Clemson's PJ Hall has chance to change Tigers' NBA Draft history (2024)

CLEMSON— Clemson big man PJ Hall has come into this week's NBA Draft with realistic expectations.

He doesn't expect to be a lottery pick. He doesn't expect to take a ton of shots as a rookie. In fact, the 6-foot-10 senior found himself touting his ability as a screener in a recent podcast interview with No Ceilings NBA.

"To someone that’s not a basketball guy it seems dumb, 'Oh. you’re a good screener,'" Hall said, "but I’m a wide body who screens and creates space."

Basketball has increasingly become a "positionless" sport where an ability to create space— setting solid screens on the perimeter, and hitting shots inside and out— holds tremendous value.

Hall, who hit 111 shots from beyond the arc in his college career, has the shooting skill teams look for. He has set many more screens for guards like Chase Hunter and Joe Girard III.

But what his skills amount to, in the context of a draft, remains to be seen.

If you scan mock drafts ahead of the NBA Draft's first round on June 26, Hall's name will intermittently appear within the top 30 picks. More commonly, the Spartanburg native appears somewhere in the 40s and 50s.

At the top of the draft, Frenchman Alex Sarr spent last season playing in Australia. Spain's Zaccharie Risacher is coming off a breakout season in France. One of them will potentially head to Atlanta on as the No. 1 pick in the draft.

That said, mock drafts rarely foretell the future with high accuracy, especially in a sport where each team only has 18 athletes under contract and positional needs are hyper-specific. Projections are even harder to trust in a year where it's not clear who will be the No. 1 overall pick.

But Hall believes he has an argument to be one of the 58 athletes chosen. Not because he's a good shooter or screener, but because of Clemson's team success.

"Well, do you want to win? That’s what I do," Hall, fresh off an Elite Eight run, used as his sales pitch on the No Ceilings podcast. "I stick through tough times. I never transferred. I didn’t leave anywhere. I stayed at Clemson. I waited until we won and I do those little things that win."

Hall's college career was filled with ups and downs. He was a bench player as a freshman. He was runner-up for the ACC's most improved player award as a sophom*ore despite an injured foot. Foot and knee surgeries wiped away the offseason leading into his junior year.

As a senior, Hall was first-team All-ACC, averaging 18.3 points and 6.4 rebounds per contest for the Tigers. He shot 31.5 percent from 3-point range, but he is hoping NBA teams remember he shot nearly 40 percent as a junior.

Hall needed to prove in workouts with pro teams that he can defend smaller, quicker athletes, because he is selling himself as a "small ball" five at the next level, or a stretch four like Clemson alum Hunter Tyson.

Last year, the fifth-year senior Tyson was taken No. 37 overall by the Denver Nuggets. Tyson, who used to room with Hall on the road, helped talk Hall through his gauntlet of workouts.

Hall's status as a prospect is similar to Tyson's a year ago.

"Obviously, not some lottery guy that’s guaranteed this and that," Hall said after a workout with the Golden State Warriors. "Hearing his perspective and how he was able to jump his name in the draft and go through this process with great poise and great determination is awesome."

If and when Hall is drafted, he would pair with Tyson to give Clemson picks in consecutive years for the first time since Chris Whitney and Sharone Wright were selected in 1993 and 1994, respectively.

It's been three decades since Clemson accomplished that feat. It had been 44 years since the Tigers made an Elite Eight.

But Hall likes to think he helped change the equation for Clemson— and he thinks he can do the same for a NBA team.

"A business makes money, that’s a win. In basketball, you win games, that’s the win. You win championships, that’s the win," Hall said."That’s what I do. I help you do that."