Of course he does. His advanced stats are on par, even a bit weaker than Lebronto Kyle Lowry, for comparisons sake. I don’t think LeBronto Lowry could lead a team to a championship without a top 5 player in the league. Lowry was 29, Ant is 24, so he has time like I said, but definitely not ready now.

I would actually love to see him play with Steph in case Warriors blow it all up next year, that may be his best chance at a real top point guard.

One area of improvement would be decision making when getting doubled.

3.7 assists to 2.7 turnovers from the primary ball handler isn’t great, he’s effectively playing the point guard role (as much as that role is tbf, with a couple of exceptions like Hali, kind of redundant in todays game) so you’d definitely want to see a big improvement in his ability to leverage his scoring to create for his team mates.

For a long time Randle was criticized for his passing, he was always capable but could get tunnel vision, but this season he is much improved in that regard, and I’d say Ant is the same boat Julius was atm where we’ve seen he’s able to be a good passer but he definitely gets tunnel vision and I see him dribbling into traffic fairly often and as he has his head down trying to deal with the intense ball pressure (hehe) teams throw at him, but it’s a minor knock. I think it’s the last piece of the puzzle that takes him from where he is to Shai’s level.

It’s something even MJ and Kobe took a while to get, even Shai took until this year to get to a level where he’s leveraging it to the fullness of what we know he CAN do, it’s not even that his playmaking numbers are better (tbf they were higher before the recent rough patch where Dort, Chet, Jdub, Wallace, Caruso couldn’t hit a shot from outside to save their lives) where he is manipulating defences and doubles a lot more.

Wade is an example of a guy I think who got it from very early on. Was never a Lebron level playmaker, but he was leveraging it in perfect balance to his scoring from early. I think Donovan Mitchell, not as good as Ant, but is someone who does an exemplary job of balancing scoring and playmaking and manipulating the added defensive attention. Atm Ant is a scoring machine from everywhere and a really good perimeter defender, it’s just that last piece.

Lmaooo

When you think about it, almost none of the top scorers he played against were number 1 picks. KD went 2, Curry 7th, Harden 3rd, Westbrook 4th, Dirk 9th, Kobe 13th, Carmelo 3rd, D Wade 5th, etc.