Champaign, Ill. - Brad Underwood and Co. got their guy, Wednesday, when four-star point guard Andre Curbelo signed on the dotted line at Long Island Lutheran high school, officially making himself an Illini.

Curbelo ranked as the No. 46 player in the Class of 2020 by Rivals and the No. 8 point guard in the country. He was also recently named to USA Today’s 25-player 2019-20 All-USA Preseason Team. Underwood believes he got much more than a Top 25 player in the country.

“We’re really excited about Andre Curbelo. When we started trying to identify lead guards, he was at the top of our list,” Underwood said. “I think he is, without question, the best passing guard in the country. He’s an elite passer. I’ve compared this, and it’s not fair because he’s a high school kid, I’ve compared him to Steve Nash in terms of his abilities in ball screens. He makes his teammates better. He has the ability to raise the level of everybody he’s on the court left.”

Underwood may have a pretty solid point here. Comparing Curbelo, now a senior in high school, to arguably the greatest point guard to ever step on a basketball court may be a tad unfair. But when comparing the film, Curbelo has some Nash-esque abilities when running pick and rolls and orchestrating offenses.

Orange and Blue News broke down the film between the Hall of Fame point guard and the recent Illini signee.

It’s no secret that in order to have any success as a lead guard in basketball, you have to be able to run a ball screen effectively. Ball screens are ran nearly every offensive possession at all three levels of the game, so you get the point.

And because of this, Nash became one of the most dominant lead guards in NBA history. He's obviously, one of, if not, the best ball screen ball-handler to ever play, and that’s almost entirely based on the fact he knew how to probe defenses and pick them apart to a tee. That’s why this comparison for Curbelo is such a hefty one in the first place.

Here, Nash examines the defense instantly, noticing Tim Duncan sunk back to defend Marcin Gortat and the pass to him. Nash’s response is a simple, yet essential, instantaneous read.

But what’s noticeably stuck out about how Curbelo runs the pick and roll is how he similarly probes defenses. When Curbelo comes off the screen, he keeps his defender on his hip because of how tight he came off on the screener’s hip.

Curbelo then keeps his dribble alive and reads the defense, and more specifically, the roll man’s defender. Since his dribble is still alive, he forces the defender to make the first move and react to him, and then Curbelo instantly responds. In this clip, Curbelo reads that the defender is sinking back to the roll man, and then he rises up for the soft touch floater, making the same read.

Defenses are going to respond when the guard gets this easy of a look. Stopping the ball-handler off the ball screen becomes an even larger priority than it normally is. This means the roll man’s defender doesn’t sink off the ball screen and steps up to defend the drive.

Nash immediately reads that here in this clip, fakes the same floater he just took in his last clip, and drops the pass off for an easy layup. This exact pass - fake a floater and, in mid-air, thread the pass - is a high-level, extremely difficult pass that a rare amount of pick and roll ball-handlers have ever made. Plays like this put Nash’s passing ability on another level that few were ever on.

Curbelo made this same pass this last September, entering his senior year of high school. Not many players his age are even thinking of attempting this pass, yet successfully executing it

So, if you’re a defense, your last line of help against a ball screen ball-handler of this caliber is to bring your weakside defender to cover the roll man, while that defender takes away the drive. The defense is hoping the guard doesn’t have the awareness or patience to hit his man on the weakside, or there’s enough distance with the skip pass to recover to the weakside.

Nash probes the defense once again in this clip, this time faking the interior pass on the roll, thus forcing the weakside man to rotate to help, and fires a bullet to his man rotating to the wing for the open 3-pointer.

Underwood is spot on with his Nash comparison again for Curbelo in this case. Curbelo punishes the defense for the weakside help rotation. Instead of faking the pass like Nash did, Curbelo raised up for the jumper, knowing the big man would step up and the weakside rotation would cut off the pass to the roll man. Curbelo probed the defense perfectly and makes the split second kickout pass to his man in the corner.

When a pick and roll ball-handler can consistently do all three of these actions in a ball screen, then it’s almost impossible to defend the pick and roll. What defenses have to do instead is switch the ball screen. Nash punished defenses for this, the jury is still out on whether Curbelo can do the same.

So what does this all mean? Does this mean Curbelo is the next Steve Nash? Of course not. That's outrageous. But it can mean he has a few Nash-esque features in his game. The film and Underwood seem to believe so.

“He’s got a little bit of something that if I could describe it, I don’t know how to do that. It’s just the ‘it.’ He’s got a feel and an instinct. He sees things so far away,” Underwood said. “He’s a magical ball-handler. He’s got it on a string. He doesn’t have to have his head down. There’s nothing he can’t do with a ball.

“He’s just a guy that has an intangible that’s very, very rare and very unique. Like I said, you have a tendency in this business to try and compare guys, and Steve Nash is the guy that came up for me. Just watching him play and the way he can handle and share and pass it. They’re almost a copycat of each other.”