Analysis: UNLV transfer David Muoka is supreme shot-blocker

By Mike Grimala (contact)

Friday, July 16, 2021 | 2 a.m.

Among the 10 newcomers who joined the UNLV basketball program this offseason, center David Muoka might be the most intriguing.

The 6-foot-10 center is coming in with a fair amount of hype. He played his first two seasons at Lamar and made a name for himself as a shot-swatting prodigy, as he blocked 2.9 shots per game while winning the Southland Conference’s Defensive Player of the Year award in 2020-21. It’s easy for UNLV fans to dream on that, especially as Muoka arrives with three years of eligibility remaining.

Of course, UNLV has also seen plenty of transfers make the jump from smaller conferences and struggle to produce up to expectations in the Mountain West. So will Muoka be a foundational piece for the scarlet and gray?

Certain aspects of his skill set should translate. Defensively, he checks most of the boxes you’d expect from a big man coming off a DPOY-caliber campaign.

The headliner with Muoka, obviously, is rim protection. He blocks a lot of shots (3.3 per game in conference play last year) and challenges many more, making it difficult to score around the rim when he’s patrolling the lane. He has natural gifts like size, length and leaping ability, and he shows good timing and awareness when deciding whether or not to go for a block. He can square up and block his own man’s shot, and he can come off as a help defender and cover a teammate’s mistake.

Muoka’s block rate of 11.7% last year would have more than doubled UNLV’s top shot blocker (Moses Wood, 5.6%) and been second in the Mountain West (behind only Neemias Queta's 13.2%):

Lamar played a fair amount of zone defense in the games I watched, which mostly kept Muoka close to the basket — definitely a good way to take advantage of his elite rejection skills. But in a man-to-man scheme, he’ll have to move his feet and defend in space more often, as is expected of big men in today’s game.

When asked to do it at Lamar, Muoka showed he was capable. Watch him fluidly switch onto four different offensive players, move his feet and cover a ton of ground before coming up with the block:

There is a caveat that goes along with all these videos, and that’s the small sample size. I could only find three Lamar games from last year, and in the grand scheme of things that’s just not a lot of court time to truly evaluate a player.

I bring that up because, just by chance, the three games I watched happened to be three of Muoka’s four least productive rebounding performance of the season, including his two lowest rebounding totals. This is one situation in which the eye test and the advanced statistics don’t line up. The numbers say Muoka posted a rebounding rate of 14.5% last year, which is solid for a big man (only two UNLV players posted a higher rate, Edoardo Del Cadia at 18.0% and Mbacke Diong at 15.3%). And he was at 14.6% the prior year as a freshman, so it appears he is consistent in that area. But in the three games I watched, Muoka did almost nothing on the boards.

He got boxed out with ease, gave little effort to get in on rebounding plays where he could have made a difference, and fumbled the ball whenever he did manage to get his hands on a carom. It was ugly:

As bad as that clip is, the numbers indicate that Muoka is a strong rebounder over a larger sample, so I’d lean toward giving him the benefit of the doubt in that regard.

One issue that crops up repeatedly is Muoka’s hands. He struggled to corral rebounds, and that carried over to the offensive end of the court, where he was not reliable on the receiving end of passes. There were several instances of him dropping passes that could have resulted in easy buckets.

That could have something to do with Muoka’s paltry offensive output, as he averaged 5.4 points in 26.6 minutes per game last year. Lamar certainly didn’t seem interested in utilizing him on offense; the Cardinals played a post-up power forward alongside Muoka who soaked up all the interior touches, and teammates rarely even noticed Muoka’s presence on offense, even when he managed to find himself uncovered in the paint.

When given the opportunity to score, Muoka delivered tepid results, hitting 51.3% from the field and converting 56.6% of his shots around the rim:

This is an instance where the eye test and the stats line up perfectly. Muoka doesn’t look comfortable with the ball, and his shooting numbers bear that out. He has made just 40.9% of his free throws over his two collegiate seasons, and he turns the ball over at a very high clip (19.8% turnover rate) for someone who doesn’t handle it very often.

I saw Muoka take one jump shot in the three games:

It’s clear Muoka has a long way to go to become an offensive threat, or even a complementary piece. But he has time to develop those skills. In the meantime, his defensive presence should be plenty good enough to get him on the court for UNLV as new coach Kevin Kruger attempts to rebuild the program with a defensive mindset from the ground up.

Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.