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Lamelo ball stts4/10/2023 How he continues to improve and play while growing into a larger role as a secondary creator next to De’Aaron Fox is key. His usage is the lowest among the rookies he’s in company with above, but as we also saw, it’d be a big surprise to not see his usage grow over time. And that’s no slight on Haliburton! From the table, he’s been great so far and has the makings of a star-potential career ahead of him. But it goes back to the point above as you take on more usage, the harder it is to be an effective shotmaking and impactful player. Well, hello, Tyrese Haliburton! It almost seems unfair to go through this whole article only discussing LaMelo in the context of great rookie seasons as Haliburton has also been fantastic so far. Self-created 3-point percentage is on shots after holding the ball for two or more seconds. With this broad sense of ceiling-raising categories, below are rookie guards from the tracking era to see how LaMelo stacks up.įor passing usage, I take a similar approach to Seth’s playmaking usage, but instead add passes that are recorded as “hockey assists”, or in other words a pass that leads to an assisted pass. They also need to maintain high passing usages and find good looks for teammates as the degree of shot difficulty goes up when they take on more usage. Star players in the modern game need to be able to create their own shots from pull-up jump-shooting to finishing effectively at the rim/drawing fouls. For a rookie guard entering the league, it’s important to have certain modern elements to their game, or else that can potentially cap their ceiling. The game has changed and more stylistic approaches are being made that signal how we value and perceive rookies. However, we have been looking through the lens of all-encompassing box score measures in OBPM and usage to measure how unprecedented it is for a rookie. Utilizing OBPM again this can be illustrated below with the distribution showing the progression of rookies, sophomores, third-year players, and so on.Īll in all, LaMelo has stood out amongst having one of the best rookie seasons in recent memory while maintaining a very high usage. However, one fact remains the same rookies are just not good. The league has been trending in this direction as more high-profile rookies are taking on massive usage rates from the get-go. They can’t rely on the easy looks generated by teammates. As Seth also points out, players are forced into more difficult “star” shots as their usage increases. This is the case except for unique situations, defined by Seth Partnow of The Athletic, in the heliocentrism era such as Luka Doncic and Trae Young. While usage and OBPM are clearly correlated, maintaining that level of play with more usage flowing through the player is inherently difficult especially for a rookie. That’s pretty good company and all while maintaining an above-average usage rate. While not in the upper echelon of all-time great rookies according to OBPM that include players like Michael Jordan, Luka Doncic, Kyrie Irving, David Robinson, and Vince Carter, LaMelo does find himself among names like Damian Lillard, Brandon Roy, Stephon Marbury, Grant Hill, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Below is a plot of OBPM and usage rate for all rookies with at least 900 minutes played since the 1979-80 season. Specifically, we’ll look at Offensive BPM due to BPM being less trustworthy on the defensive side, largely being driven by block and steal rates. We would prefer to look at one of the former metrics but in terms of looking for a proxy that can capture an estimate to how well a player is playing, less on the measured impact a player is having, BPM will serve its purpose. More modern impact metrics (LEBRON, RAPTOR, RPM) are only available for the tracking era (back to 2013-14), whereas since BPM 2.0 is calculated only using box score statistics we can go back as far back as we like. How does LaMelo Ball compare to some of the greatest NBA rookies ever? WwTtO9BqfEīut how good of a season is he actually having? In what historical context does he sit? To answer this, we’ll look at Box Plus-Minus 2.0 by Daniel Myers from 1980 to see where LaMelo stacks up among some of the greatest rookie seasons ever.
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