Free Noa.

[Ice Man]

This has been the playing time for Bulls rookies during AKME's tenure -

Pat - Started and played a ton
Ayo - Played 27 mpg as a game as a 2nd rounder, which is also a ton
Dalen - Didn't play much
Matas - Got limited minutes in the first half of the season, more as as the season went on
Noa - Not playing at all

Not sure what to make of all that, aside from the obvious that AKME/Billy do not have a rookie blueprint.

[DuckIII]

It doesn't prepare him for his role with the NBA team which likely not be doing that. Nor does it particularly develop that attribute for high end competition playing that role against low end players. If he is going to eventually be an on-ball player, getting some on-ball reps in practice against NBA teams will help him now.

I do learning and development for people all the time as one of my responsibilities in my role. If I send someone to go train on Python in an environment completely unlike my own, then don't actually reinforce that training in my environment immediately, the training is a waste. Getting Noa on ball reps in the G-League isn't all that useful to begin with, but it's even less useful if you are going to bring him up into the NBA then ask him to play totally differently.

You aren't preparing him for the road ahead. Maybe he will eventually be an on-ball guy, but you then want to focus your development of that skill closer to when you expect to actually use it. Most guys probably develop the majority of their offensive skills in the off-seasons then look to apply them in the game.

Having him develop his team defense skills and reading opposing offenses and developing his chemistry and rotations against NBA caliber offenses with his NBA teammates seems like a vastly more useful thing for him to develop at this point in time.

Which is why I said, I don't think our front office is lying, but I don't think it's the correct thing to do. I've mentored probably 50+ young professionals in their careers, and I would never take the path like this. My experience is obviously not on the basketball court, but the principle of you train people in what they can apply right away so the skills get drilled in and stick feels quite applicable to me.

3. Who cares? Its 10 games into his career and we aren't contenders. He won't even be playing with a number of these guys by the time it really matters anyway.

I suspect he'll be playing with a good chunk of these guys for the next four years.

4. Since the reason they have him down there is to get comfortable with greater responsibility operating with the ball, having him do that against Okoro and Williams with his training wheels on isn't the best idea, to say the least. Moreover, the Bulls have limited practice time in season. They aren't going to spend a bunch of it creating non-game scenarios that won't be part of this year's strategy at all. Unless Noa advances through this progression to the point that later in the season it becomes possible (albeit incredibly unlikely anyway)

I think that reason is fundamentally bad because it is mismatched with how he will be used in the NBA, nor do I think the G-League is the best way to develop offensive skills (or even a good way) or to fit into an NBA offense, and developing them against sub par players isn't going to translate, then quickly abandoning all that practice to not really use those skills meaningfully when you get to the NBA makes the scenario worthless.

5. That's a good thing. They'll defend him hard as hell.

I don't think the G-League has a reputation of defending hard as hell. They have a reputation of extraordinarily selfish, non-team oriented play.

I think he can contribute today as well. But what he contributes today is more or less meaningless to me. Its what he will contribute later after being properly developed that matters. You have a preference for how to develop him, fine. But that's not the same thing as what the Bulls are doing as being improper or meaning anything whatsoever about how they view Noa.

No, there's no way to know if what the bulls are doing is improper, but:
1: It's not what teams do generally
2: I have described in great length why I think it is improper with specific examples
3: I don't find any of the counter arguments compelling, and think my counters to those arguments are more compelling

As I stated though, I don't think this is a binary scenario. If what I would prefer is in fact better by say 20%, then doing 20% better on development for 3 months probably has an overall very miniscule effect on the end outcome.

I'd like to see this list. I can't think of one single rookie in this draft "in his position" and I bet if I took the time to drill down into the last 10-15 years of drafts, which I won't, I suspect I'd find very few comps there as well.

I don't define "in his position" as some incredibly unique thing like you do. There's nothing super unique about his position to me. He's a raw, athletic prospect that is young and needs to add muscle. I think there are many players like that every year.

Again, it's not a huge deal, but I don't think this is the right thing or will speed his development any, but I don't think it's a doomsday scenario either. TBH, I'd rather have him stay at the advocate center and work with a player development coach individually all day than go to the G-League.

Okay doug.

EDIT: I probably owe you a little more than that, but left it out because frankly it will come off as abrasive, but I don't know how else to explain it:

I do learning and development for people all the time as one of my responsibilities in my role. If I send someone to go train on Python in an environment completely unlike my own, then don't actually reinforce that training in my environment immediately, the training is a waste. Getting Noa on ball reps in the G-League isn't all that useful to begin with, but it's even less useful if you are going to bring him up into the NBA then ask him to play totally differently.

You're wrong. Your experience is not applicable to sports skill development, which is incremental and situational, and explains the rest of your posts.

While it has been youngsters - rec level, MS/HS kids rather than pros or collegiate players - I've spent over 12 years coaching up basketball players and taken my own sons to advanced skill training to learn from people who know a lot more than me. Your computer programmer training analogies on a basketball court would be disastrous. And to put it into a context where I actually do consider myself more of a credible expert when it comes to sports training, as I was a D-1 athlete at it, your view of skill training would be equally disastrous in golf.

Skills and mental processing in sports are learned at slower speeds, in less challenging conditions, and then gradually ramped up through increasingly difficult contexts until they are properly cemented. Teaching a skill and then immediately trying to implement those skills into the end-case scenario would not only be ineffective, it would be immediately and severely counterproductive both to the development of the skill itself and to the performer's mindset and confidence.

They aren't developing him to be what he'll be this year. They obviously have bigger plans for him in mind, and are using the time now to incrementally develop those skills which will gradually be implemented, over a long period of time, into NBA scenarios.

That's my last word. You may know what you are talking about, but its basically the exact opposite of my experience, knowledge and what I've been told and taught by people who take this a lot more seriously than I do.

[dougthonus]

1) I don't know how important it is to prepare Noa for his "role," which if I understand your post here, is basically a rotational backup player. The Bulls obviously hope he becomes more than that, so I do not know how much importance I'd put on preparing him for it, even if that's what he'll be in the short-term. Basically every NBA player had a huge role at a lower level of basketball and learned to adapt to whatever they have in the NBA. Is this any different than Essengue being a star player in college or whatever?

I think preparing him to be a defensive swiss army knife against opposing defenses is a skill he will use immediately but also a skill that will be extraordinarily valuable throughout his whole career. I would rephrase "preparing him for a role" into "developing a skillset". Developing the skillset of how to read an opposing NBA offense, rotate effectively, communicate with your teammates, and run an NBA defense are things that will matter throughout his career and mater the most earliest too.

This developing this skillset and immediately utilizing it makes the development stick. Developing on ball offensive skills against low caliber players then not using them meaningfully for the next 9 months is a way to waste all that time.

2) I'm just not all that convinced it'll make much of a difference if he's playing in the rotation by the end of the season regardless of which approach you take. Does 5 minutes a night in the NBA for the next couple of months develop him better than bigger minutes in the G League (while still practicing some with his NBA squad)? I have no strong opinion.

I've never said it will make a huge difference. In fact, I explicitly said, it isn't that big a deal.

I just said I think the G-League is the worse option. As I said, I'd rather have him just work 1:1 with our player development staff than be in the G-League and think that would help him more than being in the G-League. I see no tangible upside to what he's doing in the G-League relative to the other options.

I will say generally speaking, I will argue for great lengths of time frequently about things I don't feel are that important if I feel they are clearly wrong.

I don't think this G-League thing is that important, but I do think it is very clearly the wrong thing to do.

[Bulliever2020]

The software development analogy is a strange one imo as I am software engineer and we get sent to conferences, all day trainings, etc to learn new skills that we won't necessarily use immediately in our day to day jobs. It is done because we are planning on using those technologies in the future and we want to have some experience with them before we get to that point. Which sounds exactly like what the Bulls are doing with Noa in the G League.

[dougthonus]

The software development analogy is a strange one imo as I am software engineer and we get sent to conferences, all day trainings, etc to learn new skills that we won't necessarily use immediately in our day to day jobs. It is done because we are planning on using those technologies in the future and we want to have some experience with them before we get to that point. Which sounds exactly like what the Bulls are doing with Noa in the G League.

A conference is a very fundamentally different experience. It's extraordinarily shallow learning and just brief introductions to things so you conceptually have an understanding of ideas and know what to look into later when you want to implement something. I wouldn't consider conferences training (most of the time).

I don't think it's a particularly controversial statement that if you don't use it, you start to lose it, and that if you want to develop a skill, you should try to use it as much as you can after developing it to drill it in.

[Bulliever2020]

The software development analogy is a strange one imo as I am software engineer and we get sent to conferences, all day trainings, etc to learn new skills that we won't necessarily use immediately in our day to day jobs. It is done because we are planning on using those technologies in the future and we want to have some experience with them before we get to that point. Which sounds exactly like what the Bulls are doing with Noa in the G League.

A conference is a very fundamentally different experience. It's extraordinarily shallow learning and just brief introductions to things so you conceptually have an understanding of ideas and know what to look into later when you want to implement something. I wouldn't consider conferences training (most of the time).

I don't think it's a particularly controversial statement that if you don't use it, you start to lose it, and that if you want to develop a skill, you should try to use it as much as you can after developing it to drill it in.

These are all day trainings on a specific skill, same thing happens at different conferences. Many times a very deep dive and also real world simulations of how to put that technology into practice. To get experience with that set of skills to be able to put them to use and refine them even further at a later date. This exactly mirrors what the Bulls are doing with Noa.

[ghostinthepost1]

Here's my theory on player development.

If you're good, you'll be good.

Why does someone like Giddey continue to grow and improve while Dalen is essentially the same player as his rookie year? Because one is a good basketball player and one isn't. So let's put Noa out there and see if he's any good. It'll be inconsistent but if he can't show some flashes his rookie year then, like most late lottery picks, he's probably not good.

I will say, having watched him through summer league and his single g-league game, I think he's good.

[Ice Man]

Here's my theory on player development.

If you're good, you'll be good.

My guess is that you are correct -- if somebody did the work to conduct a proper study of NBA development best practices, that would be the headline finding. There would be secondary recommendations, but that would be the main point.

[DuckIII]

I don't think it's a particularly controversial statement that if you don't use it, you start to lose it, and that if you want to develop a skill, you should try to use it as much as you can after developing it to drill it in.

You are creating a false reality in which you are either all in working on those skills or doing nothing. Basketball players are capable of - and in fact must - be learning a variety of different skills and concepts at once, with some having greater emphasis than others at given times. One skill can be accelerated more aggressively while others are handled more deliberately.

An NBA basketball player can absolutely be learning multiple different skills at multiple different levels of advancement at once. Frankly, its impossible to imagine it not being that way for virtually every player.

[GoBlue72391]

Here's my theory on player development.

If you're good, you'll be good.

Why does someone like Giddey continue to grow and improve while Dalen is essentially the same player as his rookie year? Because one is a good basketball player and one isn't. So let's put Noa out there and see if he's any good. It'll be inconsistent but if he can't show some flashes his rookie year then, like most late lottery picks, he's probably not good.

I will say, having watched him through summer league and his single g-league game, I think he's good.

But you only become good by practicing consistently, other than things like being born with great size or natural athleticism. But skill things have to be practiced.

There's plenty of examples of players who entered the NBA as bad players but eventually became good players.

[dougthonus]

These are all day trainings on a specific skill, same thing happens at different conferences. Many times a very deep dive and also real world simulations of how to put that technology into practice. To get experience with that set of skills to be able to put them to use and refine them even further at a later date. This exactly mirrors what the Bulls are doing with Noa.

Fair enough, I'm not sure we're really talking about the same thing in a nuanced way, but I also don't think the analogy is close enough to basketball that it is worth clarifying further

Ignoring the specific analogy, I don't think it is a controversial statement that you retain and improve on what you do regularly, not what you experience once and then don't use much. I think this is particularly true when you are operating at an absolutely elite level. Ie, trying to apply a skill against the top 500 people in the world at it where every edge counts.

[Ice Man]

There's plenty of examples of players who entered the NBA as bad players but eventually became good players.

It's not about their starting point. Rather, it's about the inevitability of their journey. The argument is that guys who improve greatly after their rookie seasons (for example, Scottie Pippen, Jimmy Butler, and Steph Curry) were going to become much better regardless of their development path, because of their intelligence, work ethic, natural talents, etc.

By this account, the quality of the teacher is much less important than the quality of the soldier.

[dougthonus]

You are creating a false reality in which you are either all in working on those skills or doing nothing. Basketball players are capable of - and in fact must - be learning a variety of different skills and concepts at once, with some having greater emphasis than others at given times. One skill can be accelerated more aggressively while others are handled more deliberately.

An NBA basketball player can absolutely be learning multiple different skills at multiple different levels of advancement at once. Frankly, its impossible to imagine it not being that way for virtually every player.

I'm not creating that narrative at all.

I stated a counter argument to the argument "he will work on this thing in the G-League" and described why in my experience this isn't an effective way to learn that thing and why I think he would improve more doing something else.

I even explicitly said that this isn't binary and that if one path was say 20% better than the other path that the other path doesn't have 0 value, and that over this time frame, the end outcome from one vs the other likely isn't that different or important.

[WindyCityBorn]

Giddey/Essengue/White/Buzelis/Dosunmu is the core

Noa is going to be special

We might have to choose between Ayo and Coby next offseason. Hopefully not.

[WindyCityBorn]

I love his size and fluidity, and this production at 18 is great, even if it’s just the G League.

But one thing that stands out going back to Summer League is his lack of explosion, both north/south and vertically. He’s essentially an under the rim player despite being gigantic.

Hopefully NBA training unlocks his athletic potential. I doubt he’ll ever be skilled enough to be a high impact starter without a little bounce to his game.

Giddey is managing just fine without that. Getting into the paint at will and drawing fouls.

[dougthonus]

You're wrong. Your experience is not applicable to sports skill development, which is incremental and situational, and explains the rest of your posts.

While it has been youngsters - HS kids rather than pros or collegiate players - I've spent over 12 years coaching up basketball players and taken my own sons to advanced skill training to learn from people who know a lot more than me. Your computer programmer training analogies on a basketball court would be disastrous. And to put it into a context where I actually do consider myself more of a credible expert when it comes to sports training, as I was a D-1 athlete at it, your view of skill training would be equally disastrous in golf.

Skills and mental processing in sports are learned at slower speeds, in less challenging conditions, and then gradually ramped up through increasingly difficult contexts until they are properly cemented. Teaching a skill and then immediately trying to implement those skills into the end-case scenario would not only be ineffective, it would be immediately and severely counterproductive both to the development of the skill itself and to the performer's mindset and confidence.

They aren't developing him to be what he'll be this year. They obviously have bigger plans for him in mind, and are using the time now to incrementally develop those skills which will gradually be implemented, over a long period of time, into NBA scenarios.

That's my last word. You may know what you are talking about, but its basically the exact opposite of my experience, knowledge and what I've been told and taught by people who take this a lot more seriously than I do.

I appreciate the context, that's a good explanation.

I don't agree with it (ie, he's not a 12 year old learning how to dribble a basketball here, he's already played pro ball against higher competition than the G-League), and he isn't developing new skills that he's never done. He is trying to hone in to use these skills against the best players in the world which are different things from a training perspective.

I completely agree with you that at a basic level you need to do things slowly first. I wouldn't throw a 6 year old learning to play basketball in against LeBron James playing at 100%. I think at an advanced level you get pushed by playing better people, not worse people. Noa is not someone who is truly developing the fundamentals of the game. He's already at this moment in time probably a top 1000 basketball player in the entire world (likely top 300-400). He is raw in skills relative to the top 100 basketball players in the world, not on the grand continuum of basketball skills.

I think you've also misconstrued the point of learning theory which is that you master something by learning a skill, then practicing it, then continually using it. If the goal is not for Noa to continually use these on-ball reps at the NBA level right away, then it shouldn't be a development focus right now either as you won't maximize the development by spending a lot of time on something now then abandoning it, then going back to it 3 years later. It isn't going to be 100% waste, but it isn't the most efficient path.

[GoBlue72391]

I love his size and fluidity, and this production at 18 is great, even if it’s just the G League.

But one thing that stands out going back to Summer League is his lack of explosion, both north/south and vertically. He’s essentially an under the rim player despite being gigantic.

Hopefully NBA training unlocks his athletic potential. I doubt he’ll ever be skilled enough to be a high impact starter without a little bounce to his game.

Giddey is managing just fine without that. Getting into the paint at will and drawing fouls.

Giddey is a unique player, an exception not the norm.

[WindyCityBorn]

I love his size and fluidity, and this production at 18 is great, even if it’s just the G League.

But one thing that stands out going back to Summer League is his lack of explosion, both north/south and vertically. He’s essentially an under the rim player despite being gigantic.

Hopefully NBA training unlocks his athletic potential. I doubt he’ll ever be skilled enough to be a high impact starter without a little bounce to his game.

Giddey is managing just fine without that. Getting into the paint at will and drawing fouls.

Giddey is a unique player, an exception not the norm.

Noa could be another exception if he has very high skill level. Being 6’10” is huge advantage over most PF today. He will be able to get shot off against smaller 4s and just drive past most centers.

[Almost Retired]

Here's my theory on player development.

If you're good, you'll be good.

Why does someone like Giddey continue to grow and improve while Dalen is essentially the same player as his rookie year? Because one is a good basketball player and one isn't. So let's put Noa out there and see if he's any good. It'll be inconsistent but if he can't show some flashes his rookie year then, like most late lottery picks, he's probably not good.

I will say, having watched him through summer league and his single g-league game, I think he's good.

Just looking at the G-League highlights he seems to have a nice stroke on his 3-ball. Since the "varsity" Bulls are already going 9-10 deep I think in this situation Noa is best served by letting him play big minutes for Windy City. He's 18 years old. He's just arrived from France. Let him acclimate for a few months. At some point we're going to have an injury in the from court and more minutes will potentially become available. We don't need him right now. Let him get more comfortable and bring him on board when he can play at least 10 minutes a game. He's basically going from high school age to the NBA. He's still growing in all probability. No need to rush things. If he was a 3rd year college player at 20 or 21 years old you would want to ramp him up quicker. With our roster it's just not necessary. Every player's development is unique. Let the kid enjoy the burn he's getting now. His time will come.

[dougthonus]

Ignoring the "should he or shouldn't he" be in the G-League, it's great that he had an awesome G-League debut.

Given this is the path that the Bulls have chosen for him, it's great to see that he's experiencing really strong success in it (for at least the first game).

Watch on YouTube

Looking at the video, it is interesting that he's generally scoring via skill and not raw athleticism. He actually looks a little under athletic relative to my expectations, not a big leaper, mostly playing at the rim rather than above it. It will be interesting to see how he develops.