Tag Archives: Andrew Harrison

Kentucky’s Luck Runs Out vs. UConn

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by in NCAA

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After eking out four close wins against quality competition, UK finally fell into a first half deficit that they couldn’t entirely overcome, as they lost to UConn 60-54.  It was an interesting tourney run for the Wildcats, and I would now like to comb through the details to point out what changed from the regular season to the postseason that propelled them this far.  They started playing well in the SEC tournament, so I will split each player’s stats per 40 minutes into the 9 SEC/NCAA tourney games vs their regular season performance.  Note that they tended to both run into better defenses and play at a slower pace down the stretch, so naturally everybody will have rosier regular season per 40 minute stats.

Willie Cauley-Stein

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 12.0 60.1% 10.2 1.2 1.8 4.6 1.6
Post 8.0 55.0% 10.3 0.7 3.0 6.0 0.3

Cauley-Stein’s postseason sample is too small to be particularly meaningful, but he did rack up a boatload of steals and blocks and only turned it over once in 120 minutes of play. More notable is how the UK defense struggled without him.  They did not perform at a high level vs. any of Louisville, Michigan, Wisconsin, or UConn, and their adjusted defensive rating dropped to 41st in the country as per kenpom.com.  Last year’s UK team bottomed out after the Noel injury and finished with the 129th defense, but among Calipari’s successful teams this is his worst defense that he has assembled.  From 2006-2012 all of his defenses finished top 15, and the 2010-11 UK team was the only iteration that was not top 9.  Cal’s last defense to perform this poorly was the 2004-2005 Memphis team that missed the tournament and finished with the 43rd defense.

For all of Kentucky’s size and athleticism, they are not particularly effective at preventing opponents from scoring. This is largely why I am not exceptionally high on this year’s crop of Kentucky prospects.  Their success down the stretch did not stem from suddenly pulling things together and playing great defense: it was almost entirely derived from decreased turnover rates and timely shot making.

Julius Randle

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 20.1 52.2% 13.6 1.8 0.6 1.1 3.6
Post 17.1 43.6% 13.1 2.0 0.8 0.8 2.2

Randle’s big progression down the stretch was cutting down on his turnover rate.  I have not charted statistics for this, but my suspicion is that this largely stems from fewer post up attempts, as he often coughed the ball up in traffic.  Regardless of the precise reason, this was a significant development for UK as their offense is difficult to stop when they aren’t turning it over.  They rebounded 41.9% of their own misses, so turnovers are especially costly in comparison to missed shots.  This is a positive sign for Randle, as he needs to find a way to score without being a turnover machine to succeed as a pro.

On the other hand, Randle’s warts persist and I still struggle to get excited about the prospect of drafting him in the lottery.  He drew 3 favorable defensive matchups in the tournament, as Kansas State, Michigan, and Wisconsin are all undersized, lack shot blocking, and are vulnerable inside.  Naturally Randle posted his three highest scoring totals of the tournament vs. these three defenses.  He had his lowest scoring output vs. the long and athletic UConn defense, finishing with just 10 points on 3/7 FG.  And his lower turnover rate is somewhat diminished by the fact that it came in tandem with poor shooting from the field.  He is still prone to defensive lapses, and there are still questions about his ability to translate offensively.  While I appreciate his competitiveness and growth throughout the season, he did not make a convincing case that he will be able to score effectively enough vs. NBA defenses to justify a lotto pick.  He has enough strengths for a freshman to be worth a flier in the 15-20 range, but I have a hard time envisioning him becoming a true impact player.

James Young

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 17.7 49.3% 5.1 2.3 1.0 0.2 2.4
Post 17.6 51.6% 6.0 1.4 0.6 0.3 2.1

James Young had a solid two games in the Final Four, and his performance reinforced my perception that he is the Kentucky player who should most seamlessly translate to the NBA.  He doesn’t bully smaller competition to the extent his teammates do, and he is able to get his shots off vs. defenses of UConn’s caliber with his combination of size, length, a quick trigger, and a knack for hitting contested shots.  His increase in eFG% down the stretch was largely driven by his 3’s finally starting to fall, as he shot 33.7% from 3 in the regular season vs. 41.7% in tournament play.  His 2p% only fell off from 47.8% to 44.8% in spite of higher volume (8.0 2PA/40 vs 6.2) and tougher opposing defenses, and he finally started to make his free throws hitting 83.3% after a 67.4% regular season.

The shooting upticks are a welcome sign for Young.  His regular season shooting stats were surprisingly mediocre considering how nice his form looks, and his NBA success hinges largely on him becoming an effective shooter.  He is still only going to be 18 on draft night, and between his age, form, and ability to get shots off vs. good defenses, he has quite a bit of room to grow offensively and could become a good offensive player in the NBA.

That said, there are reasons to temper expectations.  Like his teammates, his defense is not particularly good.  He has the tools to be good on this end, but seems to lack acumen.  And in spite of his ability to translate and room to grow offensively, he did not have a particularly effective season for a one way scorer.  If his shot doesn’t develop well, he might be an Austin Rivers level flop.  Even if his shot does develop well, he may not become significantly better than Nick Young.  He is likely worth a late 1st round pick for the scoring upside, but he has plenty of bust equity as well.

Aaron Harrison

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 17.1 47.5% 4.1 2.6 1.4 0.4 2.2
Post 16.0 57.9% 2.1 1.2 1.0 0.2 1.3
Season 2PA 2P% 3PA 3p% FTA FT%
Regular 7.9 48.4% 5.1 30.6% 5.9 81.4%
Post 5.5 42.2% 6.1 48.0% 3.8 67.7%

I’m including Aaron Harrison’s shooting splits to show that there was exactly one thing he did well this postseason: make 3’s.  His increase in eFG% and decrease in assists and turnovers is rooted in the fact that he attacked less and was used as a spot up shooter more, hitting 48% of his 3’s including a plethora of clutch shots.  He earned casual fan acclaim for his timely shot making, but overall I was not impressed by his tournament showing.

I was somewhat hopeful for Harrison earlier in the year because I felt his 3P% was suffering from bad luck, and that his overall game might look quite good once his 3’s started falling.  So while it is nice for his 3’s to violently progress to the mean, it isn’t encouraging when his production otherwise fell off a cliff.  And I do not believe that his clutch shooting is indicative of any innate ability to score against tight defenses – he simply spotted up for 3’s and happened to make them.  If anything I have cooled on him after his tourney play and do not feel that he is worth a 1st round selection.  He’s a 2nd round pick in my estimation.

Andrew Harrison

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 14.1 42.0% 3.9 4.6 0.6 0.3 3.2
Post 12.4 40.6% 4.3 6.1 0.8 0.4 4.1

With his brother taking on more of a spot up role, Andrew Harrison took on a greater portion of the PG duties and it shows with significant upticks in both assists and turnovers.  I strongly dislike almost everything about his game, as his sole strength appears to be bulldozing to the rim and drawing FT’s.  He is a horrible decision maker, as evidenced by his turnover rate and eFG.  There is plenty of room for him to improve as a college player if he elects to stay, but I simply don’t see his feel for the game ever becoming good enough for him to be a useful pro.  Somebody will try to salvage him with a 2nd round flier, but I wouldn’t bother with him.

Alex Poythress

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 12.8 48.6% 10.5 1.1 0.6 1.7 2.1
Post 12.5 69.0% 7.4 0.3 0.8 1.1 2.1

Poythress was UK’s unsung hero of the tournament, as he hardly missed down the stretch.  He shot 14/15 inside the arc in UK’s final 5 games, providing significant unacknowledged value.  It does not appear he will be entering this year’s draft, as his stock has eroded with his regression this year.  I am not particularly high on him but he may become worth drafting before all is said and done.

Dakari Johnson

Season PTS eFG% REB AST STL BLK TOV
Regular 16.0 57.6% 11.7 0.8 0.5 1.9 1.7
Post 12.2 55.6% 10.2 0.9 0.9 1.3 2.0

UK’s offensive rebound expert finished the season with a staggering 17.0% ORB rate.  This exceeds his 15.0% DRB rate.  His tournament was up and down, as he had some efficient games and other quiet ones.  He is draftable but I suspect he will stay in school for his sophomore season.

Marcus Lee

It’s not even worth posting his stat lines with just 156 minutes on the season.  He had a great 24 minutes vs. the soft interior defenses of Wisconsin and Michigan, and then posted goose eggs in 6 minutes vs. UConn’s significantly tougher defense.  There’s not enough information to have much of an opinion on him at this point.

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High School Scouts Say The Darndest Things

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Miscellaneous, NCAA

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When discussing draft prospects, it seems that people are often afraid to confidently assert that the scouts who drive the consensus are flat out wrong.  This surprises me, since they have been wrong to hilarious degrees in the past, and will continue to be wrong going forward.  They were able to recognize that LeBron James was a fairly awesome prospect, so that establishes that at least they have operative eyesight.  But they also thought that Darko Milicic was half a notch below LeBron as a prospect, even though he never possessed any basketball playing ability of note.  VJL recently made an excellent post on the irrelevance of hype, and I’d like to highlight some qualitative examples to show where high school scouts badly missed the mark.

Many scouts are woefully bad at assessing prospect skill level, especially in watching them go against high school competition. A recent example is UCLA’s Zach LaVine, when Chad Ford noted that a few scouts called him “Russell Westbrook with a jump shot.” Of course the only things LaVine has in common with Russell are his leaping ability and his decision to attend UCLA. Granted, he doesn’t get to show off much of his PG skill with Kyle Anderson and his virtuoso passing ability running the offense. But he also isn’t trusted enough as the backup PG, as those duties fall to Bryce Alford. And his assist rate (13.8%) doesn’t stand out from UCLA’s other wings as Jordan Adams (14.0%) and Norman Powell (12.7%) who are definitely not PG’s have similar assist rates. Ford notes that LaVine has a propensity to look for his shot instead of passing, but the fact of the matter is that he hardly has any dribble penetration skills whatsoever. On the season he is 11/28 on rim FG’s in the half-court offense, only 6’3 non-leaper Bryce Alford has fewer attempts at 10/25. Adams (44/67) Anderson (24/44) and Powell (44/73) all show vastly superior penetration ability. It is possible that his low attempts are due to lack of confidence in finishing in traffic given his thin build, but his handles look awfully pedestrian to me. He appears to be a SG through and through.

To bring back the Westbrook comparison, he led his UCLA team in assists as a sophomore in spite of playing a fair amount of SG with Darren Collison running the show. Like LaVine he didn’t get the chance to fully flaunt his PG skills, but at least he flaunted something, as the Thunder drafted him in large part to his strong performance as primary ball handler when Collison was out. LaVine has not begun to display flashes of PG skill, yet Chad Ford writes:

While he isn’t really running the point for UCLA, most scouts who have seen him in high school think he has all the tools to be a NBA point guard down the road

Why do they believe this? I don’t know, maybe they saw him dribble down the open court and finish spectacularly in transition and wrote down “POINT GOD” in their scrapbooks. If he develops his handles and passing at an inordinate rate then maybe he could be a PG, but to weigh that as a significant possibility at this stage is wishful thinking. Comparing him to Westbrook is silly so long as they have such an inordinate gap in PG skills, but many scouts are bad at deducing these sort of gaping differences so they wouldn’t know any better.

Now you may be thinking that while scouts may not be experts on deducing basketball playing ability, you gotta give credit to their ability to eye test tools. This is also wrong. Let’s take Noah Vonleh, in November of 2011 DraftExpress writes:

Standing a legit 6-8, with a 7-3 wingspan, huge hands, a terrific frame and excellent athleticism, Vonleh does not look like your typical 16-year old.

I imagine that the “excellent athleticism” was simply a commonly held belief in HS scoutings circles, as his ESPN recruiting profile notes that his “physical intangibles” include “extraordinarily long arms and bounce.” While he has done well as a freshman for Indiana, it is not due to leaping ability, as Vonleh has struggled to finish at the rim in spite of his size and length due to lackluster athleticism. To DX’s credit, they noticed that the initial assertion was incorrect and in their recent scouting video note that Vonleh is “not a leaper” and list lack of explosiveness as a weakness. But the bottom line is that HS scouts are not specially trained to deduce physical tools, and when they see a super long player like Vonleh dunking or blocking a shot, they conflate his impressive use of length with athleticism.  Consequently, it is not safe to take their tool assessments entirely at face value.

Now let’s see what ESPN’s recruiting service said about Julius Randle’s future:

His reputation as a good person and hard worker will aid him as he hopes to improve and stave off competitian for his slot

This is part of a short writeup on the #2 prospect in America, and they couldn’t even spell “competition” correctly.  I know this strays from basketball analysis, but most of their writeups do appear to have been translated from English to Estonian and back to English using Google translation.  Here’s their bottom line on Andrew Harrison:

Bottom Line:
He raises the level of play on his team because he leads by example with a competitive nature, focus and battle tested toughness. At his size he has blossoming lead guard skills and is terrific at making plays. What separates him from the rest is in his pace of play. His game is like a stop light he can go from green to yellow to red all in a moments notice.

Maybe I’m being harsh, but when a scout’s writing is barely literate, it makes it that much harder to trust their “expertise.” That isn’t valid basketball analysis– it more closely resembles a child’s attempt at writing poetry.

For all intents and purposes, high school scouts are casual fans who try their best to offer their best NBA projections of high school prospects.  Aside from the fact that extrapolating a player from high school to the pros is exceptionally difficult, it’s not a particularly prestigious position and does not attract the sharpest basketball minds. They are smart enough to know that LeBron James is great when they see him play, but they also have a number of baffling false positives.  If any of us actually met a collection of high school scouts and had the opportunity to pick their brains, I doubt we would come away with the sensation that they possess any sort of expert wisdom that we lack.

In order to maximize efficiency in prospect analysis, stuff like pedigree and hype should be almost entirely disregarded.  There may be exceptions for a player like Bradley Beal who was reputed as an elite shooter but ran cold from outside as a college freshman.  But when top prospects such as Andrew Wiggins or Julius Randle show troubling signs for their future, people seem slow to accept the relevance of these signs, as they feel that obvious warning signs are superseded by high school hype.  The bottom line is scouts don’t have any advantage over an intelligent basketball fan in information (at least not once we get a sizable college sample), analytical ability, or even expertise in assessing tools.  Personally I try to glean why they felt the way they did, take the perceived strengths for what they are worth, and then discard all bottom line conclusions as it is only noise that will dilute my own analysis.  Giving any more credence than that only leads to skewed perceptions and wrong conclusions.