Lessons learned from the 2020 NBA Draft prior to the 2021 edition
How do we evaluate the skills of draft prospects? How should we? Prez details how the 2020 NBA Draft provided some valuable insight on prospect evaluation for 2021 and beyond.
Welcome to the kick-off of The Strickland's 2021 NBA Draft cycle! We were fortunate to launch the website on lottery day last year, so the draft coverage was a big part of our humble beginnings. As the wonderful 2021 season began, we were even more excited for our second go around — after all, the Knicks hold two first round picks this year (their own and Dallas’ pick) as well as the Pistons’ second rounder (pick 32). And even one more pick in the late 50s on top of that. That’s quite a few reasons to be excited about the draft!
However, the year was full of surprises, and we realized fairly quickly that the Knicks’ new front office was not destined for a top-five pick in 2021. Hell, my way-too-early preview focused solely on guys with lottery potential. As the Knicks' new reality — not just competence, but competitiveness — began to dawn on us, we realized our dreams of another top-five pick were just that — dreams.
However, the emergence of Immanuel Quickley was more than a consolation prize — a top talent, a needle in the haystack that is the end of the first round. That, coupled with the slow start and furious finish of Obi Toppin’s first professional year, illustrated why draft analysis is as much art as science. It also underscored why it is important to not only show your work, but check your work. What lessons did we learn from our misses? Are some players good but for different reasons than we expected? Is a player like Obi starting slowly an indictment of Obi, or of the Knicks, or of our own expectations? How did so many miss on Quickley, and why? There are lessons to be learned, and we gon’ learn today. This article is to get Knicks fans who don’t have multiple group chats dedicated to NBA prospects ready for the 2021 draft. Let’s get into it.
Think hard about a prospect’s context
If you frequent the weird corner of the internet known as “Draft Twitter,” you have probably heard a lot about the idea of a prospect’s “context.” What that means, usually, is the on-court situation a player is in and whether or not it is beneficial to that player’s skill set, development, or production. In college (or abroad or in the G League), situations can make a prospect look different than they might look in the NBA. It’s not even always a question of looking better or worse (though sometimes it is), but a question of looking different.
Some quick examples from the last draft, which provided some powerful lessons in the role of context:
Our own Obi Toppin. At Dayton he played the 5 full time in a spread out offense, in a conference where he rarely was at a strength disadvantage. In the NBA, because of his size and defensive skill set, he is more cut out to play the 4, is often at a strength disadvantage in the post, and has less space to operate. In college, there was more space for him in the lane; in New York, Nerlens Noel and Elfrid Payton often brought more defenders to the rim. Finally, for most of the year a play finisher in college didn’t have a real facilitating point guard, or a coach willing to use him in pick-and-rolls.
LaMelo Ball, the Rookie of the Year. People harped on his bad numbers playing for the Illawarra Hawks, with little understanding of the context. It was more than simply the fact that he competed against adults — he also played on a terrible team, bereft of playmakers outside of Aaron Brooks, who got hurt midseason. It’s no accident he was the only player with a positive net rating. People also made the odd assumption that he would take the same insane shot diet he took in the NBL in the NBA, despite literally no NBA player having a remotely similar shot diet.
Perhaps the biggest series of examples of the importance of context are all the Kentucky players we’ve seen morph their games in the NBA beyond what they showed in college. Karl-Anthony Towns shooting threes, Devin Booker’s creation chops, Tyler Herro’s scoring and shooting, our own Immanuel Quickley’s shot making, etc.
How skills intersect matters
The most blunt, straightforward way I can put this lesson is as follows: for some offensive skills to translate, they need to be complemented by other skills present at certain thresholds.
A player can be an incredible shooter, even off the dribble. Take Jimmer Fredette. A great, great shooter, but didn’t have the size or handle to do anything other than take spot-up threes, and his value there was far outweighed by his defensive ineptitude, so he’s out of the league.
Take Kristaps Porzingis! An incredible shooter, and even (when healthy) an impactful rim protector. But even when healthy, he never reached the potential many thought he had because he doesn’t have the build or speed to take advantage of mismatches or create efficient shots. So in many ways, he was less than the sum of his considerable top two skills (3-point shooting and shot blocking).
Marvin Bagley is another example: quick-twitch athleticism, great rebounder, speedy face-up scorer. But he doesn’t have the offensive versatility to play the 4, nor the rim protection to play the 5. Less than the sum of the considerable parts, at least so far.
Two more examples to drive things home:
First: Deni Avdija, the Wizards’ big rookie wing, a divisive draft prospect last year. Deni’s best skill was always his pick-and-roll passing, arguably the best at making all those PnR reads in the entire class outside of LaMelo. Because big playmaking scoring wings are always en vogue, some analysts were quite high on him. The problem is, in the NBA you’re rarely going to get chances to create and run the pick-and-roll — even with bench units — as charity. You have to earn it by being a pull-up threat (like, say, Quickley) or being a driving threat (like, say, Ricky Rubio). You don’t need to be both, but you need to be one of them, usually. Deni is neither. Even if he shot passably well from three (he didn’t), he’s not an off-the-dribble threat, so it wouldn’t allow him to leverage his playmaking.
And second, Immanuel Quickley! He was lumped in with, in the words of one analyst, “small, shootery guards' pre-draft. Despite college success, he didn’t show an appetite for driving to the rim often, or finishing when he did get there. All the elite shooting in the world doesn’t matter as much if defenses can chase you over a screen and off the line, and most of the aforementioned small, shootery guards can’t create much inside the arc. Except Quickley, who complemented elite off-the-dribble shooting with a great floater. Without that floater, he’d be dead in the water when chased off a screen since he currently can’t get to and finish at the rim. And even with that floater, if Quickley did not have an improved handle to dribble into threes and to dribble around screens into floaters, he’d be much less impactful. Those three skills (pull-up, passable handle, floater) work together to make an otherwise fatal flaw (awful finishing and poor driving together) much less detrimental.
The Ultimate Question: What does a player need to flourish?
Oftentimes we will watch highly regarded young players fail to develop from afar and wonder what went wrong, or watch unexpected success stories marvel at what we must have missed. Truth is, though, that binary oversimplifies things. What might prospects have been in different situations? With different teammates, coaches, trainers, off-court support systems? Hell, we’ve seen it with the Knicks! Frank Ntilikina got jerked around and mismanaged for years, and if the Knicks never moved on from Fizdale and Friends, RJ Barrett still might not be allowed to break in the newer shooting mechanics that led him to shoot 40% from three.
Recognizing all of the things that go into a player’s development — into turning weaknesses into strengths — is important, because not all weaknesses are equally hard to fix, and not all weaknesses are fixable by a player’s sheer willpower and dedication alone.
Getting a skinny guy to gain weight, or a heavy guy to shed a few pounds, is easier than turning a 60% free throw shooter into an 80% free throw shooter, or turning a player with quick feet and long arms but bad prior coaching into a disciplined help defender... and not just because becoming a shooter or disciplined defender is naturally hard, but because you need certain coaches and assistant coaches to help you out, you need game and practice reps, you need to change muscle memory for micro skills, etc. This shit can get complicated, so it’s important to consider when looking at 17-, 18-, and 19-year-old prospects.
Accordingly, my biggest change in analysis this year is simply asking: what does Player X need to succeed? Ironically, the 2020 class actually provided many great examples of why this question is so helpful. I want to focus on two, as examples of how useful it can be to ask “what do they need to succeed?”
Tyrese Haliburton
Many were high on him because of his exceptional 3-point shooting and tremendous efficiency stats. His biggest flaws to many, including me, were the combination of 1) inability to get into the paint, and 2) shooting mechanics not viewed as conducive to pull-up shooting.
In retrospect, those issues were viewed as similarly difficult to improve. Both problems require tighter handle, but to be a pull-up shooter, you don't need Jamal Crawford’s handle... you need to be able to go from one or two dribbles to a shooting motion. It’s not guaranteed — otherwise many catch-and-shoot guys would become pull-up guys — but it’s not as hard as, say, asking a non-shooter to shoot 40% on volume. After all, you’re not asking Tyrese to become Dame Lillard, merely to be able to take one dribble and pop if defenders go under a screen.
So what would it take for him to develop that one-dribble-to-ball-transfer combo? Certainly not outlier development, since he wasn’t a complete non-ball-handler. It would take good development staff, time to work on his handle, and him to not have constant pressure running the offense. Reasonable asks!
What else did pre-draft talk say he needed? A roster to let him focus on passing, spot-up shooting, and 1-3 dribble creation. He needed to play with a lead guard, perhaps more than one ball handler. And smartly, Hali and his agents engineered a “fall” to the Kings where he could play next to De'Aaron Fox as well as Buddy Hield and Harrison Barnes, a great infrastructure for his skill set.
So to summarize, Tyrese needed 1) small ball handling improvements, at least enough to get into his good jumper, 2) ideally (more long term) needed major ball handling to become a drive threat, and 3) needed a specific team infrastructure to allow him to slowly work his way into improving those. He ended up making the improvements for No. 1, and got the team infrastructure for No. 3 in one year, as both were fairly low-hanging fruits. Both of those were good bets to happen in retrospect.
Isaac Okoro
We know the sales pitch on Okoro: strong kid, great defender, powerful athlete and finisher, willing and capable passer, awful shooter, shaky ball handler. When people wrote about the ceiling outcomes for Okoro, they usually involved not only him becoming a good shooter, but him being able to utilize his passing to create for others, and him being able to create off the bounce and take advantage of his strength and finishing.
So, for each of those developmental “asks,” let’s go through what it would take to happen.
First, the shooting. College is a small sample but it is rather unlikely someone with his numbers in college (67% FT%, 28% 3P%, 18% 2P% on jumpers, .28 3-point rate) becomes a good shooter, much less a great one. But his form isn’t the worst, so we know what it would take here: the right tweaks, reps, and consistency. Not an impossible task, but not an easy or guaranteed one, either. Not a low-hanging fruit.
Second, him using his passing to create for others. He has the vision, but he needs the ball handling and to be a scoring threat to really bend defenses even a little. Ball handling usually takes two to three years to go from bad to decent (hi, Frank) or passable to solid (hi, IQ), so that’s a long-term goal that is pretty difficult, but not impossible. Wouldn’t call it a low-hanging fruit, especially since for him it has to be coupled with him being a scoring threat.
However, there can be mitigating factors — things teams and coaches do to help. Some are more sustainable than others. For example, the Cavs let Okoro run point every game a bit during the end of their tank-fest, allowing him to get reps ball handling and practice creating for others even though he wasn’t a real scoring threat. They also got him in more motion, similar to what Thibs did with RJ, to help artificially create dribble situations where he could bend a defense. The latter is probably more sustainable than the former though, since only a tanking team would afford Okoro point guard minutes. But did it help? Probably!
What does this mean for the Knicks?
So Okoro’s developmental asks, for higher ceiling outcomes, are — to me — a lot tougher to accomplish than what Haliburton needed. Of course, the question of which ceiling is higher, floors, etc., is an entirely different debate, and I’ve spilled enough words today on all this. But my point is this: when looking at prospects we should look at their areas for improvement through the lens of what needs to happen for said improvement. We should look at historical trends in how quickly different improvements happen, we should look at what the players themselves can do to make that happen, and what the coaches and teams — both in practice and in games — can do to make that happen. By asking those questions, a front office — or at least fans on Twitter — can better see the path to upside, or even competence, for various prospects.
