This is comical. He is not skilled enough to be anywhere near a top ten transfer.
FWIW, he’s ranked as the 20th best transfer in The Athletic’s ranking. From what I can see, none of the other three are ranked in the ~top 100 in their list.
Here’s there scouting report -
Ht: 6-9 Wt: 255
This is a tough loss for a Minnesota team that did not have much depth on the interior this year. Payne is a tough, physical interior player who rebounds, hits the glass and finishes at the rim. He’s a very direct player in that way, possessing all sorts of bounce and explosive athleticism. That’s the key skill for Payne. He is one of the best big-man athletes in the country.
Offensively, almost every shot he took this year was at the rim. When he wants to or has a runway, he can get above the rim and finish. But the skill level and hands can occasionally abandon him. Still, he made almost 64 percent of his shots at the rim, per Synergy, which is solid enough. Mostly, Payne is going to play out of ball-screens and in the dunker spot, but he also posted a few times per game for Minnesota to very mixed results. The turnover rate in those situations is quite poor, and I don’t know how great I feel about him putting the ball on the ground more than once. But as a rim-runner, he has a lot of utility if another team runs a ball-screen-centric offense. He’ll also get a significant number of tip-outs and put-backs.
More than on offense though, Payne has a ton of upside on defense. He can explosively rise up to block shots, as well as guard a bit in space. He moves really well laterally for a player his size at 6-foot-9, 250 pounds. He rotates in a timely manner on the baseline and always makes his presence felt, sometimes at the expense of taking himself out of rebounding position, but the overall impact is positive.
His game never seems to slow down. If I were a coach, I’d love to invest further time and energy into him, especially if a significant basis of my offense was a well-spaced court with high-end ball-screen action where he’d have space to take off and fly.— Sam Vecenie