Can the Golden State Warriors successfully develop their recent lottery picks while aiming for a fourth championship in the past decade?
Because they landed on a Warriors team with stars Stephen Curry and Draymond Green, 2020 No. 2 overall pick James Wiseman and 2021 lottery picks Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody haven't played as much as their peers who joined rebuilding teams.
Although Wiseman started 27 of the 39 games he played as a rookie, he didn't have the same freedom as fellow top-three picks LaMelo Ball and Anthony Edwards. Kuminga and Moody are two of four lottery picks this season to not yet have played 100 NBA minutes.
To answer this question, I looked at the broader one of how important early playing time is for the development of young prospects. This week's mailbag also answers questions about a possible rule change to prevent fouling while up three points at the end of games and the Los Angeles Lakers bringing back several players for their second stints with the team.
Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
"Given the Warriors' strong start, it seems unlikely that their two lottery rookies (Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody) and even their first pick last year (James Wiseman) will be able to get significant minutes this year. Given your projections, do you see these players being good if they are given a proper opportunity or do you see this more as a Darko Milicic situation where the players still won't succeed even with an excellent infrastructure around them?"
-- BH
One of the great unproven assumptions in NBA analysis is that young players need minutes to develop.
In 2013, I included this notion in my list of 10 key questions for statistical analysts to answer, which drew an enthusiastic response at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference from longtime NBA coach Stan Van Gundy -- a noted skeptic of the assumption.
"There's this idea that the way you develop players is you take these young guys on teams, and you just put them out there and you let them play a lot of minutes," Van Gundy said. "I'm not sure that works.
"I think what works is you have players understanding ... these are the things you need to do if you want to play, and if you won't do them, you won't play. That's a big part of player development. ... Guys can sit two or three years until they meet those standards, and then they will play better. I like guys that go into good teams. I think they develop into better players a lot faster than they go into these bad teams and just get all this playing time. I don't know how that's developing players. I really don't."
The challenge with this type of analysis is that playing time is typically well-explained by performance. Van Gundy hit on the valuable exception -- top young prospects who go to contending teams because of trades or season-to-season variance like we've seen with the Warriors. We can contrast this group to lower draft picks who go to rebuilding teams with more playing time available for rookies.
Looking at first-round picks between 2007 and 2017, their draft slot explained about 57% of the variation in their team's record during their rookie season. I focused on the exceptions, looking at the 25 players in either direction whose team's record was most different than what you'd expect based on where they were drafted.
The impact on how much playing time these groups saw as rookies is what you'd expect. Players who went to atypically poor teams averaged 1,140 minutes as rookies -- nearly 50% more than the group who went to atypically good teams (763), despite the fact the latter group was drafted slightly higher on average. But pretty quickly, that gap fades and then reverses.
By Year 3, the group of first-round picks on atypically good teams is playing 25% more minutes than their peers who started out on atypically bad teams, a difference that holds in Year 4 as well.
I don't think this necessarily suggests that a rookie playing a lot early is a bad thing, as Van Gundy suggested. Inevitably, it's easier for high draft picks to be on unexpectedly good teams rather than bad ones, so there are twice as many top-10 picks in the good team group, including No. 3 picks Jaylen Brown, James Harden and Jayson Tatum. It's not surprising this group would eventually be more productive in the NBA.
Beyond that, it's hardly like the group of players who got early playing time is filled with disappointments. It includes four All-Stars, highlighted by two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo and three-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert -- two of the most overachieving draft picks in NBA history.
However, it does seem clear that limited playing time did nothing to hold back the development of players such as Jimmy Butler (who played just 359 minutes as a rookie) and CJ McCollum (who didn't crack 1,000 minutes until his third NBA campaign, when he won Most Improved Player).
In the modern NBA, much of how players develop happens outside the 2.5 hours that games are played. Players are improving their skills in individual work and can get needed on-court reps in the G League.
As a result, I don't necessarily think there's reason to worry about the Warriors' draft picks. Wiseman could be an exception, in that he has played so little high-level basketball after his college career was limited to three games, but he did play 836 minutes as a rookie and is more likely to see rotation minutes this season than Kuminga and Moody once he is cleared to return from a knee surgery.
"Has it ever been considered that for shooting, intentional or penalty-situation fouls committed against the trailing team, they are given a choice of free throws or possession? How do you think this might change the game, and for better or worse?"
-- Kevin Ho, Singapore
The option of "declining the penalty" was mooted by TrueHoop's Henry Abbott several years ago and something I referenced when discussing possible solutions to mounting "Hack-a" intentional fouls on poor shooters back in 2015.
The big objection to the idea historically has been the need for trailing teams to have the ability to intentionally foul to get back in the game. And that makes your suggestion, which eliminates that concern by limiting the ability to decline to the team that trails, an interesting one. It essentially addresses one specific situation: defensive teams intentionally fouling with a three-point lead to prevent opponents from getting off a potential tying shot.
Although the fouling-up-three strategy isn't necessarily a great one (Ken Pomeroy has argued it's a worse one than simply playing defense at the NCAA level, while the NBA data studied by Wayne Winston in his book Mathletics was mixed on its effectiveness), enough coaches utilize it to deprive us of some exciting finishes -- particularly in situations where the trailing team is out of timeouts.
It's possible teams would still try to foul before a shot because there's no downside if executed successfully -- either the team accepts the two free throws, which the defense wants, or it acts as a foul to give by taking valuable time off the clock. Still, this idea is promising enough that I think it would be worth an NBA experiment.
"Six former Lakers on the roster. Is that the most former players on a team's roster ever in the NBA?"
Looks like it. The Lakers brought back six players who previously had played for the team this summer, signing five (Trevor Ariza, Kent Bazemore, Wayne Ellington, Dwight Howard, Rajon Rondo) as free agents and claiming a sixth (Avery Bradley) off waivers before the start of the season.
Technically, the method I used wouldn't find players who were on the roster but never appeared in a game that season, a category in which Ariza currently falls because he underwent an ankle debridement during training camp. Even without him, the Lakers' total of five matches the highest total I found for any previous team.
That record had been shared by the 1986-87 New Jersey Nets (James Bailey, Chris Engler, Kevin McKenna, Ray Williams and Mike Wilson) and 2012-13 New York Knicks (Earl Barron, Marcus Camby, Raymond Felton, Quentin Richardson and Kurt Thomas).
The Lakers hope getting the band back together will be as successful as it was for the Knicks, who went 54-28 in 2012-13 and notched their only playoff series win of the 21st century. Things did not go nearly as well for the 1986-87 Nets, who fell from 39-43 and a playoff spot to 24-58.