Once again an award has been given by the NBA. And once again, the leading scorer eligible for the award is the winner. Tyreke Evans – who led all rookies with 1,450 points scored – has been named Rookie of the Year. Stephen Curry – who finished second in scoring – finished second in voting. And Brandon Jennings – the third leading scorer – finished third.
When we move past this one element in the box score and consider a player’s production of wins we see that Evans and Curry are… okay, they are still the top rookies. Curry produced 9.1 wins with a 0.151 WP48 [Wins Produced per 48 minutes]. And Evans produced 8.9 wins with a 0.159 WP48. So one could argue that either player was the most productive rookie, and therefore, this is not quite the familiar story we always see. Yes, the scorers were given the award. But since a scorer can produce wins, the writers would have come to the same conclusion whether they looked at scoring totals or all the elements of the box score.
At least, that’s true if you just look at Evans and Curry. If we move further down the list we see two scorers who are not as productive. The first is Jennings. Of those receiving any consideration for this award, Jennings is the only one still playing. Across the regular season, though, he only produced 3.8 wins with a 0.067 WP48. Yes, Jennings can score. But he is not yet producing wins in large quantities (at least, not in the regular season).
Jennings, though, is much more productive than Jonny Flynn. With the 6th pick in the 2008 NBA draft, the Minnesota Timberwolves selected Flynn. And although he finished fourth in scoring in this rookie class – and earned two third place votes for Rookie of the Year — Flynn finished the season with -1.4 Wins Produced and a -0.030 WP48.
It’s interesting to note that every rookie who received consideration for this award was drafted in the first round. DeJuan Blair produced 7.9 wins with a 0.255 WP48. And Jonas Jerebko produced 6.0 wins with a 0.128 WP48. Neither player, though, received even a third place vote for Rookie of the Year.
The voters focus on first round picks led me to wonder: How does the first round of the 2009 draft look now that we have seen these players for one year? For an answer we turn to Table One.
Table One: Reviewing the First Round of the 2009 Draft
From Table One we can see the Wins Produced and WP48 of each player taken in the first round (with the exception of those that did not play). As one can see, only four of the rookies taken in the top ten finished in the top ten in Wins Produced. Blake Griffin and Ricky Rubio didn’t get a chance to play. And the minutes of Hasheem Thabeet and Jordan Hill were limited. But DeMar DeRozen and Flynn, didn’t perform well. And given what each player did in college, this is not surprising.
When we look at the entire first round we do not see much of a link between where a player was drafted and his first year performance. In this small sample, the correlation coefficient is only -0.22. This is actually a similar result to what we report in Stumbling on Wins (where we looked at a much larger sample of players across more than just the first season of a player’s career). NBA productivity and draft position simply do not have a very strong link.
This is similar to what we see for quarterbacks in the NFL. The reasons, though, are different. Much of what we know about a quarterback before the draft (i.e. most college stats and the combine data) is not correlated with future performance. This means choosing quarterbacks on draft day is really quite difficult (more on this in a near future post). There is a relationship, though, between what players do in college and what they do in the NBA. It is not a perfect relationship. But there is a statistical link. Despite the link between college and professional performance, though, NBA decision-makers make more mistakes than expected on draft day.
Much of this is due to a very familiar story. Yes, too much emphasis is placed on scoring. Scorers like Jonny Flynn tend to go first. And these players don’t always produce many wins.
Let me close by noting again that scorers can certainly produce wins. Evans and Curry were the most productive rookies. And LeBron James – a very prolific scorer – was the both the Most Productive Player (MPP) and MVP. More on that story in a future post.
– DJ
The WoW Journal Comments Policy
Our research on the NBA was summarized HERE.
The Technical Notes at wagesofwins.com provides substantially 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
What Wins Produced Says and What It Does Not Say
Introducing PAWSmin — and a Defense of Box Score Statistics
Finally, A Guide to Evaluating Models contains useful hints on how to interpret and evaluate statistical models.
Wages of Wins Journal 
Russell
April 30, 2010
Question to anyone reading: Would you pick a player who plays less than 20 minutes a game but has a pretty incredible rookie WP48 of .255 to be the rookie of the year?
Arthur
April 30, 2010
I think it would depend on how he got to WP48. If he were injured for the first part of season they might vote for him if for instance he was a low draft pick, he scores a ton of points, and takes a non playoff team to a playoff birth.
I was curious how Evans and Curry were historically. I did find this link http://www.wagesofwins.com/WilliamsPaulNBA.html for Williams and Paul (2nd year) which puts them in about Williams range. I don’t know whether it is better to evaluate by age or number of years in the league.
Daniel
April 30, 2010
Last season, Kevin Love had very similar statistics to Blair’s this season, although Blair has a better fg %, hence his edge in WP48 (.255 to .208).
Blair’s rookie WP48 is right at the best of the last 5 years (Landry .258, Balkman .262), which isn’t surprising considering Blair’s college WS48 is the best of the last decade (from DraftExpress).
Tom Mandel
May 2, 2010
It’d be great to see the table extended to cover the 2d round as well.
Italian Stallion
May 2, 2010
Shouldn’t we be looking at the linkage between a player’s draft position and a longer term evaluation of how good he got.
I think a lot of GMs are not selecting players based on what they think the player will do the following year.
They are basically long term investors willing to pay more for a current dollar of earnings if they think the earning will rise significantly in the future. In other words, they pay up for younger, more athletic prospects with good character and work ethic if they think the ceiling is much higher etc….
So perhaps it might make sense to look at draft position and WP48 at age 24.
That way you don’t dismiss some 18-20 year old that was drafted early and didn’t perform well in his first year and don’t give too much credit to the 23 year old that was good right out of college but never got much better.
Italian Stallion
May 2, 2010
Durant is a perfect example of what I am saying.
Some people were mildly skeptical of the Durant draft after last season, but how is that selection looking now?
How might it look in another 2-3 years when he’s peaking?
brgulker
May 3, 2010
#
That way you don’t dismiss some 18-20 year old that was drafted early and didn’t perform well in his first year and don’t give too much credit to the 23 year old that was good right out of college but never got much better.
[…]
Durant is a perfect example of what I am saying.
Your argument only holds water if college numbers are ignored. IIRC, Flynn is producing what we might have expected had we looked at his college numbers — the proverbial “ceiling” simply isn’t that high. IIRC, Durant struggled during his first season, but he produced very well in college. His ceiling was higher, and he appears to be reaching it.
In other words, I don’t see what difference age makes. If a player stinks in college, why should anyone think he would be better in the NBA? There’s gotta be a logical fallacy in there somewhere.
Further, I’m not sure the prof is projecting. I think he’s simply evaluating. Flynn sucked last year, and that’s as far as the evaluation tends to go.
Tom Mandel
May 3, 2010
Obviously, you *can’t* look at how last year’s 1st rd. picks will do later — not yet.
As far as it goes, this table certainly supports the thesis of a weak link between *first round* draft position and performance. But, SoW claims a weak link for the draft as a whole.
It would be interesting to integrate the 2d round picks into this table, and to know more about the % of 2d round players who wind up playing in the league at all.
Tommy_Grand
May 3, 2010
Looks like Dallas got value out of the 25th pick. But I’d still rather have DaJuan Blair (taken #37). I think Blair will be remembered as one of the 8-9 best players in this draft when all is said and done.
Right now (i.e. after round one of the playoffs) there’s no doubt that Blair is the best rookie still playing + contributing.