Davide Casarin | Scouting Report

One of the top prospects of the Italian basketball, Davide Casarin, is getting better and better every season in his career so far. Umana Reyer’s 21-year-old guard still impresses with his physicality after the solid performances in the youth categories. Let’s take look at Casarin’s positives and negatives on the court.

General Informations :

• Team: Umana Reyer Venice – Basket Serie A (Italy 1)
• Past Experiences: Made his Senior National Team debut in 2023 FIBA WC Qualifiers. Played in all of the FIBA’s National Team youth categories and mostly had great tournaments (U16 – U18 – U20 European Championships). Bronze medalist in FIBA U16 European Championship 2019. 
• His father, Federico Casarin, was also a professional basketball player. He played for Basket Mestre, Pallacanestro Treviso, Virtus Roma, Aurora Desio and Dinamo Sassari. He became the president of Umana Reyer, after previously holding the title of sporting director.
• Position: Guard
• Nationality: Italy 🇮🇹
• Birth Year: 2003 
• Height: 6’6 – 197 cm
• Active Hand: Right

Strengths:

• High physicality with good size. He can use body well, looking not scared to play with contact and using his toughness on defense. 
• Grabs rebounds when he combines his abilities of using his body with his anticipation. 
• He can score in many different ways. Can go coast to coast very quickly and finish at the rim strong, operate his team as a P&R ball-handler, create his own shot behind the arc or from the midrange. 
• Using euro step and jab steps very effectively against opponent’s bigs and reaches to the rim cunningly. 
• Overall court vision is good. Finds buckets from cuts and off-ball movements. 
• Not very athletic but finishes lay-ups quickly in fast breaks and transitions.
• Looks very eager on the court. Always active to get rebounds or steal the balls on defense. 
• Follows the ball, get in to paint to get rebounds and always on the side line of the paint for the rebounds after free throws. 

Improvement Areas: 

• He doesn’t use his weak (left) hand. Finishes with his right hand almost every single position around the rim. As I observed, he often positions himself in the left wing or corner before driving into the paint to attack with his right hand. 
• Plays too much with ball, sometimes loses the control of the ball very easily.
• Sometimes turnovers might occur due to his quick or risky decisions and passes.
• His release quicker than the past right now, but it’s still bit low. 
• Forces unnecessary shots, both inside and behind the perimeter. For instance, sometimes he tries to finish on 2 guys with his right hand from the left side of the rim. 

Overall, I can say that Casarin is a scorer guard with physicality which we don’t see from the many of the guards in Europe. He can make a difference in terms of physicality in high intensity games. He can hit open shots when he finds, drive against close outs, finish at the rim very quickly on open court if we talk about offensive part of his game. Therefore, his weak hand (left) is his biggest flaw in his game, in general he doesn’t use his left hand when finishes even from the left side of the rim as I mentioned in the previous part. With that, Italian guard has a really good size and strength body, can play with contact and uses his body well.

To sum up everything that has been stated so far, Davide Casarin can be a good part of a team that needs high physicality and size on the court and also needs more scoring options from their backcourt.