FanPost

Rookies getting burn(ed)?

I've been walking around with the feeling for a while now. Are our rookies getting enough burn in their first year into the league? We've heard McHale say he didn't expect our nr3 pick to take over... Why not McHale? We've seen it happen before. No, not just Lebron, there was this kid way back, he was the first in over 20 years to get drafted straight out of high school...

So when I read the post on Corey I started wondering again if he had gotten enough burn. Decided to check out the numbers and here's what I found out.

First of all: here's my über-pro Excel graph: http://users.pandora.be/wolvenclaw/chart.gif

As you can see I've used the mpg stat from the last 4 drafts (not including 2008 since they haven't played yet). I averaged the mpg for the top 10 players and also included the average for the number 13, 14 and 15 picks, so we could have some comparison material for McCants.

The numbers are clear. My feeling seems to have been wrong. Our rookies are right up there with the averages. Especially if you take into account that the Top5 average was a good bit higher than the 5 to 10 average. Since our rookies weren't top5 picks we could even say they're scoring pretty high in mpg compared to their peers.

Also, both Foye and Mccants played their rookie years on a team that was supposed to be trying to make a push for the playoffs. So with plenty of veteran competition they still managed to get a good bunch of minutes.

Another thing that stood out to me is that most players that are successfull right now all got significant boosts in their 2nd year mpg-wise. There were a few exceptions with players that already had a high mpg-stat (Howard, Paul) and with some that only started to get minutes from their 3rd year on (Jefferson). Generally speaking though, players not getting big minutes in their second  year don't get more minutes in the coming years.
This again confirms that a players second year goes a long way of telling how the rest of the players career could turn out. There's a good chance by the end of the year we'll be talking about how nice it is that Brewer pulled it together .. or how much it bites he didn't.