Who does Justin Harper really compare to?

I'm super duper bored. I'm an NBA junkie; obviously I read blogs but I watch the summer league and euro-league, study the cap for free agency, and its all gone. This is usually a good down time in the NBA; now all I hear about is Arenas cap number and how royally screwed the Magic are if they implement some type of hard cap. Whatever; wake me up when they settle it.

But I've been really intrigued about Justin Harper since we drafted him. Every draft all the players get compared to someone and the first person Harper has been compared to was Rashard Lewis. I thought that might be too easy so I wanted to find out if there was someone else that's more comparable. After the jump, my findings.  

Harper has said that he will probably be a SF in the league but he played a lot of 4 in college. His shooting numbers the last 2 seasons are off the charts and I wanted to find other "shooting big men/stretch 4" that are like him.

So I came up with Brian Cook(floor), Channing Frye, Rashard Lewis, and Danny Granger (ceiling?). Except for Rashard, they were all seniors coming into the draft. Here are their measurements from the pre-draft camp:

 *Notes-I could not find any of Rashard's pre-draft measurements other than weight. And I got 2 different weights. Crazy thing is Rashard is listed now at 215, Harper already has 13 lbs on him! I used max vertical, bench, and lane agility because those seem like good indicators of athleticism. Wingspan was used to see if he has JJ arms or Durant arms.

Just from the way Harper looks, he looks strong and the bench indicates that. Out of the players that decided to do the bench test, he was tied for first with Derrick Williams. The lane agility is a bit of concern because he will be on the perimeter much more and it seems that he may not have the footspeed to contain quick 3s. In comparison to last years rookies, Gordon Hayword had 11.73 on the lane test and Al Aminu had a 11.29. His wingspan is average for his height. More JJ than Durant unfortunately.

Ok, so I wanted to compare their college careers. Of course Rashard is excluded.

Key-True Shooting %, effective FG%, Offenisve win shares, defensive win shares, win shares, rebounds

Nothing here jumps out in favor of Harper. So how about just their senior years?

That's some shooting right there. He ranked 27 and 26 in the nation for eFG% and TS%. Every stat went up so that's good. But his rebounding numbers are pretty low. Here are the rebound % stats:

Sorry, couldn't get Brian Cook's but I imagine it wasn't very good. So Harper was better than Frye at grabbing defensive rebounds in colllege, and Frye was a center/power forward and was expected to grab more boards. Ryan Anderson had an ORB% of 11.5% but again, he is more of a "big".  With Dwight here (hopefully) Harper won't be asked to rebound much but he will have to grab a few and he looks to have the strength to go get them.

So what does all this mean?  I don't know, its always up to the player to achieve their full potential. Offensively  though, I think he can be as good as Danny Granger. Granger is a pretty good defender so I'm not sure Harper will be able to match him there, but defense is a lot about effort and if Harper puts in the effort he should at least be average. Earl Clark scored an 11.17 on the lane test and we have seen the potential for him to be a great defender.

Is there anyone else you think Harper would compare to?