From Seth Curry to Trae Young the fun statistical facts just kept on rolling this week.
1. Seth Curry builds his own case for greatness
Since his days at Duke ended, it’s been a long road for Seth Curry. Across just 132 career games, he’s already suited up for six different teams, plus he lost an entire season (last year) due to injury. Unlike many basketball younger brothers — such as Michael Jordan or Blake Griffin — Seth has remained the definitive li’l bro to Steph.
Still, Seth has his own legitimate claim to elite basketball talent. There are 734 players in league history who have both played at least 100 games, and attempted at least one 3-pointer a game, and the younger Curry ranks an amazing fourth overall in accuracy, at 43.7 percent. Where’s Steph on that list? Well, at the moment, third overall — but only by the slightest possible margin, at 43.8 percent. This contest is far from over: plus, with Seth only registering about a tenth of Steph’s career 3-point shots, he could really gain some valuable percentage points if he continues the 50 percent hit rate he’s put up so far this season.
The player closest to catching the Curry brothers is reliable ol’ Kyle Korver, who is at 43.1 percent (eighth overall). If Korver can get traded away from the Cavaliers and onto a more spaced-out team, he still has an outside shot at catching them. Korver has actually improved throughout his career, shooting a combined 41.1 percent during his twenties, and 45.0 percent so far in his thirties.
2. What’s up with The IMG Academy?
The IMG Academy seems like something out of a Disney movie: it’s an insane sports high school in Florida, with truly outrageous training facilities that look like they rival any professional team’s set-up. They’re probably genetically engineering future Olympians in a secret underground laboratory there right now.
Considering that most of us, and plenty of NBA players, went to a regular public high school, it feels like the IMG Academy would be pumping megastars out left and right. Who’s going to be the superior prospect out of high school: the IMG Academy dude who, before a game, can dip into the whirlpool, or check out film on virtual reality — or the dude whose coach also teaches history?
Now, it is impressive that, since the IMG Academy was founded in 2002, the school has already graduated five players into the league, with a sixth player — the enigmatic Indian big man Satnam Singh — taken in the draft, never to appear in the regular season. But here are those five players: Dwight Powell, Chris McCullough, Jonathan Isaac, Anfernee Simons, and Mangok Mathiang.
While the jury is still out on Simons, his two cameos thus far indicate a long development track ahead of him. One should probably still be patient about Isaac, too, but for all his defensive skills it’s hard to imagine that he suddenly develops into an above-average offensive player, much less a lottery-type player. For the moment, Powell is the undisputed crown jewel of the IMG Academy, an analytics-friendly efficiency monster reliably coming off the Mavericks bench.
For the moment, the IMG Academy still trails a number of Florida high schools in NBA output, including the unassuming private K-12 school in Gainesville called The Rock. For the moment, only one player has gone from The Rock to the NBA. But that guy is Joel Embiid.
3. The Jazz offense finds rock bottom
Just last week I was looking at this season’s sudden absence of games where teams score less than 80 points. There is now exactly one game this season where a team scored under 80, and it was the Jazz going way underneath that mark in a horrifying 118-68 loss to the Mavericks.
In fairness to the Jazz, this was less a complete meltdown and more of a live-by-the-3-die-by-the-3 moment, as they went 6-for-35 from deep. That 17.1 percent accuracy is, amazingly, not even the worst so far this year.
4. What do Trae Young’s points mean?
It’s tempting to look at Trae Young’s 17.5 points per game and picture a monster future for himself and the Hawks: “If he can score this many points as a rookie, imagine what he’ll do when he actually has some experience!”
Young’s scoring prowess is rarer than you might think: Young, Luka Doncic, and DeAndre Ayton are the only members of this rookie class to average more than 15 points as a rookie. Before this year, only 116 previous rookies had done it, meaning only a small handful of players from each rookie class manage to hit that mark.
There starts to be cause for concern when you organize all 119 high-scoring rookies by Box Plus-Minus. Young’s current mark of -3.4 leaves him ranking 116th out of all those players. And, it turns out, not all 119 high-scoring rookies have gone on to be stars. In fact, there are a lot of players near the bottom of the list, alongside Young, who have had relatively underwhelming careers. Let’s take a gander at the man who is at the very bottom of the list: Jahlil Okafor.
Unfortunately, it makes a certain amount of sense that a high-lottery bust like Okafor would be on the wrong end of this list. A player who is a high lottery pick is likely to be given every chance to score the ball out of the gate. This is especially true because, if they were indeed a lottery pick, they are likely coming aboard a team without many scoring options. So that scoring average gets above 15 per game pretty quickly, almost regardless of whether or not the player’s all-round game is very good.
By no means am I suggesting that the nail be put in the coffin of Trae Young’s career. There are plenty of quality players who are also on the wrong end of this list, such as O.G. marksman Dennis Scott (#103), and future All-Star Jamal Mashburn (#111). Still, consider this an early warning sign — especially when the rookies with the highest BPM’s are all-time greats like Magic Johnson, Chris Paul, Tim Duncan, or Michael Jordan.
5. The winners of 2016 Free Agency
Do you remember the buildup to free agency in 2016? It was a heady time. Kevin Durant made everybody travel to the Hamptons in order to talk to him on bended knee. Almost every team had bundles of cap space, and money was going to fly around, and somebody was going to come in and make your team a winner.
The results of that summer are, with the gift of just a little bit of hindsight, completely baffling. Out of the 20 deals with the most guaranteed money, half of them are completely toxic assets, with many unions between player and team already torn asunder: Timofey Mozgov, Kent Bazemore, Evan Turner, Dwight Howard, Bismack Biyombo, Luol Deng, Joakim Noah, Allen Crabbe, Ryan Anderson, Chandler Parsons. Plus, an additional four deals are absolutely more painful than fun, without completely melting into toxicity: Evan Fournier, Harrison Barnes, Hassan Whiteside, Nicolas Batum.
As a result, the winners of 2016 free agency are absolutely the teams who kept their wallets shut. Out of the five teams who spent the least amount of money that summer, four of them made the playoffs last year: the Thunder, Bucks, Jazz, and Timberwolves, with the Nuggets missing out by the slimmest of margins. Once again this year, each of those five teams entered the season with realistic playoff hopes. And, of course, four of the top five spendiest teams got locked out of the playoffs: the Grizzlies, Hornets, Mavericks, and Knicks. The lone exception was the Cavaliers, who had the good fortune to be investing their 2016 free agent dollars in LeBron James.
What’s the moral of the story here? Well, I’m not sure. Fans have good reasons to want to avoid the completely cheap owner. That said, there might not be much value in spending big when the rest of the league is doing the same thing.