Which NBA teams have the most youth and talent?

There are a lot of young teams in the NBA. Some are bad, some are good, most are trying to move from the former to the latter. One of the most intriguing young teams in the league is the Minnesota Timberwolves. Loaded with talented players in their early 20s, the Timberwolves have been trying to figure out how to grow that youth into an experienced team that wins games.

The youth movement in Minnesota may not be producing a lot of wins right now, but they’re certainly scoring some points.

https://twitter.com/VJL_bball/status/712348248954900480

Layne’s tweet sparked my curiosity and I decided to dig into the overlap between youth and a more full measure of production than just points scored. The graph below looks at the intersection of production and age for each team using VORP from Basketball-Reference. You can filter by different age ranges and see both the total VORP for each team and the distribution of that VORP among players of the different ages.

If you use Layne’s age marker and filter down to player’s 21-and-younger, Minnesota does indeed have the most productive crop in the league, just a hair ahead of the Denver Nuggets. By VORP, Minnesota and Denver are receiving more than double the 21-and-under production of any other team in the league. If we expand the age range slightly, a few more teams pop up.

At 23-and-under, the clear leaders are the Utah Jazz and the Orlando Magic. Both are teams that have been pegged as up-and-coming for a year or two now, but have failed to coalesce in the ways we’ve imagined. Still, with youthful cores both teams would still seem to be on an upward trajectory.

One of the more depressing data points in this visualization is the showing of the Philadelphia 76ers on the 23-and-under filter. They have a VORP of 0.0, which essentially means that their young players have yet to exceed replacement level this season. They rank 22nd in the league in production for this age range.

Obviously, the age ranges are somewhat clumsy and can be heavily influenced by just one or two good players — for example see the 27-year-old (Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant) age bubble for the Oklahoma City Thunder. Still, the chart allows you to see each team’s talent in a chronological wave — rising, cresting, or crashing. I suppose the one thing you don’t want to be in this analogy is slack water (Sorry, Lakers).