Warriors make the NBA fear again
Because they came to a Warriors with Stephen Curry and Draymond Green, 2020 No. 2 overall pick James Wiseman and 2021 lottery picks; Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, they have not played as much as their teammates who joined rebuilding teams.
While Wiseman started 27 of the 39 games he played in as a rookie, he did not have the same freedom LaMelo Ball and Anthony Edwards.
Kuminga and Moody are two of four lottery picks this season who have yet to play 100 NBA minutes.
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“Given the Warriors’ hot start, it seems unlikely that their two rookies (Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody), and even their first round pick last year (James Wiseman), will be able to get significant minutes this year. Given their projections, do you see these players being good if given the right opportunity or do you see this more as a Darko Milicic situation where players still won’t succeed even with an excellent infrastructure around them?”
One of the big unproven assumptions in NBA analysis is that young players need minutes to develop.
In 2013, I included this notion in my list of 10 key questions for statistical analysts to answer, which generated an enthusiastic response at MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference from veteran NBA coach Stan Van Gundy, a noted skeptic of the assumption.
“There’s this idea that the way you develop players is you take these young guys on teams, put them out there and let them play a lot of minutes,” Van Gundy said. “I’m not sure it works.”
“I think what works is players understanding … these are the things you have to do if you want to play, and if you don’t do them, you won’t play. That’s a big part of player development. Guys can sit two or three years until they meet those standards, and then they’ll play better. I like guys who get on good teams. I think they become better players a lot faster than they get on these bad teams and just get all this playing time. I don’t know how players are developing. I really don’t know,” he said.
The challenge with this type of analysis is that performance usually does a good job of explaining playing time. Van Gundy got the valuable exception right: top young prospects going to opposing teams due to trades or season-to-season variations, as we’ve seen with the Warriors. We can contrast this group with lower draft picks going to rebuilding teams with more playing time available for rookies.
For first-round picks between 2007 and 2017, their draft position explained approximately 57% of the variance in their team’s record during their rookie season. I focused on the exceptions, looking at the 25 players in either direction whose team record was more different than would be expected based on where they were drafted.
The impact on the amount of playing time these groups saw as rookies is what you would expect. Players who went to atypically poor teams averaged 1,140 minutes as rookies, nearly 50% more than the group that went to atypically good teams (763), despite the latter group being drafted slightly higher on average. But fairly quickly, that gap fades and then reverses.
By year three, the group of first-round picks on atypically good teams are playing 25% more minutes than their peers who started on atypically bad teams, a difference that also holds in year four.
I don’t think this necessarily suggests that a rookie playing a lot early is a bad thing, as Van Gundy suggested. Inevitably, it’s easier for high picks to be on unexpectedly good teams rather than bad ones, which is why there are twice as many top-10 picks in the group of good teams, including No. 3 picks Jaylen Brown, James Harden and Jayson Tatum. Not surprisingly, this group will eventually be more productive in the NBA.
Beyond that, it’s not as if the group of players who got early playing time is full of disappointments. It includes four All-Stars, highlighted by Giannis Antetokounmpo and three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert, two of the most outstanding draft picks in NBA history.
