Category Archives: pro bono NBA scouting

Age and college basketball

In terms of roster age, Duke’s as young as past one-and-done-heavy teams. What that will mean when pretty much the rest of Division I is older than normal remains to be seen. (goduke.com)

The population of men’s Division I college basketball rosters as a whole in 2022 may be older than it’s been at any time since first-year students were granted athletic eligibility in the 1970s. If this is indeed the case, the geriatric shift has been brought about by allowances in eligibility granted in response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it’s possible we already started seeing the consequences of this demographic adjustment last year. With the benefit of hindsight, Baylor looked pretty old last spring even for a national champion in the one-and-done era not named “Duke” or “Kentucky.”

The pandemic may have expanded our definition of “old”
National champions, average age weighted by minutes (AAWM)

                              AAWM
2012    Kentucky              19.7
2013    Louisville            21.7
2014    UConn                 21.7
2015    Duke                  20.1
2016    Villanova             21.1
2017    North Carolina        21.6
2018    Villanova             21.2
2019    Virginia              21.4

2021    Baylor                22.3

Age on March 1 of title season

Poor Gonzaga. The Bulldogs arrived at the 2021 title game sporting a very late-2010s-looking AAWM of 21.0, doubtless thinking it was business as usual in the world of college basketball actuarial tables.

Continue reading →

Prepare for (by far) the most perimeter-oriented first round ever

RW

Even Robert Williams attempted 12 three-pointers last season. (Don’t ask how many he made.)

The 2018 NBA draft is now just hours away, and it’s already a virtual certainty that the 30 players selected in the first round will be far and away the most perimeter-oriented such group we’ve ever seen.

Just how different is this 2018 bunch? Here’s a handy graphic representation…

first_round_threes

Behold, seven years of first-round picks. I’ve even thrown in a special bonus surprise in the form of the 2018 first round. No, it hasn’t happened yet, but I trust a fair portion of these players will in fact hear their names called. (I’ve used Jonathan Givony’s projected order of selection.) Continue reading →

If lottery selections just parrot earlier high school rankings, does the NBA really need one-and-done?

Ayton

(Kevin Jairaj, USA Today)

One fascinating aspect of one-and-done has always been that, at least in theory, it has no logical basis for existence. Recall that the rule was instituted on July 29, 2005, in part, to give NBA franchises additional and badly needed information on draft prospects. There were to be no more Kwame Browns.

An understandable wish, surely, but one that affords an exceedingly odd occasion for a proscriptive rule. After all, in a world where high school graduates are immediately draft-eligible, why would you need to make this a rule in the first place? If a front office feels insufficiently confident to draft a player right out of high school, they can just pass. No one’s holding a gun to their head and saying they must draft an enigma.

If you’re more confident using a draft pick on a player who’s been in college for one season, fine, draft a freshman. Make one-and-done the “rule” for your franchise. It’s a free country.

Or so it would seem, based on how markets are supposed to work in a classical model. Then again, that’s not how professional basketball functions. Indeed, the NBA tried that very system 20-some years ago, and, eventually, found it wanting. Continue reading →

Bigs, Bagley, and evaulative habit

Bagley

This week I re-ranked the top 25 players in college basketball on the occasion of Marvin Bagley III reclassifying and joining this year’s freshman class. I put Bagley at No. 1 because he’s been termed the best player to come out of high school since Anthony Davis. If Duke’s star does indeed have a Davis-level impact for the Blue Devils this season, I’ll come off looking like a genius in a vast hegemonic horde of parroting savants.

Whether that particular scenario pans out or not, I do wonder whether this Bagley moment itself may not function as a handy summation, one that can be called The (Evaluative) Trouble with Freshmen. On the one hand, the get-off-my-yard gene in all of us says that, at the very top of the rankings, freshmen are pretty much always overrated.

Markelle Fultz turned out to be as good as advertised, his team missed the tournament entirely, and his coach was fired. Ben Simmons turned out to be as good as advertised, his team missed the tournament entirely, and his coach was (eventually) fired.

Even Jahlil Okafor, who, whatever else you may think of him, was a first-team All-American as a freshman and was the leading scorer on a team that won a national title, is now being pointed at as some kind of museum exhibit for obsolete basketball artifacts and cautionary draft tales. Freshmen are always overrated. Continue reading →

Why Aaron Gordon will never shoot better than 62 percent at the line

It's an open look. Knock it down.

Statistically speaking, this is unlikely to go well.

We typically think of bad free throw shooters as all alike. Either a player makes a normal number of free throws or he falls short of that standard, and we all know that guys in the latter category represent a special case. We sit up and pay attention when they’re at the line, we shake our heads when they miss, and we applaud a little too enthusiastically — like parents at the school play — when they make one.

Basically we define “really bad” as anything under 60 percent because, well, that is really bad. An average shooter will make something closer to 70 percent of his attempts. But in terms of measurable harm to your offense, there’s a significant difference between shooting, say, 58 percent at the line and connecting on just 42 percent of your free throws. And in his one and only season as a college player, Aaron Gordon shot 42.2 percent at the line.  Continue reading →