Re: The Detroit Pistons- Someday, we will rise again!
Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 5:53 pm
Stern must have been pressured. He's the weakest of the commishes. He'll fold.
Andre Drummond put up 18 points and 18 rebounds in just 28 minutes on Tuesday, the latest in a series of big stat lines in short minutes for the 19-year-old rookie. Pistons fans, enduring what looks like a fourth straight season without De-troit Bas-ket-ball in the postseason, are clamoring to see more of the prodigiously talented young center -- and to make their case, they point to his stats.
Yet on the national scene, it's hard for a guy averaging 7.5 points and 7.7 rebounds per game to make a big impression while coming off the bench for a team that's never on ESPN or TNT. A few dunks, a few YouTube clips, sure -- but lots of players have those items on their résumé.
At just 20 minutes per game, it's hard to get folks to take Drummond seriously as a rookie of the year candidate or as player who matters much. What's so great about averaging 8 and 8 for a bad team?
Here's the thing: When we dig just below the surface, we can see the numbers suggest the NBA's next great center may be disguised as a role player for a lottery team. In fact, Drummond's first 46 games have put him in the conversation with Dwight Howard and Shaquille O'Neal.
Yes, Shaq. The Big Penguin could become Superman III.
So what's going on in the Palace?
The way Detroit uses Drummond puts the lie to a basketball truism, which is that the best players play the most minutes. The relationship between performance and playing time isn't perfect, which is why statistical analysts look at per-minute or per-possession stats to put players on a level playing field. Still, it's hard to find examples of players who combine elite performance with limited minutes the way Drummond has during his rookie season.
Let's take a look specifically at rookies. I've charted win percentage, the per-minute version of my WARP ratings, against minutes per game for every rookie with at least 500 minutes played dating back to 1979-80, the first season of the three-point line.
In this chart, the vertical line shows production and the horizontal line shows minutes. For instance, David Robinson had fantastic production as a 24-year-old rookie in 37 minutes per game, while Tim Duncan, as a 21-year-old rookie, produced a little less than Robinson per minute, but played even more (39 minutes per game).
Most of the rookies, as you can see, cluster around a normal range of playing time and performance. But it's easy to see on this chart that Drummond is producing at an elite level while getting relatively little playing time.
So why hasn't Drummond played more minutes? Only Pistons coach Lawrence Frank can really answer that question, and from his replies to the frequent queries from observers in Detroit, it seems there that are several reasons. For one thing, like most other teenagers, Drummond is prone to occasional defensive lapses. Furthermore, Drummond's high-energy style of play can tire him out.
But the biggest problem is that Drummond plays more or less the same position as Detroit's top veteran, Greg Monroe, although their skills might be complementary -- Frank has slowly ramped up their minutes together with positive results.
Drummond skeptics can point to the way Frank has used his young center as the reason for his success. He mostly plays against other backups, for example. Yet, as logical as this argument sounds on the surface, the evidence says it's really not -- research has generally found that strong performance in a smaller role does not decline when players ramp up their minutes.
This was one of the main points made over the years by John Hollinger, who showed in "Pro Basketball Prospectus 2002-03" that players were actually more effective when their minutes increased due to factors outside their control, like injuries to teammates. Several years later, Tom Ziller of SBNation.com and I updated that study and found similar results.
We even coined a term for the theory -- the Millsap Doctrine, named after the Utah Jazz forward.
Back then, Paul Millsap was still playing behind Carlos Boozer. Now he's a veteran starter, and his prodigious play off the bench has been just as great as the numbers predicted it would be. In fact, Millsap's best two seasons have been the last two -- as a starter.
A similar story has played out this season in Houston. The Rockets signed Omer Asik to a lavish contract as a restricted free agent on the strength of his strong performance behind Joakim Noah in Chicago. As a full-time starter, Asik has more than doubled his minutes per game (from 14.7 mpg to about 30). Aside from a curious drop in his blocked shot rate, Asik's stats per possession have increased across the board. He's grabbing more rebounds, shooting more frequently and making a better percentage of his shots, and he has cut down on his fouls.
There are no guarantees in life, and there is no guarantee Drummond will play just as well when he becomes a starter. But there's also no particular need to be skeptical of his statistics just because they have come in limited minutes.
Actually, the biggest reason Drummond might come back to Earth is simply because he's playing at such an incredible level -- a level reached by very few rookies, regardless of their minutes. Drummond's combination of a high shooting percentage (he's one of a handful of NBA players shooting better than 60 percent from the field), dominant rebounding and lots of blocks and steals is catnip for advanced metrics.
Drummond's PER ranks 12th among rookies in NBA history according to Basketball-Reference.com, which estimates ratings for players before full box-score stats were tracked starting in 1978. The list of names ahead of him is littered with Hall of Famers, most of them much older when they debuted because they spent four years in college. In fact, as Tom Haberstroh wrote here recently, he's outplaying every other teenager in NBA history.
In the WARP era, Drummond trails just three rookies in per-minute productivity: Michael Jordan, David Robinson and Arvydas Sabonis. The Lithuanian center occupies a similar spot to Drummond's on the chart above, but that comes with a catch -- Sabonis was already 30, a Euroleague MVP and an Olympic gold medalist by the time he arrived in the NBA. (Sabonis had also dealt with injuries, which is why Portland kept his minutes low despite how well he played.) At age 24, Robinson was also old for a rookie -- he served two years in the Navy before joining the Spurs.
That leaves just one center in NBA history who has been as instantly productive as Drummond at a similar age. No, it's not Dwight Howard, whom Haberstroh rightly compared to Drummond; it took Howard until his third season to push his PER above 20. Instead, Drummond might be most similar to Shaquille O'Neal as a rookie.
Comparing Stats: Drummond, Howard and O'Neal
Player Pts/36 2P% FT% TS% Usage Reb% Blk% Win% PER
Drummond
13.3
.604
.385
.579
.165
.215
.064
.719
22.8
Howard
13.2
.521
.671
.571
.168
.172
.036
.556
17.2
O'Neal
22.2
.562
.592
.584
.270
.202
.057
.710
22.9
Drummond can't match Shaq's prowess in the low post -- Drummond isn't nearly so skilled or physically dominant (O'Neal has three inches on Drummond, who is listed at 6-10). As with a young Howard, most of Drummond's scoring comes off other players setting him up. And somehow he makes both Howard and O'Neal, known for their free throw follies, look like Steve Nash at the charity stripe.
But the rest of his stat line compares favorably to O'Neal's rookie season -- when Shaq was a year and a half older and had two additional seasons of NCAA experience to polish his game.
As his role grows, Drummond must chart his own path. Maybe he won't get there. But the way he's played so far calls for comparisons to some of the best centers in the NBA over the past three decades. That's heady stuff for a 19-year-old, especially one coming off the bench.
