They tell Brandon Huntley-Hatfield to ignore the mock drafts, so he does.

Except when he doesn’t.

Those things are everywhere, including on Instagram, where the Louisville men’s basketball forward — an offseason transfer from Tennessee — has been known to scroll through 2023 NBA Draft projections and scan for his name.

Typically he doesn’t find it.

“These guys now, in this year’s draft? In high school I was with them,” Huntley-Hatfield said last week. “I was a top guy just like them. That’s why I say it feels like people forgot about me. I’m not in no mock drafts, which is cool.”

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But he doesn’t seem cool with it. Which is understandable.

It’s part of the reason he’s at Louisville, hoping for the kind of Kenny Payne push that got so many Kentucky players to the level Huntley-Hatfield wants to reach, when Payne was a UK assistant with a rep for development.

“He's had a pipeline of guys — guys at my position, guards, lottery picks, everyone knows — who was at Kentucky,” Huntley-Hatfield said. “And those guys did it. And I just felt like what I accomplished and what I showed people in high school, it's still in there for me.”

What he showed then was really something.

Back when he was in the high school class of 2022, the 6-foot-10, 250-pound Huntley-Hatfield was the No. 6 player in the 247Sports Composite ranking. When he committed to Tennessee, he switched to the 2021 class, where 247Sports ranked him No. 26.

In a 2019 evaluation, Evan Daniels — now an agent at CAA Sports, then the director of basketball recruiting at 247 — called Huntley-Hatfield “a tremendous talent” who “with continued development could be a one-and-done level recruit.”

In other words, Huntley-Hatfield was on an NBA track.

And somewhere things got derailed.

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‘I haven’t really been trusting’

At Tennessee, Huntley-Hatfield was a bit player on a 27-8 team that won the SEC Tournament and lost to Michigan in the second round of the NCAAs.

He played in all 35 games and started the final 13, and he showed flashes. There were 12-point games against Tennessee Tech and UNC Greensboro; 11 points on 4-of-5 shooting against Kentucky; 10 points in an SEC Tournament win over Mississippi State.

But he finished the season with pedestrian averages — 3.9 points and 2.9 rebounds — and shot 45.7% from the floor, making 2 of 13 3-pointers.

“I got better as the year progressed,” Huntley-Hatifeld said. “But I wasn't comfortable; I wasn't really confident.”

Something was missing, and Huntley-Hatfield entered the transfer portal in search of it. He considered Arizona State, Auburn, SMU and Wake Forest but ultimately settled on Louisville in large part because of Payne.

When they talked, Huntley-Hatfield said, Payne told him “to be truthful and honest with him about what I wanted.” So he did.

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Huntley-Hatfield talked about losing his confidence and needing to find it. And he talked openly about the NBA, about his desire to play in the league and Payne’s history of helping players make it there.

And when Huntley-Hatfield shared those thoughts, Payne told him it all was possible. Payne had seen the film. He’d watched Huntley-Hatfield in high school. Payne was convinced of his potential and hopeful he could help reach it.

From the beginning, he made Huntley-Hatfield comfortable. Huntley-Hatfield said he "can be myself" around Payne.

“And that was really big for me, because the past couple of years I haven't really been trusting with anybody,” Huntley-Hatfield said. “I have a really tight circle. So for me to feel that genuine connection with him is really big for me. And I feel like this was the right spot for me.”

He feels like it’s paying off.

“(Payne has) just allowed me to come into myself again and find myself again and just play confident,” Huntley-Hatfield said.

The question now is whether results will follow.

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‘Impose your will on people’

Huntley-Hatfield loves a spin move.

He’s worked hard on one. He finds himself turning to it. It’s a go-to.

Payne has asked him to reevaluate it.

“When I'm playing, when we're going live, I find myself always spinning, spinning, spinning, right?” Huntley-Hatfield said. “So he's just telling me I'm big and I'm strong and I'm athletic. Like, I don't always have to do that.”

Sometimes, Payne tells him, he can get in the post, bump his defender once and get straight into a right-handed jump hook. And some of the jump shots Huntley-Hatfield takes, Payne tells him, are bailing out defenders who’d rather he stretch them out to the perimeter than pummel them in the paint.

“Basically, what I am asking him to do is … be a bear around that basket,” Payne said. “You’re skilled. Don’t let that be the main thing that you try to rely on, your skill. Rely on your toughness, your fight, your will to be great. Impose your will on people. Impose your will on winning.”

On paper, Huntley-Hatfield is a matchup nightmare. Too quick and agile for most centers to defend, but big enough to overpower power forwards.

“He can score anywhere, he can shoot, he can finish at the rim, he can set screens,” Louisville guard Zan Payne said. “He’s very versatile. I don't know why people stopped talking about him. I don't know what happened at Tennessee or anything, but he's a great player and he's been great for us so far.”

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When Huntley-Hatfield puts it all together, teammate Kamari Lands said, “He’s gonna be a problem, definitely."

But it never clicked at Tennessee. His jump shot was unreliable, his scoring inconsistent.

So Kenny Payne is pushing him trying not to let him settle. And not just on offense.

Recently, he started putting Huntley-Hatfield in a drill that required him to pressure a point guard bringing the ball upcourt, the better to force the big forward to move his feet, a key for the switching defense Payne prefers.

To unlock Louisville at that end of the court, Huntley-Hatfield needs to be able to guard a big man who sets a screen, then switch and stay in front of the ballhandler who uses that screen to get into open space.

“And he’s embracing it,” Kenny Payne said.

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One day last week, Huntley-Hatfield came to his coach and asked, “What can I do more?”

Asking the question was a step in the right direction. Huntley-Hatfield is “more confident than I’ve ever seen him,” Kenny Payne said. He’s “studying and trying to understand what we want from him.”

Huntley-Hatfield knows what he wants for himself. He wants to get Louisville back to its winning ways after a 13-19 season. He wants to soak up what Payne is teaching. And he wants to prove mock-draft doubters wrong.

“I feel like once the season comes around — and towards the end of the season when we're winning and we do what we want to do — I feel like I’ll be in the position I want to be in,” Huntley-Hatfield said. “But I'm gonna try to take it one day at a time. And I feel like I'm gonna shock the world this year."

Reach Louisville men’s basketball reporter Brett Dawson at mdawson@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @BDawsonWrites.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Why Louisville basketball's Brandon Huntley-Hatfield will surprise