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NBA draft stock watch: G League's MarJon Beauchamp is high on the rise

Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

It’s not his fault. But before the season began, Marjon Beauchamp was basically moved to the back burner by many NBA scouts and evaluators.

However, through three games, Beauchamp has been arguably the best player on the G League’s Ignite. That’s especially impressive considering he was a far less-touted prospect than teammates Jaden Hardy, Michael Foster and Dyson Daniels.

While he had flown a bit under the radar during the offseason, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, the 6-foot-7 wing was long considered a player who could play in the NBA.

As a freshman in 2016-17, Beauchamp was a reserve for former NBA star Brandon Roy at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School. While there, he played alongside future Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr., who helped lead the school to an undefeated season and was voted by MaxPreps as the best team in the nation. 

Porter graduated and went on to play at Missouri and Roy switched jobs to coach nearby at Garfield High School. Beauchamp transferred with him in 2017-18 and the two then went on to win the Class 4A state championship in Washington for the second year in a row. 

Beauchamp, who was long a dominant AAU scorer on the Adidas Gauntlet, transferred twice more. When it was all said and done, the wing attended four different high schools in as many years.

The summer after his senior year of high school, he announced that he would bypass college and prepare for the pros. While the decision to go down that path was not traditional, in Feb. 2020, I included him in an early edition of my 2021 NBA mock draft on USA TODAY SMG’s Rookie Wire.

He moved to San Francisco to train at Chameleon BX — though, due to COVID-19, he soon returned home to the state of Washington. While there, Beauchamp considered walking away from the game. 

He eventually decided to enroll in his local community college and he played at Yakima Valley College. He soon led the Northwest Athletic Conference in scoring, averaging 30.7 points per game, even notching as many as 50 points in a single-game performance. 

Beauchamp didn’t end up declaring for the NBA draft in 2021 and actually even considered going to a high-major college to play basketball. But his decision to play in the G League has already been beneficial.

The wing scored 19 points and 27 points in his first two games for the Ignite. He added 10 rebounds, 4 steals and 3 blocks in the season opener and he was 4-for-7 on 3-pointers in the second game.

One of the most exciting elements of his game has been his ability to take the ball up the floor in transition, especially after forcing a steal, and he is always a lob threat on leak-outs as well.

But the most unique aspect is that, while he is listed at 6-foot-7, he can play on-ball and hit step-back jumpers off the dribble. Those capabilities from a wing make him an extraordinarily draftable prospect.

After several rounds of transfers during high school and circumstances once out of high school that took him out of the national spotlight, Beauchamp has recently done a wonderful job reminding talent evaluators that he is every bit the future NBA player that they once thought he could become.

Beauchamp is the first player to go from junior college to the G League’s Ignite program. He is also the first person to join the team despite being more than one year out of high school.

There is no doubt in my mind that Beauchamp will land much higher on my next mock draft than he did on my previous mock draft. Especially because his path has been windy, he is someone who has earned all of our attention.

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