HiRez wrote:The overall trend doesn't seem wrong. Because Kuminga did clearly trend up in the second half of the season, just as he is now trending sharply downwards, and the graph shows that. The graph shows Kuminga reached a peak and started declining about 10-15 games ago (the line appears to be a smoothed moving average that will be delayed from the data points). Seems about right. And honestly the entire team has been playing terrible defense lately.
Kuminga ranks #1 in PTS/36 and #7 in REB/36 among qualified rookies. Considering he's only 19 (Franz is almost 21) he's had a pretty spectacular season. Some bumps on both ends of the floor aren't unexpected and I think it's too soon to draw conclusions that he won't be good defensively in the future. If you had told be after the first couple months of the season that Kuminga would finish the season shooting over 30% from 3 and would be one of the top rookies in TS% and EFG% I'd have said you were nuts but here we are. And despite some pretty bad defensive performances, I feels like he was better than expected on that end as well. That said, Franz is definitely better right now and has been all year. But Kuminga's future looks bright if he can hold onto the ball.
Pts and rebounds isn't a way to track effectiveness though. Certainly isn't predictive.
He was, and still is theoretically, good in the Paschall role right now. He's literally been his best when he's playing smallball C and can just run through defenses, typically backup defenses. And that's fine, like you said - a very fine marker for an upside player. But, that's not what we're looking for long-term. We're looking for a guy who's a forward, either SF or PF, and he's struggled tremendously when asked to do that. And that's offensively too, which tracks - Draymond and Looney are a bit of lane-cloggers and Kuminga struggles to make a play or score effectively off the drive when there's traffic.
And that's why I have concern for his fit long-term. If you take away the lineups where he plays smallball C, which is his future here, he's been really bad for the most part. Conversely, Franz is in his natural position and has been excellent and trending up. While I'm not nearly as bullish as some are here when citing superstar names with Kuminga, the point was more that Franz has been excellent and still has realistic, achievable potential.
Example: Franz takes about 2 pullups per game, his eFG is 45%. Pretty low - but it is trending upwards since the start of the season. Considering he's hitting 39% of his 3s when wide open and 32% when he's pulling up, the likelihood that these numbers improve is very achievable, or 'realistic potential'
Kuminga on the other hand has taken a total of 27 pull-up jumpers this season, and even that is a bit of a stretch. Because I can't recall a single pull up 3, but I have seen him dribble once and take a wide open 3 because the defense left him.. but it still technically counts as a pull up (to be fair, I have no idea how many shots like that Wagner has taken). And Kuminga's eFG is 27.3% on those shots. He's hitting 32.7% in wide open 3s, so is there potential there? Maybe, but its pretty far off as of now. That's more 'potential potential'.
So the short version is: Kuminga has been fine for us as a draft pick. He's nowhere near a finished product and has some very bright red flags that need to get sorted, but he's not like some busted pick. However, Franz Wagner has been excellent, is trending up, is much better right now and fits our system to a T. We'd be much happier with Franz, and the likelihood that Kuminga catches up with him in a 5 year window is unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. And even if you want to use the 9 year window to evaluate prospects, the 5 year window is far more relevant to us because of our contention timeline
