What causes NBA draft busts? Part 4: External factors

Why do NBA Draft prospects fail? Our four-part series looks at the 2011-2015 NBA Drafts and why the prospects who busted didn’t make it. Part one looked at functional strength. Part two looked at skill development. Part three looked at intelligence and decision-making. Part four wraps up by looking at some unique cases that we can learn from.

Board categories of classification are nice when talking about a big topic such as this one. The three categories of draft busts we’ve discussed so far cover a lot of different topics, but all have the same general themes. The first is that strength is the predominant athletic indicator for future success at the NBA level — you can survive if you don’t meet other athletic thresholds, but lack of strength is very difficult to overcome. The second is that lack of skill development can cut a career short, especially if it’s a vital skill to a common archetype. And the third is that certain awareness, anticipation and decision-making thresholds need to be met, no matter how athletic or talented you are.

However, we can’t put everyone into these simple boxes. There’s obvious overlap between them, and the cases we’ve discussed so far are definitely not reduced down to just the topic at hand. But more importantly, outside factors can be heavily involved in determining how a prospect does. Development is not a one-way street, and the team a prospect lands on is a huge determinant on the player’s outcome. The player’s own experiences and drive are a major factor. And injury is always lurking, as well.

We have 10 players left to discuss, who fit into a variety of different categories outside of the on-court categories we’ve discussed so far. Some are easy situations to diagnose; some are harder to work through. Some are more applicable to future projection; others are unique situations that are worth discussing, but probably don’t hold much value for our discussion.

Personal issues

Selling Points: Athleticism, handle

Demise: Fourth-year option was declined

Selling Points: Offensive decision-making, handle, pull-up shooting

Demise: Fourth-year option was declined

It seems obvious, but it is forgotten a lot when looking at the dynamics of a player’s fit with their team. Players are expected to just fill a role and accept it without a fight, and to fall in line with the pecking order of the locker room without issue. However, that doesn’t always happen. Players get restless with their role, or don’t understand how the locker room dynamics work when they enter the league. That unrest can cause clashes with teammates or the coaching staff that hinder the performance of the player in question.

Mario Hezonja and Sergey Karasev happened to both be high-level prospects from a young age in the European setting, and both had problems with accepting their roles on their NBA teams. Hezonja clashed with coach Scott Skiles during his rookie season, struggling to earn playing time thanks to poor shot selection and a tendency to lose the plot on both ends. His development was slow going throughout his time in Orlando due to his fiery nature, and that helped spur his early release from Orlando.

Meanwhile, Karasev spent his first year in the NBA in a poisonous locker room in Cleveland and was displeased with floating between Cleveland and the Canton Charge, as the Cavs assigned him for 10 different stints with their G League team. A fresh start in Brooklyn in his second season helped his development, but a knee injury and fleeting minutes quickly took their toll, and Karasev was back in Russia before his rookie contract was up.

This is a difficult subject to parse without sounding like you’re putting on the Extremely Serious Sports Radio Pundit hat and railing about Kids These Days, but both of these cases did involve players with some level of entitlement. Hezonja’s clashes with Barcelona in his pre-draft year — when he was coming off the bench behind fellow young guard Alex Abrines — were a well-documented concern, and while a lot of blame was placed on coach Xavi Pascual at the time, in hindsight, his inability to earn playing time became prescient of similar issues with his hard-nosed NBA coaches. An extremely confident player by all accounts, Hezonja’s belief in his own abilities probably added to his frustrations when he didn’t prove himself capable.

Meanwhile, Karasev was the son of one of Russia’s most well-known coaches and was already playing on Russia’s Olympic team at 17 years old. He hadn’t experienced the typical “low man on the totem pole” experience that many young European players get, and that could have been a factor in his frustration with his NBA role.

The lesson to take from these two cases is not that European prospects have entitlement issues — these are just two cases, and the list of college players with these types of problems holding them back is also quite long. But they help us make a larger point: that a player that has talent, but doesn’t accept their role at lower levels, may do the same when put into the structure of the NBA. Hezonja and Karasev aren’t a caution tale for a guy like Dzanan Musa; instead, they may hold some insight into potential problems Cam Reddish may have after he struggled to accept his lot in the Duke rotation.

Health

Selling Points: Two-way versatility, defensive havoc creation

Demise: Didn’t play a single game with Houston; traded to Philadelphia for a second-round pick, then waived

It’s cruel to throw Royce White into this category given how far behind the league was on mental health at the time, but his NBA career tanked before he even stepped on the floor due to struggles managing his anxiety issues. Interestingly, he’s the only player in the cohort who didn’t make the end of his rookie contract due to health concerns. Injuries definitely derailed the careers of players like Jabari Parker and Dante Exum, but their continued earned-faith from their teams point to how far the league still has to go on mental health.

White was a test case for how the league would react to such a thing from a young player, and the Houston Rockets failed miserably to attempt to manage his anxiety. And while players like DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love have helped promote the awareness of mental health issues with the support of the league, we still aren’t that far along, especially given how the Philadelphia 76ers cut bait with Markelle Fultz at their first opportunity after mismanaging his struggles with his shot.

White’s inclusion on this list, and the preceding Hezonja and Karasev situations, reinforce this stark contrast — that players can tear multiple ACLs, separate shoulders and miss over 100 games on their rookie contract, and still hang on. But if a young player has real mental health struggles, or displays personal displeasure with their role and situation, they become expendable. The draft has an imaging problem with being thought of as a meat market, and the fact that physical ailments are forgivable, but mental or emotional distress are not, is something the league definitely needs to reconcile with.

Team malpractice

Selling Points: Positional versatility, rebounding, on-ball scoring

Demise: Traded to Phoenix for a second-round pick

Selling Points: Catch-and-shoot, touch

Demise: Traded to Charlotte for Luke Ridnour and a second-round pick

Selling Points: Defensive playmaking, length, finishing

Demise: Traded to Portland for a second-round pick

Selling Points: Length, shot-blocking, face-up game

Demise: Traded to Dallas for Justin Anderson, Andrew Bogut and two second-round picks

We have put a lot of our discussion on prospect’s individual failings so far, but give credit where credit is due — sometimes players don’t end their rookie contract with their original team for suspect reasons on the team’s behalf. Trades involving young players who have somewhat disappointed happen all the time, but these four, involving teams cutting bait on players by trading them for next to nothing, are definitely worth discussing as cases that border against negligence on the part of the front office.

Marcus Morris was horrible in his rookie year. He played just 17 games, shot 29.6 percent from the field and was also a massive negative on the defensive end. But in his second season, he was actually playing a pretty large role on the first James Harden Rockets team. He was coming into his own as a shooter and bench scorer, but so was Chandler Parsons, who made Morris expendable as Houston’s No. 2 scorer. The Rockets tried to extract value for Morris at the deadline, but couldn’t, finally shipping him to the Phoenix Suns for the pick that would become Isaiah Canaan. Of course, Morris then flourished next to his twin brother Markieff, while Parsons bolted at the first opportunity for a big payday in Dallas. Now Morris is coming off a year where he may have secretly been the Celtics’ third-best player for most of the season, and Parsons has one of the worst contracts in the league. Life’s funny.

Jeremy Lamb was basically salary-dumped ahead of that crucial 2015 offseason where the team hired Billy Donovan and maxed Enes Kanter. He was a fine player in Oklahoma City, but wasn’t special, and they needed flexibility to add last-minute pieces. It was a defensible trade at the time, but given how little Lamb made, how they kept Dion Waiters over him, and how Lamb has improved every year since, this is the weirdest decision to bail on a prospect in this study.

Maurice Harkless, meanwhile, was very explainable: The Magic had bombed at coaxing development out of him in three years with the team, and they sold low, trading him for literally nothing (a 2020 second-rounder that’s top-55 protected) to the Blazers. Harkless immediately rounded into form on defense in a new situation (with a well-regarded development staff) and became a starter for multiple playoff teams.

And then there’s Nerlens Noel, whose grievances are well-documented — consistent injury in his first two years in the league, followed by being squeezed out of the long-term picture by the team drafting Joel Embiid and Jahlil Okafor. A disgruntled Noel missed the first 23 games of the 2016-17 season recovering from a minor surgery, then played sparingly when he returned. And while Noel hasn’t exactly lit the world on fire with Dallas and Oklahoma City in the last two and a half years, he’s a great poster child for Process detractors, who point to how the team jerked around its players in the name of flexibility.

Three of these four players were rotation players on playoff teams last season, and the fourth was Charlotte’s second-best player. They show that while the draft is usually a one-way street — what can the individual do for the team — sometimes players end up on this list because of mistakes the team made.

Our next player is another flavor of that same theme.

Overdrafting

Selling Points: Length, mystery box principle

Demise: Traded to Sacramento for Malachi Richardson

If you’re two years away from being two years away, there’s a high likelihood that you aren’t going to complete that four-year journey, especially on a team with title aspirations. If his Memphis tenure is to believed, that quote from his draft night was prescient, but still, that’s a first round pick burned by the Raptors on a player they could have gotten at pick No. 60. There probably hasn’t been a more extreme flier taken in the first round, so it’s not surprising it didn’t work out.

Series conclusions

Selling Points: Physical tools, raw athleticism

Demise: Fourth-year option declined

To wrap up, we can tie things together with our two best examples of the themes that we’ve discussed in this series. A confluence of those different themes resulted in James Young getting drafted in the top 20, and then playing just 812 career minutes, the lowest total in the sample behind Royce White. Young was a member of the 2014 Kentucky national runner-up team, and his draft value hinged on his raw upside as a potential 3-and-D wing that could handle the ball in simple situations. However, he is a perfect example of the threshold concept we’ve talked about throughout this series.

In multiple areas, Young showed potential, but he missed major indicators that reared their head in a major way in the NBA. He wasn’t a skilled ball-handler in college, and only spent 5.2 percent of his scoring possessions in isolation or pick-and-roll situations. He combined the skill and decision-making issues in the worst way for a wing, being indecisive on when to drive, and lacking the ball skill to be able to get all the way to the rim. That’s why, despite good size and length, Young took just 11 percent of his career shot attempts at the rim, and offered almost nothing as a playmaker, two things that wings absolutely need offensively at the NBA level. Without those, he was basically just a spot-up shooter, and he shot just 27.7 percent from 3 in his career because he was very easy to defend on the perimeter. (This is a warning sign for Tyler Herro of the Heat, who had similar issues with getting to the rim in college and may get similarly run off the 3-point line in the NBA due to his size).

There was also the decision-making on defense, where Young was brutal at Kentucky and worse in the NBA. Not only was he not technically sound, struggling to fight through screens and presenting with a poor defensive stance, but he couldn’t contain on simple dribble moves on the perimeter thanks to his delayed reaction time to the initiation of drives. Young may be the worst anticipatory defender to get drafted in the last decade, and he definitely did not have the physical gifts that Noah Vonleh does to bail him out.

Young essentially got drafted due to pedigree (Top 10 recruit! Kentucky player!) and his frame. He was a good enough shooter to help Kentucky’s offense, but certainly was not skilled enough on catch-and-shoots or pull-up jumpers in the NBA. He was good enough to be a transition finisher in college, but didn’t hit the threshold to even garner 15 percent usage. And he was salvageable enough on defense at Kentucky due to length, but the emphasis on intelligence and technique in the NBA was a huge reason why Young couldn’t even grab minutes in Boston. Looking at him through the lens of who we’ve seen succeed and fail in the modern NBA, it’s shocking that Young was drafted in the first round at all. But it’s not as shocking as our last example, who checked every single potential bust check mark we’ve discussed so far.

Selling points: Finishing, looked vaguely like Charles Barkley

Demise: Waived by Minnesota prior to Year 3

You’re probably already familiar with a lot of the lore of Anthony Bennett, a player no one saw coming as the first overall pick in 2013. He struggled to rehabilitate from a shoulder injury suffered during the pre-draft process. His weight and conditioning were constant issues. He started his career 0-of-18 from the field. And he was traded for Kevin Love after a single season, but couldn’t crack a consistent rotation spot on a 16-win Timberwolves team. Since, he’s spent four years in G League purgatory, and he’s the shortest-tenured No. 1 pick since the 1960s to not have been wrecked by injuries.

Bennett might have an argument as the worst NBA player of any that we’ve discussed, and the Cavs drafting him No. 1 is a mistake compounded by the spot that he was picked at. But he’s very useful as a final discussion point for this series. Let’s run through the list of our major themes again, because Bennett hits almost all of them.

Functional strength is more than raw strength and power. Bennett has a good frame and is a strong player, and got stronger later in his career as his body filled out and he shed a significant amount of weight. But it didn’t matter, because Bennett was not able to leverage his strength on the glass or as a finisher. His weak core muscles and lower body frame limit his ability to deal with contact on drives and were a culprit behind his poor contested rebounding numbers.

Ball-handling is more than just dribbling. Bennett couldn’t dribble in a meaningful way either, but lack of ability to turn the corner on much smaller technically sound defenders was also an issue.

Touch matters, on both short and long shots. Bennett’s touch was okay at the rim, but not against contact; and his shooting touch on long shots never materialized, as he was a career 31.2 percent shooter on long twos and 26.1 percent 3-point shooter.

You have to be able to pass. Ben Rubin of the Stepien wrote a great piece on black holes a few weeks ago, and used Bennett as an example of an exclusive play-finisher. While that worked for him at UNLV, it’s a great way to find yourself on the bench in the NBA. Seventy-seven assists in 1,900 career minutes is just amazing work in black hole living.

Defense is basically all awareness, decision-making and technique. Lateral quickness and length don’t matter as much as we think. Again, Bennett had the physical tools to be at least an okay defender at the 4, but had nary a clue of how to handle the simplest defensive concepts. It’s very hard to be Noah Vonleh and get meaningful minutes, and it’s harder to be “Noah Vonleh, but smaller.” Bennett couldn’t get meaningful minutes at Fenerbahce in EuroLeague, and it’s very hard to enter a Zeljko Obradovic defense and not look at least passable.

Outside factors contribute to failure. As if his on-court failures weren’t enough, Bennett runs the gambit of the problems we discussed earlier in the piece. He was overdrafted, setting unrealistic expectations. He had several personal issues, from his lack of effort to his conditioning issues. His health was a problem, given his struggles with sleep apnea. And of course, we can’t forget just how dysfunctional that 2013-14 Cavaliers team was, maybe the worst situation for a player like Bennett to try to develop in.

It’s unlikely an Anthony Bennett situation will occur again in the draft, but teams will continue to value the wrong things and miss crucial aspects of what it takes to be a modern NBA player. Hopefully, through this series, we’ve been able to highlight things that limit players from succeeding in the league, and will help you better evaluate these players as we head into the 2020 NBA Draft.