One thing I look at after a game is the hustle stats, which is offensive boards plus blocks ans steals. I think it gives a good indication of how hard teams are playing.
Usually the numbers are pretty close between the teams but last night was ridiculous, 37-11 in favor of the Pelicans. Pitiful effort by the Bulls.
While I definitely agree, it is worth noting that the Bulls started skinny-ass Matas at the 4 and Pat at the 5 last night vs Zion and Missi. The offensive boards and blocks were always going to heavily favor New Orleans no matter how much the Bulls hustled.
And then to cap off an already crazy mismatch in size, they didn't hustle at all...
To borrow part of a comment I made on a game thread here last week:
"I've discovered the key to beating the Bulls: Try hard. That may mean trying hard for all 48 minutes (for bad/middling teams) or most of the game (for good teams). The Nuggets really didn't look like they wanted to bother giving much defensive effort for much of Monday's game, and also had a lot of "casual" possessions on offense. But the injury-riddled Pistons just smoked us with a FAR less talented group on the floor."
That trend seems to have played out across subsequent games. These Bulls don't work as a concept unless they're giving consistent max effort. And even then, good teams who match that effort will beat them. The Bulls "niche" in the modern NBA is a team that keeps trying to win every regular season game while good teams are pacing themselves and bad teams are tanking and/or developing youngsters.
I actually didn't think Zion or the Pelicans gave that great of an effort. I think part of the Bulls problem is not necessarily a lack of motivation but simply being worn out playing this style. I'd say they're likely to be better after the time off, but last time they had a few days off was before the Utah game
I will confess that I didn't watch the Pelicans game (I had it DVR'ed but once I heard how it went, that got quickly deleted). I agree that motivation might not be the core factor, but whether it's motivation or exhaustion, they can't win when other teams really stress/press them.
We held out some key guys against New Orleans, and regardless of what you think of Vuc, he does contribute to team defense and rebounding, as well as being a stabilizing presence on offense (screens, passing, positioning). I feel like the Bulls are much more susceptible to looking bad when our frontcourt is shorthanded? (I'd like to see a breakdown of how the Bulls perform when various guys are out...I think we can survive some injuries better than others...ahem, Coby White, cough).
But the team we put out there against New Orleans is so far removed from the team that started 5-0. Okoro is also our only real high-energy wing defender with size, with Dalen Terry (the ostensible backup in that role) also injured. Forcing Pat to play over 20 minutes at center, with Jalen Smith at over 25 in that spot, with Matas sort of sharing PF/C duties when we know he's been struggling against big/strong guys...I mean I just have to look at the box score to see that's a recipe for disaster. Not to say we would have won if everyone was healthy, but Monday night's Bulls team on paper, and in reality, is not a competitive squad.
I think if we're healthy, and Billy can rotate between 9 and 11 guys in and out, then there's a better chance the team can maintain the energy and fans can see some fun games. But health is never a given...
Still convinced they'll finish around .500 by virtue of depth/trying hard when others aren't/insane wins that they've made a habit of, but the current trend of this season is not promising since that fun start. Around .500 with a net rating well into the negative while Matas scuffles and the Bulls win games because of Vucevic is pretty much a worst-case scenario for me. There have been some legit positives (Giddey's improvement is real, Ayo has kicked ass, Coby looks good), but another truly mid season with little Matas growth would be pretty ugh.
I can't deny that Billy Donovan is an all time great college coach and a pretty good NBA coach, whom his former players tend to speak well of. But has he really developed one draft pick on this roster? PWill, Terry, Philips (gets a pass as overachieving a second round grade), Matas and Noa. The latter two of which are viscerally ignored by the coach.
Not that the players haven't had successes but I haven't seen much growth from anyone other than Ayo. And I am uncharitably chalking that up to the player rather than coach based on Ayo's comments on skill building this spring and summer while injured.
As yfbb has pointed out, Billy shows a preference for vets over youth almost all the time. Which is a fine philosophy but maybe not for this team. Or maybe it is intentional based on his assessment of AKMEs drafting ability.
Coby's done ok, but I get your point. Williams and Terry are not good, and Ayo gets credit for Ayo.
Matas started the season strong and we got excited, but I don't think he is ready yet unfortunately. He needs another year, but it sure would be nice to see progress the rest of this season. Noa just turned 19, there is no good reason for him to be in the rotation right now.
It's disturbing given he was a notable college coach. How can a guy who guided Horford, Noah, Mike Miller and Beal not help young players level up in the NBA?
My strong feeling now, and it's a depressing one, is that AKME has assembled but more than anything Billy coaches this group like a pickup game. Whoever is available put them on the court and see what happens, no developmental plan in mind other than play fast shoot threes. Everyone is just a piece part, no view of how you build this into an interesting and contending team or grow players into winning roles. Maybe that's not a new or unique thought but really what's the purpose of all this?!
I tend to look at things pretty differently than a lot of people. I try to peg things down to decisions rather than outcomes. What I see is that the Bulls are reaping the results of bad decisions.
1. They didn't get any additional draft capital for trading away Caruso.
2. The chose to get a forgettable player (Okoro) on a longer team deal instead of taking Marcus Smart (who's similar but better than Okoro) and a draft pick.
3. They further traded down out of the second round, so they got a 6'9" PF instead of a 7'2" center in the second round this year.
4. They drafted Noa, who has entered the realm of true concern that he might just be wholly unqualified to play in the NBA.
5. They didn't take note of the fact that every other team in the NBA is shifting to play bigger.
6. They started telling guys to practice taking charges in the pre-season, and did it poorly so one of their players broke their wrist as a direct result of this.
-
Note, I will credit them that trading Zach was possibly the best trade the Bulls have made since AKME took over. While it's lame to only get their protected pick back, if they had escaped the top 10, they'd still have given up the pick in 26 or 27. So they got that monkey off their back.
-
Anyway, the team should look different.
1. I think at a minimum they could have gotten a first plus Giddey. Call that 2025 #24. The Bulls draft Ryan Kalkbrenner
2. They do the Memphis trade with Lonzo and their 2025 2nd to get Marcus Smart, Jake Laravia and 2025 #18. Draft Drake Powell
3. No Second rounder
4. Trade the #11 pick that they used on Noa for #23 and the Pelicans pick in 2026. Draft Asa Newell.
Smart is pretty much washed. Paying him $21 million this year would have been really dumb. And Laravia didn't have Bird rights. So we would have had to re-sign him using an exception just like the Lakers did.
No, not dumb. He'd be a $21M expiring contract that was marketable. Instead we are stuck with another player for 26-27 that we'd be better off being able to move.
LaRavia would be the best Power Forward on the team, and re-signed for a bargain-basement price of $6M. That would be a great get.
I'm not following that. Surely if the Wiz thought they could get value by keeping Smart to the deadline they would have. I know a lot of people will say that AK is a lot smarter than Wiz FO and could do deals they could not, but I'm not thinking that's the direction you're going. So enlighten me, what is the difference?
And talking about relevance, Laravia was a rental last year. He didn't re-sign with the Kings and he wouldn't have re-signed with the Bulls. I mean come on, he's on the Lakers with LeBron and Luka. He wasn't going to choose to back up Matas, unless he got a boatload of cash.
Noa’s only played 6 minutes in the NBA, so who knows what he’s going to be.
One serious problem is AK only drafts projects in the first round and then assigns them to a head coach who has no patience for projects. That’s a horrible mix. Oh, and they also want to try to win every regular season game, so they have zero patience for growing pains.
I have no idea what’s to be gained from giving the second youngest player in the entire league three minute stints off the bench. It’s like throwing an intern into the middle of a meeting for five minutes and then kicking him out because he looked overwhelmed.
If he’s not ready and you’re not going to let him make mistakes, just keep him in the G League this year.
I don't know for sure, but I've got a pretty good idea and it's not good.
Turns out that there's a pretty obvious divide when you start looking at the first couple months of a draft pick's career. I went back and looked at the last 11 drafts lottery picks.
Matas' handling was pretty standard. He got a small role and when he began to demonstrate competence (which he did quickly). The minutes were small, but he played regularly from the start.
This is the standard situation. When this happens, it's good, but since teams typically play their lottery picks whether they are good or not, it doesn't convey a lot of information. It's kind of "situation normal".
What's happened with Noa is not normal, but it's not unprecedented either. In fact, it seems to happen with 1-3 picks in every year. And in my analysis, I found it happened with 19 guys (all played under 100 minutes by this point in their rookie year). EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE 19 GUYS WAS A BUST.
Now obviously that doesn't mean that Noa can't break the streak, but it's not a good thing at all.
And, just for the record
1. It doesn't really change things to use other measures of not playing (like MPG or games played). You can use all of them, and it's a bad sign.
2. I don't buy the whole thing about age and him being "raw". Plenty of guys have had less experience and similar age and done just fine.
A lottery pick playing is not a clear signal of a player's quality. But a lottery pick not playing is. Bayes theorem is an awesome tool.
What we are doing here is updating our view of the world based on the information we get.
1. We draft a guy and we don't know if he's going to be any good. Maybe we think the odds are 60% he'll be good and 40% he'll be bad.
2. In most cases, we see a guy play, and his play is weak information. Because we know that a lot of times, teams play bad players for a lot of reasons. So if a guy starts playing, maybe it only increases the probability he's good slightly. He goes from 60/40 to 65/35.
3. In a small but consistent number of cases though, we see a guy not play much at all. This turns out to be a very strong information signal, because literally every time this has happened before, it's been a sign that the guy isn't any good. That doesn't move me from 60/40 to 0/100, but we do update our priors pretty heavily in my opinion. Maybe we go from 60/40 to 10/90.
4. If we're sitting at 10/90 and once he does set foot on the court, he looks like he simply doesn't belong, we have to downgrade again. I'm not ready to do that till I see a good 15-20 games w/o much progress. But... it ain't looking good. :(
Yeah, it's pretty unusual for a 1st round draft pick to be held out of the rotation. I am surprised there are only 19 players in that category though. Who are they, of I might ask? I assume you are not counting 2nd rounders or draft-and-stash?
Correct, only looking at the lottery. And I obviously I excluded guys who didn't play due to injury.
That left these guys:
Denzel Valentine
Trey Lyles
Moses Moody
Ochai Agbaji
Rob Dillingham
Kira Lewis Jr.
Johnny Davis
Jarace Walker
Jerome Robinson
Jett Howard
Zach Collins
Cameron Payne
Jett Howard
Thon Maker
Noah Vonleh
Joshua Primo
James Bouknight
Georgios Papagiannis
Taylor Hendricks
Romeo Langford
Out of those 19 guys, 14 of them I'm going to say were complete busts and either quickly out of the league or on their way to being out of the league.
Dillingham looks like he's going to be #15 on that list
Jett Howard randomly had a huge game the other day, but still seems to have five DNP-CDs and has shown nothing otherwise. Don't know what is going on there.
That leaves 4 guys who have become pretty borderline journeymen:
Lyles
Collins
Payne
Moody
None of them would be redrafted anywhere close to where they were actually drafted.
Sometimes you just don't need a huge sample. That was the case for most of these guys. Teams figured out immediately that these guys were lost causes who couldn't play. If a guy can play in the league, especially if he's drafted in the lottery, they play.
So, maybe Noa becomes the first guy in 12 drafts to become a high level player despite this kind of start. But that kind of turnaround would literally be unprecedented, because guys who start out this way almost always are either complete or nearly complete busts.
It sucks, and I will say that I was relatively high on Noa as a draft prospect, so it's not great to say that. I'm still trying to figure out what the deal is, because he played over 1300 minutes in a relatively decent league. Granted that those guys are a lot slower, so maybe he just falls into that category of guys who are skilled/athletic enough to have show potential against lower tier athletes but not be able to ramp up against NBA athletes.
But, realistically, the guy has size and measured to have good athleticism. Donovan was literally complaining about his motor after the first game. Which is not something he usually does.
And also, it's not something you usually see. Most guys would be dying to get out there, and he just sort of stood around.
Not a good peer group for Essengue to be lumped in with. There are probably more- maybe you discounted 2020 as an outlier year but I think Toppin, Okungwu, Nesmith and Jalen Smith could be added in. Not that it changes much.
I would say that Noa is probably different because Bulls front office planned to take it slow with him. However, based on the list above, one would have good reson to question that strategy.
I will say that most rookies' first year performance is bad. Looking at 2017 and 2020 lottery picks, about half had BPMs below replacement level. Some of them have turned out fine (Edwards and Foxx are two of the best examples) but others never made it. The rookies who had positive BPMs are mostly stars now- if you are good as a rookie, you are not going to regress.
so I was thinking about this, what's the composite ages on these guys when they were drafted. big difference in age 19-21 in development. caveat being Denzel sucks bad while coming in the league with bad knees and old man game as a rookie
they also didn't get the best draft capital in sending DeRozan to the Kings. If they just took Harrison Barnes they would've gotten the 2031 swap that the Spurs now own. They didn't because Barnes was signed through this season. They instead spent that theoretical salary 'slot' on Pat Williams and Jalen Smith.
that's why I keep saying their "competitive, while building" is horseshit. They are building with the minimum draft chances per year, and are content with that. If you had multiple swings then maybe you can be more comfortable drafting Noa. They are instead not choosing to 'build' if it means harming the 'competitive' part, at all. Most glaringly evidenced by not trading Andre Drummond in 2023. This deadline they have opportunity to trade from depth to help 'building' while still being 'competitive', but they won't.
Signing Williams for 5/90 was a bonehead move. Taking on Barnes's bloated contract for 2 years would have been less of a bonehead move for sure. The smart move was to do neither.
I pretty strongly disagree with the premise of this headline as Vegas had them generally around 31.5 wins before the season and has them around 41.5 now. I don't gamble but I would have exhorted anyone who does to take the over (pre-season). And I haven't seen much to convince me that low 40s in wins isn't a likely outcome for this team. If anything, they overachieved against their early schedule (I predicted around 40/41 wins but didn't think they would be over .500 on November 25), but they're still likely due to end the season on a "hot streak" for the same reasons they always do.
One thing I look at after a game is the hustle stats, which is offensive boards plus blocks ans steals. I think it gives a good indication of how hard teams are playing.
Usually the numbers are pretty close between the teams but last night was ridiculous, 37-11 in favor of the Pelicans. Pitiful effort by the Bulls.
While I definitely agree, it is worth noting that the Bulls started skinny-ass Matas at the 4 and Pat at the 5 last night vs Zion and Missi. The offensive boards and blocks were always going to heavily favor New Orleans no matter how much the Bulls hustled.
And then to cap off an already crazy mismatch in size, they didn't hustle at all...
To borrow part of a comment I made on a game thread here last week:
"I've discovered the key to beating the Bulls: Try hard. That may mean trying hard for all 48 minutes (for bad/middling teams) or most of the game (for good teams). The Nuggets really didn't look like they wanted to bother giving much defensive effort for much of Monday's game, and also had a lot of "casual" possessions on offense. But the injury-riddled Pistons just smoked us with a FAR less talented group on the floor."
That trend seems to have played out across subsequent games. These Bulls don't work as a concept unless they're giving consistent max effort. And even then, good teams who match that effort will beat them. The Bulls "niche" in the modern NBA is a team that keeps trying to win every regular season game while good teams are pacing themselves and bad teams are tanking and/or developing youngsters.
I actually didn't think Zion or the Pelicans gave that great of an effort. I think part of the Bulls problem is not necessarily a lack of motivation but simply being worn out playing this style. I'd say they're likely to be better after the time off, but last time they had a few days off was before the Utah game
I will confess that I didn't watch the Pelicans game (I had it DVR'ed but once I heard how it went, that got quickly deleted). I agree that motivation might not be the core factor, but whether it's motivation or exhaustion, they can't win when other teams really stress/press them.
We held out some key guys against New Orleans, and regardless of what you think of Vuc, he does contribute to team defense and rebounding, as well as being a stabilizing presence on offense (screens, passing, positioning). I feel like the Bulls are much more susceptible to looking bad when our frontcourt is shorthanded? (I'd like to see a breakdown of how the Bulls perform when various guys are out...I think we can survive some injuries better than others...ahem, Coby White, cough).
But the team we put out there against New Orleans is so far removed from the team that started 5-0. Okoro is also our only real high-energy wing defender with size, with Dalen Terry (the ostensible backup in that role) also injured. Forcing Pat to play over 20 minutes at center, with Jalen Smith at over 25 in that spot, with Matas sort of sharing PF/C duties when we know he's been struggling against big/strong guys...I mean I just have to look at the box score to see that's a recipe for disaster. Not to say we would have won if everyone was healthy, but Monday night's Bulls team on paper, and in reality, is not a competitive squad.
I think if we're healthy, and Billy can rotate between 9 and 11 guys in and out, then there's a better chance the team can maintain the energy and fans can see some fun games. But health is never a given...
it's true, the vaunted depth is pretty concentrated towards players under 6'6"
Still convinced they'll finish around .500 by virtue of depth/trying hard when others aren't/insane wins that they've made a habit of, but the current trend of this season is not promising since that fun start. Around .500 with a net rating well into the negative while Matas scuffles and the Bulls win games because of Vucevic is pretty much a worst-case scenario for me. There have been some legit positives (Giddey's improvement is real, Ayo has kicked ass, Coby looks good), but another truly mid season with little Matas growth would be pretty ugh.
Also, Essengue...yikes!
I can't deny that Billy Donovan is an all time great college coach and a pretty good NBA coach, whom his former players tend to speak well of. But has he really developed one draft pick on this roster? PWill, Terry, Philips (gets a pass as overachieving a second round grade), Matas and Noa. The latter two of which are viscerally ignored by the coach.
Not that the players haven't had successes but I haven't seen much growth from anyone other than Ayo. And I am uncharitably chalking that up to the player rather than coach based on Ayo's comments on skill building this spring and summer while injured.
As yfbb has pointed out, Billy shows a preference for vets over youth almost all the time. Which is a fine philosophy but maybe not for this team. Or maybe it is intentional based on his assessment of AKMEs drafting ability.
Coby's done ok, but I get your point. Williams and Terry are not good, and Ayo gets credit for Ayo.
Matas started the season strong and we got excited, but I don't think he is ready yet unfortunately. He needs another year, but it sure would be nice to see progress the rest of this season. Noa just turned 19, there is no good reason for him to be in the rotation right now.
It's disturbing given he was a notable college coach. How can a guy who guided Horford, Noah, Mike Miller and Beal not help young players level up in the NBA?
My strong feeling now, and it's a depressing one, is that AKME has assembled but more than anything Billy coaches this group like a pickup game. Whoever is available put them on the court and see what happens, no developmental plan in mind other than play fast shoot threes. Everyone is just a piece part, no view of how you build this into an interesting and contending team or grow players into winning roles. Maybe that's not a new or unique thought but really what's the purpose of all this?!
“what's the purpose of all this?!”
For AK? The purpose is to just stay employed. That’s literally it.
And 40 wins and a home play-in game will keep him employed forever.
I tend to look at things pretty differently than a lot of people. I try to peg things down to decisions rather than outcomes. What I see is that the Bulls are reaping the results of bad decisions.
1. They didn't get any additional draft capital for trading away Caruso.
2. The chose to get a forgettable player (Okoro) on a longer team deal instead of taking Marcus Smart (who's similar but better than Okoro) and a draft pick.
3. They further traded down out of the second round, so they got a 6'9" PF instead of a 7'2" center in the second round this year.
4. They drafted Noa, who has entered the realm of true concern that he might just be wholly unqualified to play in the NBA.
5. They didn't take note of the fact that every other team in the NBA is shifting to play bigger.
6. They started telling guys to practice taking charges in the pre-season, and did it poorly so one of their players broke their wrist as a direct result of this.
-
Note, I will credit them that trading Zach was possibly the best trade the Bulls have made since AKME took over. While it's lame to only get their protected pick back, if they had escaped the top 10, they'd still have given up the pick in 26 or 27. So they got that monkey off their back.
-
Anyway, the team should look different.
1. I think at a minimum they could have gotten a first plus Giddey. Call that 2025 #24. The Bulls draft Ryan Kalkbrenner
2. They do the Memphis trade with Lonzo and their 2025 2nd to get Marcus Smart, Jake Laravia and 2025 #18. Draft Drake Powell
3. No Second rounder
4. Trade the #11 pick that they used on Noa for #23 and the Pelicans pick in 2026. Draft Asa Newell.
5. They've added several bigs
6. Don't do this stupid thing.
7. Also only offer Tre Jones a 1+1 (TO) deal
Bulls lineup
1- Smart, Jones
2-Coby, Ayo, Powell
3-Giddey, Huerter
4- LaRavia, Newell, Pat
5- Vuc, Collins, Kalkbrenner
Smart is pretty much washed. Paying him $21 million this year would have been really dumb. And Laravia didn't have Bird rights. So we would have had to re-sign him using an exception just like the Lakers did.
No, not dumb. He'd be a $21M expiring contract that was marketable. Instead we are stuck with another player for 26-27 that we'd be better off being able to move.
LaRavia would be the best Power Forward on the team, and re-signed for a bargain-basement price of $6M. That would be a great get.
Well he wasn't marketable two months ago, was he. The Wiz swallowed his contract to waive him.
Irrelevant. They're a different team in a different place.
I'm not following that. Surely if the Wiz thought they could get value by keeping Smart to the deadline they would have. I know a lot of people will say that AK is a lot smarter than Wiz FO and could do deals they could not, but I'm not thinking that's the direction you're going. So enlighten me, what is the difference?
And talking about relevance, Laravia was a rental last year. He didn't re-sign with the Kings and he wouldn't have re-signed with the Bulls. I mean come on, he's on the Lakers with LeBron and Luka. He wasn't going to choose to back up Matas, unless he got a boatload of cash.
Noa’s only played 6 minutes in the NBA, so who knows what he’s going to be.
One serious problem is AK only drafts projects in the first round and then assigns them to a head coach who has no patience for projects. That’s a horrible mix. Oh, and they also want to try to win every regular season game, so they have zero patience for growing pains.
I have no idea what’s to be gained from giving the second youngest player in the entire league three minute stints off the bench. It’s like throwing an intern into the middle of a meeting for five minutes and then kicking him out because he looked overwhelmed.
If he’s not ready and you’re not going to let him make mistakes, just keep him in the G League this year.
Totally agree. Everyone knew Noa was incredibly raw. I'm not ready to freak out after 6 minutes of NBA action.
With that being said, AK absolutely should have taken that New Orleans deal on draft night.
I don't know for sure, but I've got a pretty good idea and it's not good.
Turns out that there's a pretty obvious divide when you start looking at the first couple months of a draft pick's career. I went back and looked at the last 11 drafts lottery picks.
Matas' handling was pretty standard. He got a small role and when he began to demonstrate competence (which he did quickly). The minutes were small, but he played regularly from the start.
This is the standard situation. When this happens, it's good, but since teams typically play their lottery picks whether they are good or not, it doesn't convey a lot of information. It's kind of "situation normal".
What's happened with Noa is not normal, but it's not unprecedented either. In fact, it seems to happen with 1-3 picks in every year. And in my analysis, I found it happened with 19 guys (all played under 100 minutes by this point in their rookie year). EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE 19 GUYS WAS A BUST.
Now obviously that doesn't mean that Noa can't break the streak, but it's not a good thing at all.
And, just for the record
1. It doesn't really change things to use other measures of not playing (like MPG or games played). You can use all of them, and it's a bad sign.
2. I don't buy the whole thing about age and him being "raw". Plenty of guys have had less experience and similar age and done just fine.
A lottery pick playing is not a clear signal of a player's quality. But a lottery pick not playing is. Bayes theorem is an awesome tool.
What we are doing here is updating our view of the world based on the information we get.
1. We draft a guy and we don't know if he's going to be any good. Maybe we think the odds are 60% he'll be good and 40% he'll be bad.
2. In most cases, we see a guy play, and his play is weak information. Because we know that a lot of times, teams play bad players for a lot of reasons. So if a guy starts playing, maybe it only increases the probability he's good slightly. He goes from 60/40 to 65/35.
3. In a small but consistent number of cases though, we see a guy not play much at all. This turns out to be a very strong information signal, because literally every time this has happened before, it's been a sign that the guy isn't any good. That doesn't move me from 60/40 to 0/100, but we do update our priors pretty heavily in my opinion. Maybe we go from 60/40 to 10/90.
4. If we're sitting at 10/90 and once he does set foot on the court, he looks like he simply doesn't belong, we have to downgrade again. I'm not ready to do that till I see a good 15-20 games w/o much progress. But... it ain't looking good. :(
Yeah, it's pretty unusual for a 1st round draft pick to be held out of the rotation. I am surprised there are only 19 players in that category though. Who are they, of I might ask? I assume you are not counting 2nd rounders or draft-and-stash?
Correct, only looking at the lottery. And I obviously I excluded guys who didn't play due to injury.
That left these guys:
Denzel Valentine
Trey Lyles
Moses Moody
Ochai Agbaji
Rob Dillingham
Kira Lewis Jr.
Johnny Davis
Jarace Walker
Jerome Robinson
Jett Howard
Zach Collins
Cameron Payne
Jett Howard
Thon Maker
Noah Vonleh
Joshua Primo
James Bouknight
Georgios Papagiannis
Taylor Hendricks
Romeo Langford
Out of those 19 guys, 14 of them I'm going to say were complete busts and either quickly out of the league or on their way to being out of the league.
Dillingham looks like he's going to be #15 on that list
Jett Howard randomly had a huge game the other day, but still seems to have five DNP-CDs and has shown nothing otherwise. Don't know what is going on there.
That leaves 4 guys who have become pretty borderline journeymen:
Lyles
Collins
Payne
Moody
None of them would be redrafted anywhere close to where they were actually drafted.
Sometimes you just don't need a huge sample. That was the case for most of these guys. Teams figured out immediately that these guys were lost causes who couldn't play. If a guy can play in the league, especially if he's drafted in the lottery, they play.
So, maybe Noa becomes the first guy in 12 drafts to become a high level player despite this kind of start. But that kind of turnaround would literally be unprecedented, because guys who start out this way almost always are either complete or nearly complete busts.
It sucks, and I will say that I was relatively high on Noa as a draft prospect, so it's not great to say that. I'm still trying to figure out what the deal is, because he played over 1300 minutes in a relatively decent league. Granted that those guys are a lot slower, so maybe he just falls into that category of guys who are skilled/athletic enough to have show potential against lower tier athletes but not be able to ramp up against NBA athletes.
But, realistically, the guy has size and measured to have good athleticism. Donovan was literally complaining about his motor after the first game. Which is not something he usually does.
And also, it's not something you usually see. Most guys would be dying to get out there, and he just sort of stood around.
Not a good peer group for Essengue to be lumped in with. There are probably more- maybe you discounted 2020 as an outlier year but I think Toppin, Okungwu, Nesmith and Jalen Smith could be added in. Not that it changes much.
I would say that Noa is probably different because Bulls front office planned to take it slow with him. However, based on the list above, one would have good reson to question that strategy.
I will say that most rookies' first year performance is bad. Looking at 2017 and 2020 lottery picks, about half had BPMs below replacement level. Some of them have turned out fine (Edwards and Foxx are two of the best examples) but others never made it. The rookies who had positive BPMs are mostly stars now- if you are good as a rookie, you are not going to regress.
one thing I'll say about him is that he doesn't even have shoulders yet. if anyone is a long term project, it's him
so I was thinking about this, what's the composite ages on these guys when they were drafted. big difference in age 19-21 in development. caveat being Denzel sucks bad while coming in the league with bad knees and old man game as a rookie
I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but quite a few of them were very young guys.
I also don't think youth means anything. Just as many very young guys play well.
they also didn't get the best draft capital in sending DeRozan to the Kings. If they just took Harrison Barnes they would've gotten the 2031 swap that the Spurs now own. They didn't because Barnes was signed through this season. They instead spent that theoretical salary 'slot' on Pat Williams and Jalen Smith.
that's why I keep saying their "competitive, while building" is horseshit. They are building with the minimum draft chances per year, and are content with that. If you had multiple swings then maybe you can be more comfortable drafting Noa. They are instead not choosing to 'build' if it means harming the 'competitive' part, at all. Most glaringly evidenced by not trading Andre Drummond in 2023. This deadline they have opportunity to trade from depth to help 'building' while still being 'competitive', but they won't.
Signing Williams for 5/90 was a bonehead move. Taking on Barnes's bloated contract for 2 years would have been less of a bonehead move for sure. The smart move was to do neither.
like Smart, the point of the bloated contract is to get a draft pick. There's no awards to be had in not having overpaid players
Vuc wandering around in a hot dog suit saying "We're all trying to find the guy who isn't playing defense."
Lol
I pretty strongly disagree with the premise of this headline as Vegas had them generally around 31.5 wins before the season and has them around 41.5 now. I don't gamble but I would have exhorted anyone who does to take the over (pre-season). And I haven't seen much to convince me that low 40s in wins isn't a likely outcome for this team. If anything, they overachieved against their early schedule (I predicted around 40/41 wins but didn't think they would be over .500 on November 25), but they're still likely due to end the season on a "hot streak" for the same reasons they always do.
i mean to say they are performing like a 31 win caliber team, not that they will win 31 games