure of the exact wingspan figure.)

The combination of positional size, speed and explosiveness gives Coulibaly a chance to become an elite defender. Last season, the Wizards often deployed Coulibaly to guard opponents’ top perimeter scorers, with intriguing results. Vincent Collet, who coached the French men’s national team during the Olympics, played Coulibaly 21 minutes in the gold-medal game against the United States.

“He hadn’t played a lot until that gold-medal game,” said Cleveland Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson, who served as one of France’s assistant coaches. “As a staff, we decided we need(ed) him against Team USA because of his defense, because of his athleticism, because of his length. The sky’s the limit for him.”

Coulibaly has opened this NBA season in the same defensive role, guarding opponents’ top perimeter scorers. In the opener against Boston, he was assigned to Tatum. On Saturday against Cleveland, he was asked to track Donovan Mitchell. During Monday’s victory over Atlanta, he was dispatched onto Trae Young and helped limit Young to 14 points on 2-of-15 shooting. Appropriately enough, Coulibaly successfully guarded Young when Young launched — and missed — a potential game-winning 3 just before time expired; the sequence illustrated Coulibaly’s unique blend of length and body control.

“Defensively,” Scout C said, “he’s a versatile guy. He has agility. He has good attributes on that end, and he plays (hard) on that end as well. I think he will be a guy who can be a perimeter wing defender who can play the best guys and do a good job on the ball.”

When Coulibaly was drafted, analysts described him as a raw offensive player. That assessment turned out to be only somewhat correct. For sure, he needed to tighten his dribbling. But from the jump, he made quick decisions and often moved the ball before the offense stagnated.

His shooting stroke, originally said to be a weakness, looked sound. Through his first 23 games last season, he made nearly 44 percent of his 3s on 3.0 attempts per game. From that point on, however, he scuttled. In his final 40 games, his long-range shooting dipped to 29 percent on 2.9 attempts per game.

“I don’t think it’s anything alarming, the dip,” Scout C said. “I think there’s a number of factors that play into it: the guys he was playing with, the quality of shots. As they looked to expand his role, he was taking more shots by design. They put him in a position to run things for him to get attempts up. The percentages, I don’t necessarily think they tell the full story. With his shot, I think that’s an aspect of his game that’ll continue to improve. Mechanically, there’s nothing that stands out that’s alarming.”

With only three games in the books this season, it’s much too early to know whether Coulibaly’s 3-point shooting will improve.

But once again, he’s at least shown the ability to sink 3s. Against Cleveland, he made four of his nine attempts from deep, and it’s safe to say that he’s at his most effective as a spot-up shooter when his feet are set.

What has impressed Keefe so far this season is that Coulibaly has played aggressively — and for the most part, has made the correct decisions. Against Boston, encouraged by teammates and by coaches to attack, Coulibaly drove to the hoop with an assertiveness he rarely showed last season, generating eight free-throw attempts.

Against Cleveland, Coulibaly recognized that defenders were attempting to prevent drives to the hoop. So, when defenders sagged off, Coulibaly launched shots.

“He’s reading the game and taking what’s appropriate,” Keefe said. “But we want him to play downhill. You can see when he does (attack the basket), what he does to the defense. He collapses people. We want him to be able to do that. He has the ability to get into the paint, and we’re going to continue to expand that.”

Coulibaly’s weaknesses

A crucial initial step to being a capable playmaker is the ability to analyze a defense, and Coulibaly does that already. In retrospect, because of his meteoric rise, he was enough of a mystery to draft analysts 17 months ago that his feel for the game was badly underestimated.

What remains unclear is whether Coulibaly is skilled enough to take advantage of what he correctly processes. As a rookie, he turned the ball over at a sky-high rate for a wing, according to the advanced analytics database Cleaning the Glass. In Washington’s three games this season, he turned the ball over eight times. He needs to tighten up his dribbling, especially in traffic.

Again, mistakes are to be expected. What everyone needs to remember is that Wizards coaches — first Wes Unseld Jr., then Keefe after Unseld’s dismissal — were careful last season not to give Coulibaly too much responsibility too soon; they wanted Coulibaly to focus first on defense and on adjusting to the NBA. As a result, Daniel Gafford, Delon Wright and Johnny Davis were the only Wizards players who compiled lower usage rates last season than Coulibaly did. Keefe planned to expand Coulibaly’s role during the season’s final month, but Coulibaly suffered a season-ending fracture in his right wrist in mid-March. He needs time to settle into his expanded offensive role.

What’s encouraging is that Coulibaly’s shown promise early this season as a passer, tallying 10 assists.

Although he has shown he can sink open 3s, he still has a long way to go before opponents fear him enough beyond the 3-point arc. In that sense, he is not a floor spacer yet. That, too, might occur in time, though.

What Coulibaly is attempting to do, and what the Wizards are correctly asking him to do, is a difficult transition. As a rookie, he was essentially a defensive specialist. Now, he’s being tasked to develop into a true two-way player; while he must continue to guard opponents’ best perimeter scorers, he now has a larger playmaking role on offense. Being a two-way player requires more physical energy and more focus. He cannot take offensive possessions off anymore.

Coulibaly’s self-awareness is one of his strengths. It should come as no surprise that when he was asked to name the most difficult part of changing roles, he answered, “(I) gotta play both sides now. So, it’s really tough. You’ve got to stop the best player, and after that, you’ve got to get some buckets. So, yeah, it’s really tough. I’d say that’s the toughest part because you’ve got to be in great condition to do that.”

So far, so good. He appears to welcome that challenge.

Coulibaly’s future

The most optimistic assessment of Coulibaly’s future came from Scout D, who said, “I think they did the right thing with him last year. They tried to bring him along slowly — maybe slower than he wanted. There’s just so much there. It’s what everyone in the league’s looking for, right? These multi-position defenders at the wings that can score enough.

“Even if his scoring is just via spot-up 3-point shooting, that’s still good. I just think there’s way more to him. Maybe we see it by the second half of this second season, because he’s still so young. By the second half of this second season, will we start to see the progression to what he can be? I think you just have to continue to play the long game with him.”

Scout A noted that Coulibaly is only 20, and to put that into added context, it’s important to note that Coulibaly won’t turn 21 until next July. To take things a step further, Coulibaly is so young that it’s unwise to draw definitive conclusions. Because Washington is attempting to maximize its lottery odds, the team can afford to play Coulibaly a significant number of minutes and make him a featured playmaker in its offense.

“He’s got the athletic tools,” Scout A said. “He can handle (the ball). I think he’s got a good basketball IQ. I think he’s got versatility, potentially, as a defender. But is he a rotation player on a (conference finalist) team at this point? No. But I think there’s upside. With some of these guys, (you have to ask whether they’re) going to be able to make shots? That’s often the skill that defines them or relegates them to ‘just another guy’ versus somebody really good.”

Scout A added: “I’m not ruling him in or out in terms of whether he was a good pick. (It’s) too soon. But I’d say the arrow’s pointing upward.”

For now, the scouts are making conservative projections.

“It’s safer to say that he’s going to be a 3-and-D guy than a shot creator in the way of, say, Brandon Miller,” Scout B said. “If you compare him to Brandon Miller, you can see with Brandon Miller the shot creation and the shooting touch, which he showed even at Alabama. With Bilal, that’s going to come later, I think, for him. But right now, it’s still TBD. It’s safer to say he’s going to be a defender who can make an open shot and play in transition than a top-two shot creator for the team.”

Coulibaly will have the opportunity to defy those cautious expectations. When the Wizards traded up to acquire Coulibaly’s draft rights, the move was seen as a high-risk, high-reward move.

Now, early in Coulibaly’s second season, the potential for a “high-risk” outcome seems highly unlikely. Coulibaly will not be a bust — and he still has the potential to turn into the high-reward player whom Washington so desperately needs.

Already this season, he’s starting to show capabilities he rarely, if ever, displayed last season. Early in the fourth quarter against Cleveland, he received a pass near the top of the arc, prompting Evan Mobley to make a half-hearted closeout. Coulibaly attacked that closeout, drove past Mobley, scored on a layup and drew a foul. Against Mobley, a former first-team NBA All-Defensive player, that’s a superb offensive play.

“I would say, conservatively, (he will become) the secondary or the third playmaker on a really good team that contributes in a lot of different areas — and not just one area on offense,” Scout D said. “In a playoff game, could he against a switch get his own shot in a quick isolation? When the ball moves to him, swings to him … can he go make a play from the wing? I think that stuff is all within his grasp. And that’s conservative. The aspirational view sees him as the primary playmaker at times, that he can dribble, pass and get his own shot. Even if he’s a middling self-creator, he’ll still be a value add just because of his defensive abilities.”

The 2024-25 season will begin to unravel that mystery: What’s the more accurate projection, the aspirational view or the conservative view?

(Photo: Geoff Burke / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)