Odds are Mike Conley of the Memphis Grizzlies won't be named an All-Star when reserves are announced Thursday on TNT's pregame show before a doubleheader that includes Conley's Grizzlies facing the Denver Nuggets. Still, the fact that Conley is a serious part of the conversation is remarkable given that as recently as four years ago, he was one of the league's weaker starting point guards.
Conley isn't the only late-developing point guard to start his career in Memphis. During his first season and a half, Conley was backed up by Kyle Lowry, who is now with the Toronto Raptors and will be making his first All-Star appearance at age 28. When Conley and Lowry played together, there was little indication either eventually would be among the NBA's top-10 point guards, let alone both of them. They're the two most obvious examples that point guards often take more time to fully form than players at other positions.
Slow, steady development
As Jonathan Abrams shared in last week's detailed Conley feature on Grantland, the Grizzlies traded Lowry to the Houston Rockets in large part to give the younger Conley an opportunity to play point guard full time. Back then, in 2009, there were doubts about the futures of both players. Lowry was a dogged defender who had yet to consistently shoot 3s or show the ability to run a team, while Conley took a back seat on offense to teammates Rudy Gay and O.J. Mayo.
Lowry's breakthrough came in 2010-11, when he stepped into the Rockets' starting lineup in place of the injured Aaron Brooks and played well enough that Houston eventually traded Brooks. Lowry averaged 13.5 points and 6.7 assists in his first opportunity as a full-time starter. Yet Lowry was still seen more as a stopgap solution than a star when the Rockets traded him to the Raptors in summer 2012 in exchange for a first-round pick (which they later used as part of the package for James Harden). He battled Jose Calderon for minutes at the point during his first half-season in Toronto, winning the job by default when the Raptors dealt Calderon as part of a trade for his old teammate Gay.
Last season, Lowry's eighth in the NBA, was his first as a starter from beginning to end and the time he established himself as an elite point guard. Despite averaging 17.9 points and 7.4 assists per game and ranking among the league's top-10 players in win shares and wins above replacement player (WARP), Lowry was left off the All-Star team. A late push from Raptors fans to make Lowry a starter guaranteed he won't meet the same fate this year.
As the No. 4 overall pick in the 2007 draft, opportunity was never the issue for Conley: performance was. He took a step backward the season after Lowry was traded, and posted just 6.2 WARP in his first three campaigns. Yet Memphis saw enough potential to sign Conley to a widely criticized five-year, $40 million extension that has since proved one of the NBA's better bargains.
Conley made incremental progress in 2010-11, when the Grizzlies reached the playoffs and upset the top-seeded San Antonio Spurs in the opening round, and continued adding to his game as Memphis developed into one of the West's top teams. He has improved his scoring average in six of the seven seasons since his rookie campaign while growing more efficient as a scorer, culminating in 17.4 points a game in 2014-15.
When the year-by-year progress made by Conley and Lowry (measured by Win%, the per-minute version of WARP akin to PER) is put on the same chart by age, their paths look remarkably similar aside from Lowry's fluky rookie season (he played just 172 minutes before a broken wrist ended his season):
Late bloomers common among PGs
Conley and Lowry aren't unique among point guards in needing more time to reach their potential. Of the 39 players to enter the league since 2004-05 who have posted at least 10 WARP in a season (typically around the cutoff for All-Stars), 14 did so for the first time at age 25 or later. Six of those 14 late bloomers are point guards, including Conley and Lowry.
At age 28 by the conclusion of his first 10-WARP season (2013-14), Lowry is the second-oldest of the group, trailing only a former Grizzlies teammate: center Marc Gasol. The third-oldest player to break through with an All-Star performance is yet another point guard, Goran Dragic of the Phoenix Suns, with his 2013-14 season. Because Conley entered the league at age 20 and actually reached 10-plus WARP in 2012-13, his sixth season, he's not at the top of the list by age. But only Lowry (eighth season) and Andrew Bynum (seventh after entering the NBA out of high school) have taken more time to reach the 10-WARP level since entering the league in the past decade.
We should be able to add another point guard to the list this sesaon: Jeff Teague of the Atlanta Hawks, age 26 and in his sixth season, who likely will be chosen for his first All-Star Game and is on pace for 11.9 WARP.
There's an important lesson here for teams: Don't write off developing point guards too soon. Though some elite athletes are able to come into the league and dominate right away (Derrick Rose, John Wall and Russell Westbrook all reached 10 WARP before age 24), many players take longer to learn the NBA's most demanding position. Memphis benefited from betting on Conley, while for better or worse the Rockets lost out on Dragic and Lowry, both of whom were on their roster at the same time. Teams with young point guards should heed their example.
News and notes
• It took 55 points from Kyrie Irving, but on Wednesday night the Cleveland Cavaliers got their second win without LeBron James in 10 tries this season, beating the Portland Trail Blazers 99-94 to extend their winning streak to eight games. Irving was incredible, becoming the second player in the past week (Klay Thompson was the other) and just the eighth in league history to make 11 3-pointers in a game.
Beyond Irving's heroics, the Cavaliers were also more effective than they had been playing without James because they controlled the offensive glass (corralling one-third of all available misses) and committed just eight turnovers. Those skills can help Cleveland continue the streak if James sits out Friday, when the Sacramento Kings come to visit.
• Don't look now, but the Spurs climbed out of seventh place in the Western Conference and into a tie for sixth with the Dallas Mavericks thanks to their win Wednesday and a Dallas loss. The Spurs are 6-1 since Kawhi Leonard's return, and while the schedule has been favorable -- six of those seven games have come at home -- San Antonio appears poised to make another second-half surge.
On the other side, the Mavericks' loss to the Rockets was their fourth in a row. Three of those four games have been close, so it's hardly reason for panic in Dallas. Moreover, the Mavericks still have the conference's fourth-best point differential (plus-5.2 PPG), ahead of not only the Spurs (plus-4.1) and the Rockets (plus-4.0) but also the second-place Grizzlies (plus-4.6). The disconnect between records and advanced metrics adds to the relative parity to make the race from second through seventh in the West a fascinating one to watch unfold.
• Let's talk some more about home-court advantage after Wednesday's Tom Haberstroh and Steve Ilardi feature on the stunning decline in home winning percentages this season. One factor has been the stratified nature of the league, with 11 teams winning more than 60 percent of their home games and 10 losing more than 60 percent. The closer two teams are in ability, the more important home court is in swinging a potential loss to a win instead of merely making a blowout slightly closer. That's apparent statistically in comparing home winning percentages with the standard deviation of team winning percentages season-by-season:
Parity explains about a quarter of the season-to-season variation in home-court advantage, and indeed the standard deviation of team winning percentages this season is the third-highest since the ABA-NBA merger. That factor doesn't completely explain why home teams are winning less frequently -- as the chart shows, we'd expect them to win about 58 percent of the time based on the lack of parity, and the adjusted data still shows the trend toward smaller home-court advantage over time, Haberstroh and Ilardi observed -- but it does help us understand why things have changed so much from last season, when the league was relatively more balanced.
Follow Kevin Pelton on Twitter @kpelton.