BY HENRY ABBOTT
When I was kid, I thought my Blazers got players by having brilliant staff haunting gyms from Kentucky to the Congo. And then once in a while they’d call back to the bosses and say: “Ding, ding, ding, this is the one!” And when that prospect arrived, he’d receive a steady stream of brilliant insight from the world’s best player-development experts—what David Thorpe calls “royal jelly.”
I’m 50 years old now. I’ve been covering the league my entire adult life and marinating in the stats. I can tell you that if you’re looking for evidence that any team is particularly good at identifying or developing talent, you won’t find it.
The guy who drafted Michael Jordan is named Rod Thorn, but all in all there’s little evidence he drafted well—his record is heavy with names like Zoran Planinić and his all-time winning record is mostly losing. (In 2003, Thorn magically plucked Kyle Korver out of the second round … then traded him to the 76ers for cash.) That’s just how the draft has been working—you have to draft a lot of Zorans to get an MJ. It’s much more of a crapshoot: Failure is the norm.
A while ago I wrote a story called “You Have to be Right.” It might have upset Gregory, a TrueHoop reader who emailed. Great guy. We went back and forth. He thought I was taking a dig at the Milwaukee Bucks, who I contend are very poorly set up for the future.
An average team has 12 draft picks over the next six years, between the first and second round. The Bucks have three—total. The good news is that they’re all first-rounders. The bad news is that in all three cases, some other team has swap rights, making it impossible for the Bucks to win the lottery no matter how bad the team gets.
We are used to thinking of the draft as a way teams get better. For the Bucks, who start nine picks behind the competition in the race to contend in the future , it’s more accurately a way they’ll get worse.
What might the Bucks do with those three middling picks? Quite possibly nothing that matters. The Bucks’ last three first-round draftees turned into AJ Johnson, Marjon Beauchamp, and Isaiah Todd. Todd is out of the league, the Bucks declined Beauchamp’s contract for next season, and Johnson has barely played.
Why is that? At the moment, the Bucks have some system of finding young players. They bring in prospects before the draft. They have some process. Maybe they have them shoot over assistant coaches, race through ball-handling drills, and go out to dinner. They put together a summer league team and a G-League team.
What we have learned, though, is that it wasn’t enough. All kinds of good players didn’t get picked by the Bucks, Marjon Beauchamp did.
But an even bigger problem is keeping them glued to the bench. However you define it, the Bucks are among the very worst at finding minutes for developing young players.
The theory here is that playing time matters immensely to player development. It matters even more in a place like the NBA, which is not amazing at using great coaching to inspire skill development. When you’re not growing by leaps and bounds in practice, playing time emerges as the only real royal jelly left. Let the opposition teach a lesson or two—the hard way.
David Thorpe says when he watches NBA basketball, he often notices the prospects who don’t even play in blowouts: “You’re basically saying to them: You’re not good enough. I don’t trust you to help us protect this six-possession lead, even with three or four starters still out there. That’s the message. And, you’re robbing them of the reference points they need to get better.”
Maybe players are like scratch-off tickets: You can’t win if you don’t play them. And the way you scratch off the ticket is to see them play for a year, ride the bus, sit next to you on the plane, go to practice, and all that stuff, right? Training, nutrition, lifestyle. What kind of teammate are you? Put all of that into the mix, for a good long while, and after that maybe you can figure out which one might become the next Giannis. (Like many players who went on to become MVPs—from Steve Nash to Kevin Durant—Giannis only helped his team win after some seasoning.)
That’s why it matters that the Thunder play young players long minutes, systematically and repeatedly. I dug around Basketball Reference to come up with ways to assess teams where young players get opportunities. I learned that 30 times in the last four years, the Thunder have played someone under 25 at least 1,000 minutes in a season. That leads the league!
Meanwhile, over the same span, the Bucks are dead last, having played young players 1,000 minutes or more a measly three times. Three times? No wonder they don’t have elite young players!
It’s happening right now. On draft day, the league resolved that Australia’s AJ Johnson was 11 picks more valuable than Santa Barbara’s Ajay Mitchell. A few months later, though, Mitchell is seeing real time even in close games, at times on the floor in the fourth quarter while veteran Alex Caruso is on the bench. (Mitchell played nine minutes in the Thunder’s Wednesday loss to the Nuggets.) At his current average of 13.5 minutes a game, Ajay would finish 82 games having logged 1,107 minutes.
The Bucks’ AJ, however, has played only six minutes over seven games. At that rate, Johnson would finish the regular season with just 71 total minutes. Ajay has already played 105.
Maybe the argument is that the Bucks need to win now, and therefore can’t invest game time in player development. The Thunder are 7-1, though, and the Bucks are 1-6.
Every team could probably get better at identifying and developing elite talent. But until that happens, it’s more of a numbers game than any of us want to admit. And in that, it’s like the Thunder are going down to the convenience store, buying 30 tickets, and then fishing around for a coin to scratch off every last square millimeter of that foil stuff to see what they’ve won.
The Bucks don’t get as many lottery tickets. But the craziest part? Half the time they don’t even scratch them off.
Thank you for reading TrueHoop!
Share this post