In the wake of my story last month looking at how Nikola Jokic slipped to the second round before developing into a two-time MVP, in part because of his highlight-reel ability as a distributor, a reader wondered how big a factor Jokic's passing was in that equation.
As good as Jokic is as a shot-maker and rebounder, it's his court vision that truly separates him as a star. Jokic came within 0.2 assists per game of averaging a triple-double in the regular season before narrowly missing in the playoffs as well. Jokic isn't the only top passer from the frontcourt taken in the second round, as Draymond Green fits that criteria as well. Let's dig deeper into whether this is a trend or if Green and Jokic are simply outliers.
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.
In addition to the main question, this week's mailbag also answers your questions on the most difficult teams for NBA Immaculate Grid and the career-altering injury that affected the most championships.
"Is part of the [Jokic] story maybe that elite passing is a skill that is either harder to judge or is maybe just less valuable at lower levels of play, whereas at the NBA level it's one of the most valuable offensive skills a player can have?"
-- @zgeballe
My first thought here was to look at where the players with the highest assist rates in modern NBA history were drafted. There have been 31 players drafted since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976 who have averaged at least 10 assists per 36 minutes in a season in which they qualified for league leaderboards. Of them, 12 -- nearly 40% -- were taken in the top five, including No. 1 overall picks LeBron James (2003), Magic Johnson (1979), John Lucas (1976) and John Wall (2010).
At the other end of the spectrum, five of these 31 players were taken in the second round: Green (No. 35), Jokic (No. 41), Nate McMillan (No. 30), Doc Rivers (No. 31) and Johnny Moore (No. 43). Among the guards, I'm not sure there's a common theme besides future coaching success.
Rivers was more of a score-first guard at Marquette than the setup man he became in the NBA, but Moore was an elite playmaker (he remains Texas' all-time assists leader) and McMillan was a quality passer who dropped because of concerns about whether he could shoot and score at the NBA level.
Even if we look at first-round picks who went later than they should have, including Hall of Famers Steve Nash (No. 15) and John Stockton (No. 16) and All-Star Rajon Rondo (No. 21), I don't think there was ever much question about their playmaking or its value at lower levels.
That leaves the big men, Green and Jokic. It's interesting that neither of them posted outstanding assist rates before coming to the NBA. Green averaged 4.1 APG as a junior at Michigan State, leading the team but still nowhere close to the 8.9 assists he peaked at in 2020-21. Jokic, meanwhile, peaked at 3.5 APG in 2014-15, when he won MVP of the Adriatic League the year after being drafted by the Nuggets in the second round.
Certainly, Jokic still showcased the ability to make next-level passes. In a 2021 feature by ESPN's Ohm Youngmisuk, then-Denver president of basketball operations Tim Connelly recalled asking Jokic why he wasn't seeing those same kind of dimes early in his NBA career. But it does seem Jokic's passing was a smaller part of his value before the NBA.
You could add Marc Gasol to this group, too. Although Gasol never had the kind of assist totals Green and Jokic put up in the NBA (he topped out at 4.6 APG), he was another second-round pick whose passing ability wasn't as evident statistically before coming to the league. In his breakthrough campaign with Girona after being drafted, Gasol averaged 2.3 APG in Spanish ACB play.
Given those examples, I do think there's something to the hypothesis if we confine it to big men. Whether non-NBA teams are less equipped to highlight their passing skills or they haven't been fully developed early in their careers, it does seem like it's more difficult to predict just how good big men will be as NBA distributors.
"Which combination of teams is most difficult to answer in the NBA Immaculate Grid game?"
-- Dan Feldman
In case you haven't seen it, Immaculate Grid started as a daily baseball trivia game in which users find players who played for both sets of teams in the horizontal and vertical intersections of a three-by-three grid (or fit other criteria). Earlier this week, Sports-Reference rolled out an NBA version. Previously, there had been a few NBA imitators, including Hoopgrids.com (which does not limit players to nine guesses like the original) and at Crossovergrid.com alongside multiple other sports.
Naturally, some teams are easier to pick than others. At the high end, 95 players have appeared in a regular-season game for both the Atlanta Hawks and Detroit Pistons, counting those franchises' previous homes (Tri-Cities, Milwaukee and St. Louis for the Hawks, Fort Wayne for the Pistons). Undoubtedly the best grids answer for these teams is Rasheed Wallace, who famously played one game in Atlanta between the trade that brought him from the Portland Trail Blazers and the one that sent him on to Detroit, where he won a championship that season.
How about the low end? Here are the bottom five teams in terms of connections, along with some additional criteria (All-Star, in this case, means with at least one of the involved teams).
All of the top (or bottom) three are strong contenders for the toughest pair. Naturally, the total number of connections isn't as important as the most memorable one. The Charlotte Hornets and Utah Jazz, for example, have just 18 players in common. However, one of them is Gordon Hayward, an All-Star with the Jazz who's a current member of the Hornets. So they seem easy to get.
Although there's no former Utah player currently on the New Orleans roster or vice versa, there are a few recent connections, so I'd put them in a different tier from Indiana-Memphis and Detroit-New Orleans.
Ultimately, I'm going with the Pistons and Pelicans -- who have the fewest overall players because the Charlotte Hornets reclaimed their pre-move history -- as the most difficult teams to connect. There are a couple of recent prominent players who played for both teams, Jameer Nelson and Josh Smith, but neither of them is particularly associated with New Orleans. Remarkably, no player has played at least 100 games with both teams, with journeyman Frank Jackson (93 in Detroit) coming closest.
"Which premature early decline/retirement likely affected the most NBA championships, assuming the player would have aged as expected without decline?"
This question included a number of possibilities. For the most part, I'm not sure they actually affected championships given the high bar to get there. For example, one of the suggestions was Magic Johnson, who was forced into (temporary) retirement at age 32 in 1991 after his HIV diagnosis. Although the Lakers had just reached the NBA Finals, they were much older than the Chicago Bulls, who would have remained the favorites going forward after winning in 1991.
I suppose the cop-out answer here is Michael Jordan's first retirement in 1993, although that doesn't fit the spirit of the question. I see two legitimate choices. The more tragic one is Len Bias' death two days after being drafted No. 2 overall by the defending champion Boston Celtics in 1986. Boston would go on to lose the Finals to the Lakers in 1987.
It's certainly possible, as Bill Simmons wrote in "The Book of Basketball," that adding Bias to the core of Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish would have eased the load on the Celtics' veterans and extended their prime. As Bias ascended, he also could have offset some of Bird's injury-related decline in the late 1980s. Still, that's a bit speculative given we never got to see how Bias' game would have translated in the NBA.
The best answer is probably Bill Walton's navicular fracture in 1978. The defending champion Portland Trail Blazers were famously 50-10 at the time, having built a big enough cushion that they still had home-court advantage throughout the playoffs despite going 8-14 to finish the season without Walton -- who won MVP anyway.
Remember, the 1976-77 Blazers were the youngest champion in league history when players' ages are weighted by minutes played. The oldest player in their top five in playoff minutes was Maurice Lucas, who was 25 at the time. It's possible contract issues might still have ripped the Portland core apart, but the Blazers could have replaced role players if they had Walton anchoring everything through his prime.
Instead, Walton refractured the bone when he returned for the 1978 playoffs, Portland lost to the Seattle SuperSonics and Walton never played for the team again. The Blazers might have had a hard time staying on top of the league after the 1980s dynasties rolled in, but they would have been heavy favorites to win in both 1978 and 1979 with a healthy Walton.