The Jalen Green Experience is Coming

Maybe the outliner should be that he was a rookie who was figuring things out and has started to turn the corner as the game slows for him. The moral of the story can be that you have to be patient with young people especially when you are trying to suck anyway

 

It’s both, players that were that bad usually don’t improve by this much. This would seem obvious, there are plenty of terrible rookies, if they all improved like this there would be no bad players.

 

Agreed that this tangent was irrelevant to the larger discussion.

As to Edwards, he improved 10%, but even when he was finished, he still wasn't good.....and he's not good this year either. That's why I don't like Edwards as the go to.

Sure he went from terrible to less terrible plus more volume, but Green went from terrible at basically everything to amazing offensively and less terrible defensively. IMO that's MUCH more impressive.

 

Honestly it's not that rare - it's just we haven't had a golden child rookie since Yao (who also started off really badly) and have no idea what the path is of someone who is talented but raw. I never paid much attention to the he's the most NBA ready and didn't expect him to light the league on fire from day one. Why? Because he's 19 years old. the G league isn't a proving ground but more like the college game anyway. Green basically had one year of college and there was going to be a transition process. When I saw him play, I didn't think - oh he's really bad. I saw hmmm, he needs to learn when to drive and finish and when to pass vs pulling up for a J. That's what I saw. That's what others saw. yet the narrative was - "he's so bad".

I feel like that's the new way of trying to rationalize the bad assessments people made.

It wasn't that Jalen Green was so much worse than expected, it was that people's ability to assess the situation was so much worse than expected.

 

So you spent the last 20-30 posts insulting anyone trying to correct you on TS%, but now that you've been corrected it's no longer relevant to the larger discussion?

The whole point of correcting you is because you made a patently false assertion, that Edwards did not improve like Green because all he did was improve his raw scoring numbers.

The reason why people brought up Edwards is because drastic mid-season improvement for rookies is not an anomaly to the league, and you tried to dismiss this point by claiming that Edwards never improved and only increased quantity but not quality of his shots.

 

Small sample size, still. A dozen games doesn't mean as much as 30+. Let's see if Jalen can keep it up for the rest of the season - I think and hope he can.

 

To keep things relatively consistent I pulled data for the same players I've been using. This is +/- data directly from basketball-reference.com, broken down to specific months and the number of games each player played within that month. The one thing I will call out is that I used NBA.com's +/- data for Jalen because basketball-reference.com did not have data for him.

Name	1st month	2nd month	3rd month	4th month	5th month	6th month	7th month
Bradley Beal	-39	-10.2	-12.8	3.8	4.2	6.9	19.4
Games Played	1	13	12	15	8	6	1
Zach Lavine	-40	-21.5	-12.5	-20.3	-12.7	-9.8	-14
Games Played	1	11	15	16	10	16	8
Devin Booker	6.3	4.3	-9.3	-13.5	-15.2	-9.2	2.4
Games Played	2	11	16	14	10	16	7
Darius Garland	-7.7	-9.6	-13.6	-4.8	-4.2	NA	NA
Games Played	4	15	14	15	11	NA	NA
Collin Sexton	-9.8	-10.5	-20.1	-19.9	-3.4	-9.9	-12.2
Games Played	7	14	16	15	10	15	5
Trae Young	-16.7	-14.7	-2.3	-3.1	-4.5	0	-8.4
Games Played	7	16	13	14	12	15	4
Jaylen Brown	-6.4	0	0.5	-9.8	-2.1	-12.4	9.2
Games Played	3	15	16	13	9	16	6
Anthony Edwards	-11.5	-8.8	-6.9	-7.1	-3	7.8	NA
Games Played	4	15	16	13	16	8	NA
Jalen Green	-12.8	-14.3	-1.3	-11.3	-7.8	-2.5	NA
Games Played	6	12	3	14	10	6	NA

As you can see, there's been players that have started out just as poorly as Jalen did. Through the first six games of his NBA career he had a +/- of -12.8. Players within +/- 1.28 (at least give me a 10% range to interpret the data) of -12.8 after six games were Trae Young and Anthony Edwards.

"Ha! See! It's rare! Only two people from your list started out as bad as he did!"

If you really want to focus on a small sample size of 6 games, sure. Moving onto the 2nd month in their rookie season, you get a bit more data. Now you can see the likes of Beal, Lavine, Garland, Sexton, and Young taking a beating as a rookie almost as bad as Green did. This actually continues well into the 3rd month where the same usual suspects are sporting a really bad +/- , only to now be joined by Devin Booker with a -9.3. Jalen only played 3 games in his 3rd month so you'll have to excuse me for not creating mass hysteria over his small +/- value.

Now we get into the 4th month (typically January but a couple of these players' seasons started later). In 14 games, Green has a +/- of 11.3, a pretty good improvement when compare to months 1 and 2. As you can see, Young, Garland, and Beal all showed similar improvements (e.g. Month 4 vs. Months 1 or 2).

Month 5 shows Jalen sporting a -7.8 over a 10 game period in February, which is a +3.5 difference when compare to the previous month. Really good but is it really "ridiculously rare"?

Month 5 vs 4 improvements:
Anthony Edwards: +4.1
Jaylen Brown: +7.7
Collin Sexton: +16.5
Zach Lavine: +7.6

So exactly half of my list of players showed about the same jump that Green showed from Month 4 (typically January) to Month 5 (typically February)

If we want to continue onto Month 6, we can but I'll call out the glaring fact that Green's sample size of 6 games is less than that of most of the players on my table...but....let's go check that tape. Green showed another improvement of +4.7 between Months 5 and 6.

Month 6 vs 5 improvements:
Anthony Edwards; +10.8
Trae Young: +4.5
Devin Booker: +6.0
Zach Lavine: +2.9

3 out of the 8 players I'm using showed just as good of an improvement as Jalen has during their respective rookie season. If you want to throw me a bone and include Lavine that's 4 out of 8 players used for comparison.

As for your Win Shares inquiry I wasn't sure what point you were making with that relative to Jalen Green's individual performance given that there's still time/games played for Jalen to increase his season-ending Win Share total so making comparisons now is irrelevant but....let's go check the tape.

Name	Ending season WS	Team Record
Bradley Beal	3	29-53
Zach Lavine	-0.02	16-66
Devin Booker	1.9	23-59
Darius Garland	-1.3	19-46
Collin Sexton	-0.6	19-63
Trae Young	3.3	23-59
Jaylen Brown	1.5	53-29
Anthony Edwards	0.8	23-49
Jalen Green	-0.2	17-49

As you can see, 3 out of the 8 players I used sported a negative win share by their respective season's end. But Jalen's WS value right now is -.2. What happens if he (or more correctly, the team) gets his WS value up to zero or a positive number? Wouldn't that put him in the company of the majority (5 out of 8)?

I think, collectively, we need to appreciate that the improvements he's made solidifies that Stone and the Rockets most likely made the right call in draft Green for what he could become. Based on the data I've exhaustively put together, that means Green is still trending or has potential to be, at the very least, a borderline All-Star (e.g. Edwards) or a bona fide All-Star like Beal, Lavine, Garland, Brown, Young, etc.

Sorry it took a while to get this out. Sometimes people like to call ad-hoc Friday meetings to put out fires at work.

 

Whatever. I don’t feel like I was wrong about Jalen since I pegged him as a high level scorer (but incapable of leading a team, like the Lavine, Beal and Bookers) from day one. But if it makes you guys feel better that “I was wrong” then have at it, I never cared much about that anyways which is funny reading people say it was all about “being right”. It was never about being right. It was about being miserable watching Rockets games because Green playing badly was a constant reminder of what could have been and who we could have had, and then the one rookie on the team I actually loved getting no minutes. I’m just glad that it is exciting to watch Rocket games again, I’m actually looking forward to it. Could care less who was right or wrong.

 

Amazing how much work it takes to hold a fool accountable

 

Look, I'm just saying that he was never so bad. Whether you eat crow or not matters nothing to me but yeah it matters a lot to others. Good that you can enjoy being a fan again. I do think Green will be a leader at the highest level. He has it in him.

 

LMAO

it’s been a while since I’ve seen a poster get embarrassed like this

this is why u can’t even take posters like bobby seriously

they act like they know what they’re talking about and everyone else is dumb, meanwhile the reality is that they don’t know sh*t and are incredibly ignorant

this is getting really embarrassing now

 

sheeesh

flamingdts, leave little bobby alone, he’s already dead

 

I can respect that for sure. Don't want to keep piling on - I appreciate you engaging and admitting where you had the metrics wrong.

 

Hello? 911? Yes, I’d like to report a dead body. ID says his name is booby, I believe he’s part of a Jalen Green hate group

 

You are using a sample of 9 guys, all specifically selected as players who started out bad and turned into good players, as proof that Green doing the same isn’t rare. I asked for a list of ALL the players who were negative ws or -4 bpm (within your criteria of rookie sg in the lottery), to see if these 9 guys are the norm or the outlier. That’s how we see if what Jalen is doing is rare or not.

 

Just so I don't keep pulling "incorrect" information, if I've shown you the respect and patience to pull the data on these players can you show me the same courtesy and get me the names of the players you want me to compare? I'll gladly do it.

 

Haven’t you heard, I’m eating a lot more than crow nowadays.

 

I think it's pretty sad to watch couple of the "adult" posters trashing on a 19 now 20 yr old kid. Pretty immature in my opinion. Like don't y'all have better things to do than to trash a kid for the way he talks or dresses? You can criticize his GAME when he isn't playing well. That's fair. But you better compliment him with the same energy you had trashing him when he's playing well. Also don't call us Jalen only fans for defending him because rational fans understands a rookie will have their ups and downs. Sorry, we as REAL Rockets fans want to see our rookies to play well. Those actively rooting against Jalen aren't real fans of this team. I've never seen fans of a team wanting their potential franchise piece to play badly just so they can "prove" a point. Unless you are trying to get an analytical/scouting job for an NBA team, no one cares if you are right or wrong. We are all here to kill time and be entertained. Some of y'all take things way too seriously.

 

This is what I come to clutchfans for. Love the data driven arguments.