Amen & Ausar Thompson: Should the San Antonio Spurs roll the dice?

A Brief background on Amen & Ausar Thompson

The Thompsons are Oakland, California natives whose older brother, Troy Thompson Jr., played two seasons of basketball at the City College of San Francisco followed by two seasons of D1 basketball at Prairie View A&M. He has sporadically played both in the G-League and overseas and, according to Amen and Ausar, is the only member of their immediate family to play sports in college or professionally.

Amen and Ausar moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in eighth grade to attend Pine Crest School, where they both posted some eye-popping stats. In their junior season in 2020-2021, they led the school to a 4A state championship. Amen posted 20.5 points, 8.4 rebounds, 4.4 assists, and 3 steals per game, while his brother Ausar put up 22.6 points, 7.2 rebounds, 3.4 assists, and 2.7 steals per game that season.

Rather than staying with Pine Crest School for their senior season, however, the twins opted to join the Overtime Elite program in its inaugural season. At the time, the Overtime Elite was only made up of three teams: Team Overtime, Team Elite, and Team OTE. While Jean Montero and current Spurs rookie Dominick Barlow both played for Team Overtime, Amen and Ausar played for Team OTE and Team Elite, respectively.

Since then, the Overtime Elite league has expanded to six teams and Teams Elite, Overtime, and OTE were renamed the City Reapers, Cold Hearts, and YNG Dreamerz. Amen (#1) and Ausar (#0) Thompson both now play for the City Reapers under Head Coach Dave Leitao.

Why are Amen & Ausar Thompson considered top prospects in 2023?

I'm going to be diving into the minutiae of each twin's strengths and areas for improvement up next, but generally speaking, their high draft stock is mostly predicated on their elite athleticism and how they leverage it to be productive in games. Amen and Ausar are debatably the two best athletes of the 2023 NBA Draft class--yes, even over Scoot Henderson and Victor Wembanyama--and they have some must-watch highlight reels as a result.

Since the beginning of this draft cycle, many outlets have named Amen Thompson as the early consensus #3 overall pick behind only Wembanyama and Henderson, while Ausar initially began a bit further down most boards. Even now, while Tankathon, CBS, and Bleacher Report all have Amen listed as the 3rd overall pick on their latest mock drafts, Ausar comes in at 6th, 6th, and 4th in those respective mock drafts.

I was originally very skeptical of both prospects for reasons I'll get into momentarily, but after watching several games more closely, it's abundantly clear that both twins are lottery-worthy players. But ultimately, if you're here, that probably means you're wondering which one is best-suited to be wearing a Spurs jersey next season, and to give a bit of a spoiler, I have one brother rated markedly higher than the other despite having little separation between them on my overall big board. After watching an extensive amount of film on both brothers, here's what I noticed.