Monthly Archives: February 2014

Video

The Exum Factor: How High is Dante’s Peak?

05 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in International

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Now that Dante Exum has officially declared for the draft, I figured it’s time to put him under the microscope to see whether his hype is justified.  I analyzed his performance vs Spain in the FIBA u19 games this summer to try to get a feel for what he brings to the table as a prospective NBA player.  Note that this game occurred the week before he turned 18:

This was Exum’s best scoring game, so perhaps not all of his weaknesses were fully exposed.  I looked at DraftExpress’s scouting report to see if they listed any weaknesses that may not have been on display.  Their list:

-Perimeter shooting- this is the one that everybody acknowledges
-TO Prone/PG Skills- this took my by surprise- I’ll touch on this below
-Shot selection- easy to see why, although I don’t think it is a significant weakness.
-Strength- this is the other obvious one on top of shooting.

With respect to turnovers, they claimed that he sometimes plays out of control which is true to an extent- one or two of his turnovers this game could have been qualified as such.  Also against the US he was benched due to playing out of control after committing 4 turnovers in 11 minutes, as Australia went on to lose 94-51.  But he still only had 21 total turnovers in 9 games over the tournament, which is excellent.

Let’s compare his FIBA stats to those of Tyler Ennis.  Ennis played for Canada which was a similar caliber team (Canada finished 6th, Australia finished 4th, the teams shared a 4-5 record, and Australia had a slightly better PD +1.8 vs +0.6).  Differences of note are that Australia played a tougher schedule (both teams played the US once, but Australia played the second best team in Serbia twice while Canada didn’t play them at all), and Ennis had Trey Lyles on his team as a second big time scorer to draw defensive attention.  Ennis led the u19 games scoring 20.9 points per game, Lyles was third with 20.3.  Australia’s second leading scorer was Dane Pineau who averaged 11.8 pts/game.  Also Australia was slightly better defensively (97.2 D-Rating vs 98.2) so it’s not like Exum had the benefit of a hugely pro-offense team construction that Ennis did not:

Mins FG FGA FT FTA Ast TOVs Pts
Ennis 279 74 159 36 51 25 24 188
Exum 266 54 121 39 64 34 21 164

As a freshman at Syracuse, Ennis is averaging 34.4 mpg 12.1 ppg 5.6 apg 1.5 topg playing as more of a distributor than scorer.  That is an excellent turnover rate for any point guard, let alone a college freshman and it will be a large reason why he is likely a lottery pick.  Yet at the FIBAs, Exum had more assists and fewer turnovers against a tougher schedule with just a slightly larger scoring load, and DraftExpress gleaned that turnovers and PG skills is a weakness!

On one hand they are doing their due diligence to list everything that can be perceived as inadequate for an unproven player vying for such a high draft slot.  And it’s possible that he got lucky to have a low number, as 9 games is a small sample and I noted in the video that the scorekeeper miscredited one of his turnovers vs Spain.  But even after you add up the out of control possessions and the lazy low leverage passes that went awry, his bottom line result was excellent.  He clearly is doing something correct to avoid them, and I believe it is a testament to his ball handling, passing, and basketball IQ.  Against Spain he repeatedly got into the lane and made beautiful passes to his teammates, but of his pile of turnovers only one of them came on a drive and kick when his pass was deflected.

DX’s qualm with his PG skills is that sometimes he misses teammates and forces shots, which is a perspective I understand after seeing some of his forced shots in the paint vs Spain.  But in that game, he did much more finding teammates than he did missing them.  I’m not sure if it was an above average distribution game where his teammates did a below average job of converting.  But he was credited with 4 assists and averaged 3.8 for the tournament, and it’s inevitable that his teammates failed to convert some significant amount of quality looks created by Exum in other games.

With respect to shot selection, I again do not think he was particularly bad.  He should inevitably attempt some bad shots with such a great disparity between his talent and that of his teammates, and his intelligence inspires confidence that he will learn to improve his shot selection with better NBA teammates.  Also DX takes exception to his volume of 3 point attempts, but he shot 33.3% for the tournament so again the bottom line does not look bad.  It would be more upsetting if he instead insisted on launching long 2 pointers.

Taken altogether, I’d qualify all things efficiency and basketball IQ related (turnovers, PG skills, shot selection) to be a distinct positive.  The fact that DraftExpress listed this as a weakness is a testament to the fact that there’s so little to dislike about Exum.   His actual weaknesses are his shot and strength, and he is reportedly investing significant effort to improve both.  My next biggest qualm is that while he is a fluid athlete, he is not particularly explosive.

Even without great strength or explosiveness, his tools are decidedly positive as he brings elite speed, quicks, height, and length to the PG position.  Even without a great shot, his combination of ball handling, passing, and touch around the rim offer promise as a future offensive centerpiece, especially if surround by good shooting.  He projects to be a positive defensively as well.  The only thing that could prevent him from becoming good is poor development, but he reputedly has an excellent work ethic.

Exum idolizes Derrick Rose, which is sensible as the players offer similar value.  They both have a great combination of size and speed for the PG position.  Rose is stronger and more explosive, but Exum is taller and longer as he is 6’6 with a 6’9 wingspan vs Rose’s 6’2.5 with a 6’8 wingspan.  They share questionable shooting as their weakness, as Rose’s shooting improvement played a large role in his winning MVP in his 3rd season in the league.  While Rose’s freshman season was good, his ability to grow was what made him such an appealing prospect and successful NBA player until derailed by injury.  While Exum’s future growth rate is a mystery, his work ethic and intelligence are two strong points in favor of it being good.  Even his college stats parallel closely to Exum’s FIBA stats:

MPG PPG APG TOPG SPG 2p% 3p% FT%
Rose 29.2 14.9 4.7 2.7 1.2 52.1% 33.7% 71.2%
Exum 29.6 18.2 3.8 2.3 1.7 52.9% 33.3% 60.9%

This is not an apples to apples comparison by any stretch, but you can see the similarities in their mold.  It’s possible that Exum would have been worse than Rose with a season in college, but he also may have been better and I don’t think he would be at risk of being as bad as Andrew Harrison.  Also Exum will be a year younger on draft night than Rose was.  It’s fair to give Rose the edge as an overall prospect due to his edge in athleticism and his excellent performance in the NCAA tournament, but I do not believe Exum is particularly far behind.

Exum’s value largely hinges on his performance in workouts. If he is as working as hard on his shot and body as people around him indicate, he will likely boost his stock and vault into the top 3.  Exum is perceived as the mystery box of the draft, but with Andrew Wiggins’ underwhelming freshman performance he is no longer a can’t miss star.  Even if you assign a Marvin Williams level floor to Wiggins, that’s hardly much consolation for a top 3 pick.  I doubt that Williams becoming a semi-useful pro makes Billy Knight feel particularly better about selecting him over Chris Paul.  Especially at the top of the lottery, a player’s value is almost entirely driven by his upside and his odds of achieving it.  While Wiggins has shown better outside touch and more potential as a complementary piece on offense, Exum’s upside as an offensive centerpiece is more attractive.  I don’t think Wiggins has a significant enough (if any) defensive edge to offset this.  As of right now, I rate Exum as the 2nd best prospect overall in this draft, with Jabari Parker having the best shot of supplanting him with a strong finish to his season.

The worst thing that can be said about Exum is that he is young and needs to spend time developing before making a large impact as a pro.  But I believe in his upside, and I believe that he is unlikely to flop completely.  Indications are that this mystery box just might contain a boat after all, and you know how much we wanted one of those.

Video

Rodney Hood’s Defense vs Lamar Patterson: Don’t Believe Everything Jay Bilas Tells You

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in NCAA

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When Pittsburgh All-American candidate Lamar Patterson struggled offensively in a home loss to Rodney Hood and the Duke Blue Devils, the immediate media reaction was to applaud Hood’s defensive performance. He spent most of the game guarding Patterson, who finished with 14 pts 4-14 FG 5-6 FT 1 Ast 5 TOVs, which is a decidedly bad line for a normally efficient scorer.

It’s natural to assume that some significant portion of credit goes to Hood, and it raises the possibility that I have been underrating his defense and/or he has improved throughout the season.  The team as a whole has recently been playing better on that end, so it’s fair to wonder if Rodney Hood is transforming from a sieve to a passable defensive player.

I compiled the key plays to display how Duke shut Patterson down:

Conclusions:
-Hood was only guarding Patterson for 1 of his 5 turnovers, and it was when Marshall Plumlee came to help for the trap. It does not require much defensive acumen to force a turnover in that situation.
-Pitt’s bad spacing and elite help defense neutralized Patterson almost every time he penetrated. He got all the way to the rim only twice when Jabari Parker failed to cut off his drive and fouled him for free throws.
-Did anybody notice Hood doing anything impressive? He contested a couple of shots and he ripped away the ball on the trap, but that’s it. None of his good plays are indicative of an ability to hang with NBA SF’s
-There were four occasions on which Patterson badly faked out Hood. Aside from having questionable tools to hang with NBA SF’s, Hood exacerbates his projection by being easily juked. Consequently he gets blown by regularly, only this game he had Amile Jefferson at his back to keep him from looking too bad.

Overall this shows why measuring defense by counterpart performance is entirely worthless. The main credit goes to Coach K for finding a way to mitigate the impact of Hood’s defensive deficiencies, and Amile Jefferson for playing good help defense. At both the NCAA and NBA level defense is a team effort, and Hood’s role against Patterson could have been fulfilled by any wing draft prospect. In the NBA Hood will once again be reliant on help from his teammates, except it will be more difficult to find a solution when all of the good NBA offenses have far better spacing than the Pittsburgh Panthers.

Richard Sherman Is Awesome And We Can Learn From Him

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Personalities and Intangibles

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Recently Richard Sherman has garnered much attention, as he frightened Erin Andrews when he angrily declared himsef the best corner in the game and called Michael Crabtree a “sorry receiver” after Sherman’s Seahawks defeated Crabtree’s 49ers in the NFC championship game.

As a casual NFL fan, this was my first exposure to Sherman.  While people had varying reactions to his postgame mini-rant, I had an inkling that he was one of the more awesome human beings on this planet and did some digging.  Last year he went on ESPN’s First Take and told Skip Bayless “I’m better at life than you,” which is painfully true.  He also demonstrated commendable word choice when he called Bayless an “ignorant, pompous, egotistical cretin.”

But Richard Sherman is more than just an elite troll.  After his 2nd NFL season, he was voted by the AP to the NFL All-Pro 1st team.  Now in his 3rd NFL season, he is widely considered a top 2 NFL cornerback.  He’s on the fast track to become an all-time great, yet in the 2011 NFL Draft he was chosen in the 5th round, 154th overall.  His draft stock was deflated because he started off his college career as a wide receiver, and only had two years experience as a cornerback entering the draft.  He was considered raw, which was something that Sherman himself acknowledged.  But he has good tools and is insanely smart and driven to succeed, so it shouldn’t be surprising that he achieved the heights that he did.  Check out how cerebral his approach to the game is:

And much like Paul George, he had his sights set on extreme goals.  Per an SB Nation interview:

“Doesn’t matter where I play I just want to be a great player.  I don’t want to be a guy that’s in the league a few years, makes a ton of money and has nothing else.  I want to go down as one of the best.I want to prove other NFL Draft websites wrong that say I am the 52nd ranked CB prospect in their eyes.”

The fact that there was a player with the tools to be great and had such an intelligent and dedicated approach to the game yet was passing up multiple times by every team is amazing to me.  Richard Sherman is the archetype of player that both NFL and NBA GM’s should be pursuing, and the fact that he slipped to the 154th overall shows the inefficiencies of the NFL Draft that I believe remain present in the NBA Draft as well.

The NBA player who stands out as the most Richard Sherman like personality is Chris Paul.  He went 4th overall, as he was a polished NCAA superstar, but he neverthless made the GM’s who drafted Andrew Bogut, Marvin Williams, and Deron Williams ahead of him look foolish.  He thrives off of his otherworldly basketball IQ, and there was concern that he was too competitive as he punched Julius Hodge in the crotch during an ACC game.  I feel that he was one of the all-time underrated draft prospects in spite of going at a high slot, as his lack of an extra inch of height got too much attention and his intelligence received far too little.

Players like Richard Sherman and Chris Paul are one of a kind, and most draft classes will not have anybody who compares.  But these personality types are so underrated, part of the prospect evaluation process should be to identify players who show similar characteristics.  It is built from thin slices from afar, but here’s my early list of players to monitor who have shown signs of possible elite drive, confidence, and intelligence.

6) Joel Embiid-  His personality is slippery to assess, as he is still learning the English language and the game of basketball which makes it difficult to fully convey his intelligence.  On the other hand it also makes it difficult to grasp for his mental limitations since there’s an excuse for most of his mistakes. But his massive overperformance when he wasn’t expected to make an impact, and also his demonstration of a basic ability to learn are positive signs early.   Also noteworthy with Embiid is that he seems to have a fiery passion to his game as he already has 3 technical fouls on the season. Some may view this as a negative, but prefer it to his teammate Andrew Wiggins’s passive approach by a comfortable margin.

5) Tyler Ennis- He has an insanely low turnover rate for a freshman PG, and he has been at his best against good competition as some of his worst games have come against the dregs of Syracuse’s schedule.  Further, his stats in the final 5 minutes of games are better than sooner.

4) Dante Exum- he’s outwardly quiet but reputed to be confident and an extremely hard worker.  Derrick Rose is his role model and they seem to have similar deameanors.  He won me over a little bit with an incredibly sharp assessment regarding the pressure of being a high draft pick:

“Being told that you’re going to be a franchise player doesn’t mean anything, honestly they can say what they’d like and it’s just an opinion and it doesn’t mean it’s going to come true…Dealing with I guess that pressure, it doesn’t really matter to me because I know I’m just going to do what I can to get to that.”

That’s an impressive perception for an 18 year old kid, and it should inch NBA teams toward taking the mystery box over the boat.

3) Spencer Dinwiddie- He may not declare for the draft after his ACL tear, but he is an obviously intelligent person in interviews.  In a DX interivew, he cited that he wanted to improve his efficiency last offseason, and demonstrated a solid vocabulary when touched on his capacity to be an “auxiliary scorer.”  He also expressed an inclination to be a franchise point guard but accepted the possibility of a supporting role.  To me, he reminisces of Shane Battier with PG skills.

2) Marcus Smart- he occasionally makes a bad decision on the floor as he is prone to force bad shots, which may be a sign that he does not have elite intelligence.  But overall he demonstrates good feel for the game, especially defensively.  And from watching interviews he seems to back up his name with above average intelligence.  Moreover he demonstrates uniquely good intangibles and leadership skills as I noted in my Embiid breakdown.  He recently had a mini-meltdown where he outwardly demonstrated frustration during a poor game, and had a good apology afterward where he expressed desire to avoid similar behavior in the future. Willingness to accept feedback and learn from mistakes is how people grow, so it’s encouraging to see the reaction from him even though the meltdown wasn’t particularly bad.

1) Nik Stauskas- He strikes me as the complete package in terms of intangibles.  He is a highly intelligent player, and his work ethic must be incredible given the offseason work he put in on both his body and his skills.  He has a confident demeanor as he does things like blow kisses to the Michigan State crowd after a crucial road win.  His coach also acknowledged that Stauskas showed leadership by holding him back from the refs after a missed call.  His physical limitations place a ceiling on his upside, but that ceiling might be higher than common wisdom would suggest.

Note that the list is not comprehensive, and I hope to identify other attractive personalities as the season progresses.  My analysis of on court performance and statistics certainly carries more weight, but personalities can’t be excluded from prospect assessment altogether so this is a subject I will touch on sporadically.  Consider the assessment of the personality underlying each player to be a skill that I am developing as a side project.  In the interim, I will be rooting for Richard Sherman and the Seattle Seahawks to win that football game that is apparently happening tonight.