Choosing the Best Rookie in November

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Way back in October the NBA season began.  And here we are, already halfway through November.  So with this much time elapsed, it’s time to determine the NBA’s Rookie of the Year.  I know, what took us so long?

Okay, teams haven’t even played 10 games yet.  But David Thorpe at ESPN.com is already discussing the issue, so I thought I would chime in.

The leading candidates on drafting night were Greg Oden and Kevin Durant.  Then Oden got hurt, and that pretty much left Durant as The Choice.  Unfortunately for Durant, the NBA started its season.  And now that we have seen Durant play, as well as a few other other rookies, Durant’s front-runner status has been shaken.

To see this, let’s look at the numbers generated by three rookies – Durant, Al Horford, and Yi Jianlian.  Why these three players?  Durant is the de facto front-runner.  Horford, as I noted a few weeks ago, was the most productive rookie in the pre-season.  And Yi was identified by David Thorpe of ESPN.com as a player who has surpassed Durant.

Table One: Early Returns on Durant, Horford, and Yi

Table One begins with Durant.  ESPN reports that Durant is a shooting guard, so his numbers are being compared to the average at that position.  And relative to the average performance at this position, we see Durant is well below average with respect to shooting efficiency and assists.  He’s also turnover prone.  He does get the Sonics rebounds, steals, and blocked shots, although the rebound story is only positive if he is indeed a guard.  As a small forward, he would be below average on the boards.

When we put it all together we see a Win Score that is well below average and a WP48 [Wins Produced per 48 minutes] that’s in the negative range.  Given his very low levels of shooting efficiency, this is not surprising.  It is interesting to note that NBA Efficiency also tells us that Durant is below average, although not by much.  Durant’s NBA Efficiency measure is enhanced by the fact he takes ten more shots than the average shooting guard per 48 minutes.  Consequently, as detailed before, his NBA Efficiency measure is inflated.

Although Durant’s scoring attracts attention (and inflates his NBA Efficiency mark), Thorpe saw past this and argued that Yi has thus far been the better player.  And the numbers confirm that story.  So far Yi has shown an ability to rebound, get steals, and block shots.  His shooting efficiency, though, is well below average.  And he is not getting many assists.  Consequently, his overall value – as measured by Win Score and WP48 – is below par.  Still, he is doing more than Durant.  So if the choice is between these two players, Yi would get the nod.

Of course the choice is not confined to these two players.  Horford, as noted, was the best rookie in preseason.  And thus far, he has been a pretty good rookie in the regular season.  Again we start with the individual stats.  Horford is above average with respect to shooting efficiency, rebounds, and steals.  He is prone to commit turnovers and he is a shade below par with respect to blocked shots and assists.  When we put it all together, though, we see Win Score and WP48 marks that are well above average.  In fact his WP48 of 0.189 matches exactly the mark posted by Rajon Rondo last season.  And as noted, Rondo led all rookies last year in Win Produced.

What of the other rookies?  I only intended to look at these three rookies.  But in calculating the WP48 for these players I did look at their rookie teammates.  So I can say that Jeff Green – Durant’s rookie teammate in Seattle — has a WP48 of 0.102, if he is a small forward.  I think he has spent substantial time at power forward, though, and he is below average when he makes this switch. 

Acie Law – Horford’s teammate in Atlanta – has posted a -0.036 WP48.  A negative mark is bad, but he has actually been the most productive point guard Atlanta has employed this year.  Obviously this position is what’s holding this team back.

Yi doesn’t have any rookie teammates.  But let me toss this out for Milwaukee fans.  Thus far Michael Redd and Desmond Mason are playing very well.  Unfortunately  Andrew Bogut and Charlie Villanueva are not. Still the season is young.

And that point needs to be remembered.  Our sample is still too small.  If only the NBA would just make all its teams play 20 or 30 games in the first two weeks of the season.  I could tell much better stories if my data was just a bit better.

- DJ

Our research on the NBA was summarized HERE.

The Technical Notes at wagesofwins.com provides more information on the published research behind Wins Produced and Win Score

Wins Produced, Win Score, and PAWSmin are also discussed in the following posts:

Simple Models of Player Performance

Wins Produced vs. Win Score

What Wins Produced Says and What It Does Not Say

Introducing PAWSmin — and a Defense of Box Score Statistics

26 thoughts on “Choosing the Best Rookie in November”

  1. Hey Dave, just out of curiosity, what is the correlation between WP and Dean Oliver’s player wins? I know you and Dean talk a fair amount, but I haven’t ever really seen you compare WP to Dean’s player wins (available historically at basketball-reference.com).

  2. Dave,

    Charley Rosen over at FoxSports writes interesting pieces though he is the opposite of the statistical approach. He argues that (1) David Robinson was overrated, and (2) players such as Battier, Raja Bell, Nick Collison, Jeff Foster, Bo Outlaw, etc. are underrated (their contribution is not measured by primary statistics). What does hour approach say?

  5. No one outside of Toronto is talking about him yet, but Jamario Moon may end up competing with Al Horford for most effective rookie. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation and it seems he has a better PAWSmin than Al.

  6. Everyone should check out Mike Conley’s production so far this season. In limited minutes his production has been very good.

    Also I am going to be voting a ton for the all star game this year.

    Not that my votes will matter but if enough of us voted on the game maybe we wouldn’t be so bored and the game would be like it was in its hayday when the best players all happened to be great scorers as well.

  7. Joey C,
    Not only did Rosenbaum post anonymously, he also posted comments promoting his own work.

    And yes, people get in trouble for doing this kind of stuff.

  8. This is what I voted.

    West
    Paul
    Ginobili
    Nowitzki
    Marion
    Camby

    East
    Kidd
    Wade
    James
    Garnett
    Okafor

    In retrospect maybe I should pick a real small forward instead of inserting Marion there.

  9. Last post I promise…too much caffeine today.
    I guess I could choose Duncan over Camby but I wanted to leave Paul and Nowitski as the only guys in my lineup who likes to hold the ball longer than 3 seconds.

    If I were doing the same in the east I guess I could choose deng over LBJ leaving only Wade and Kidd as dribblers in the East

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  11. I think DT Rosenbaum’s comments were under the APBRmetrics handle. If so, he wrote this, “(…)The only work on this that I know of is a paper presented at Harvard by David Lewin and Dan T. Rosenbaum that showed that Wins Produced predicts future wins worse than Points per Game, Minutes per Game, and NBA Efficiency if a team adjustment is added to those metrics. Now, as far as I know, the paper for that presentation is not publicly available, so we should be skeptical about this evidence until we see the full details. But at least there is an attempt there to present evidence about how well various metrics predict the future(…)” Then he wrote a bunch of other posts in which he mentioned Rosenbaum in the 3rd person!!! Very sneaky!

  12. If that comment really was written by DT Rosenbaum I wish he would just make his presentation available so we can evaluate it. I think that would be more appropriate on his part than writing cryptic anonymous posts praising it.

  13. Joey C – You can find it on APBRMetrics, the slides at least, and the video of the presentation is available online…

  18. Owen, I can’t find the presentation that DT Rosenbaum did. Can you provide the url to it here? Tkx.

  22. Anyone have thoughts on that presentation? I found it to be interesting. I need to go through more carefully and watch the video as it wasn’t clear to me exactly how some of the calculations were done.

  23. Joe C, thanks for the presentation. There’s a lot of problems in the methodology that I’ll write about later. It’s a good starting point, though.

  24. This is way too small a sample to start evaluating rookies. Or at least I think it is. Does anyone know the 10-game variability of wins scored?

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