Bryce Moragne becomes SlamBall's first overall pick, hailed as most complete player

Lava did not use the first overall pick on a loud scorer or a pure highlight machine. They used it on the kind of frontcourt player SlamBall now prizes most: Bryce Moragne, the first name called in the 2023 SlamBall Draft, a 6-foot-5, 220-pound former Florida A&M forward whose mix of size, balance and transferable basketball skill made him the league’s clearest modern prototype.

Mason Gordon’s assessment captured the appeal in plain language. Moragne, Gordon said, looked like “the most complete player that we’ve ever seen in SlamBall.” That label fits the job description Lava was buying. In a sport built on sprinting, collisions and launches off the springbeds, the best bigs have to do more than rebound. They have to protect the rim, finish above it, recover fast enough to clean up broken possessions and make smart decisions in space when the floor opens and closes in a blink.

Moragne’s Florida A&M numbers explain why he stood out. Over three college seasons from 2019-22, he averaged 8.3 points and 6.2 rebounds per game, grabbed double-digit rebounds 15 times and posted a career-high 22 points against Jackson State as a senior. Those are not empty box-score marks in SlamBall terms. They point to a player who can absorb contact, keep his balance and turn second chances into points, which is exactly what separates a useful big from a true two-way asset in this league.

His path to that first pick also gave Lava a player with more than one kind of polish. Moragne earned both a B.A. and an M.B.A. from Florida A&M and was working in an accelerated sales management program for an international food company before SlamBall came calling. That combination of maturity and athletic tools matters in a league still proving that it is more than a spectacle. When SlamBall relaunched on ESPN on July 21, 2023, and ran five weekends at Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas before wrapping with playoffs and the championship in mid-August, Moragne arrived as the kind of anchor a new-era roster could build around, not just a name for a clip reel.

Lava’s pick said as much about the league as it did about Moragne. In SlamBall, the most valuable frontcourt player is not simply the biggest body. It is the one who can survive the chaos, punish it and think through it at game speed.