awolfinwater wrote:payitforward wrote:Whoa, hold on there. If you're going to look at a guy's numbers & compare them either to another player's numbers or to some kind of "norm," you cannot isolate his hottest streak & say -- "here's a reason to think about drafting him."
The simple response to that is for someone to point at a different segment of his year, his coldest streak, & say -- "here's a reason to forget about drafting him."
Sure I can look at how he ended the season in NCAA. I would call it reckless not to look at how each player progressed over the year....
You bet! I would never suggest otherwise.
My comment was that "you cannot isolate his hottest streak" -- wherever it came! (we're seeing the same thing in comments about Black -- except in his case he was "better" early) -- & say, "see, that's who he really is; draft him b/c of that."
I mean... one can do that, of course. But, I'd be willing to bet that if you tracked that over a few players, you'd see a pretty high failed-prediction rate. But, that's not a point about Kobe Bufkin (or any player). & it wasn't a criticism of you either, for that matter. Just a reminder of the common human desire to isolate & favor data that confirms a thesis one finds appealing for any reason. Kobe Bufkin may turn out great or sink like a rock. Who the h#ll knows?
awolfinwater wrote:In this case, I did cherry pick a little bit but was focused on how Bufkin finished the season during peak B10 play.
For more apples-to-apples, I ran a 7-game moving average of TS% for Bufkin, Black, Dick, and Wallace to get a sense of if they progressed or any other patterns that qualitative data can help explain. Each other player tended to drift down as the season progressed except in the case of Bufkin, you can clearly see a dip mid-season and return to peak form to close out year.
Why the dip mid season? Injury? Coaching? Personal? Depending on what I hear and learn would better inform my decision on his NBA potential....
See what I mean?
You didn't ask why the "drift down" by e.g. Black, Dick or Wallace. Instead you asked for a way to explain (hopefully to explain away) Bufkin's "dip mid-season."That's a perfectly reasonable thing to investigate, of course. As it would be to investigate the other guys' late-season dips. In fact, it would be sensible to investigate all of those phenomena & any other that impacted any guy's overall performance. & once you got into it, you might do just that.
The truth is that it's a long shot for any one of those guys to turn out to be a really good NBA player. But that's not about the particular group this year.
It's also a long shot for you, me, or any among us to pick the winner, as it were. Despite high intelligence & passionate convictions.
H#ll, it's a lot more significant for an NBA franchise to pick the winner at #8 than it is for you or me. Yet, FOs took:
Brandon Knight in 2011, leaving Kawhi Leonard on the board
Terrence Ross in 2012, leaving Draymond Green on the board
KCP in 2013, leaving Giannis on the board
Nik Stauskas in 2014, leaving Zach Lavine on the board
Stanley Johnson in 2015, leaving Booker on the board
Marquese Chriss in 2016, leaving Malcolm Brogdon on the board
Frank Ntilikina in 2017, leaving Donovan Mitchell on the board
Collin Sexton in 2018, leaving SGA on the board
Jaxson Hayes in 2019, leaving Cam Johnson on the board
Obi Toppin in 2020, leaving Tyrese Haliburton on the board
& of course for each year I could have added several players to the list of those left on the board so as not to miss on a guy who in every case turned out to be meh or (usually) much worse.
