NBA HD: Are Rookies Better Finishers in Sophomore Year?

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend Omri Casspi’s debut at Madison Square Garden when the Sacramento Kings visited town.  Israeli flags blanketed the Garden and the Kings generated more cheers than the home team.   Casspi was the star that night to be sure but I had my eyes on another Sacramento rook: Tyreke Evans.

Tyreke is a man amongst men.  The 20-year old packages his ball-handling skills, 7-3 wingspan and 220+ pound frame and plows through the lane like a bowling ball against his slighter foes.  The guy is averaging 20.3 points per game in the NBA, just a few months after leaving Memphis after his freshman year.  And the most impressive fact? The rook attacks the rim more than any other player in the NBA.  With 8.2 at rim attempts per game, Tyreke Evans has shown that not all rookies need a few years to adjust to the league’s size before they can weave through the NBA bodies and get to the rack.

And he can finish there too, unlike some of his other classmates.  The average point guard converts 56.1 percent of their at rim attempts which includes layups, dunks, and tip-ins while Tyreke knocks down 60 percent.  I know some people may have a problem with classifying Tyreke as a point guard.  I’m fine with that.  Shooting guards have a 59.7 percent at rim field goal percentage.  He’s good.  He’s so good that after he took his man off the dribble and powered his way to the rim, I felt compelled to ask Joe Treutlein, founder of Hoopdata.com, who was sitting next to me at the time,  ”If he can do this now in his rookie year, just imagine what he will become.  Do we even know?”

So, I went to my toolbox over at Hoopdata.com to see if  I can dig up some sort of an answer to that question.  I wanted to see if rookies improve their ability to convert at the basket in their sophomore year after a year’s worth of banging with the big boys.  We have four years worth of shot location data at our disposal so I grabbed all the rookies with sophomore experience and put them into a pile.  I threw out the ones who didn’t attempt more than 50 layups in their rookie season and separated them by their positions.  After the trimming process, I had 77 rookies still standing.   Here are the results.

Overall, the sample did experience a slight uptick in field goal percentage from 58.9 percent to 59.7 percent but not enough to expect huge gains into sophomore year.  The fourteen centers in the sample actually regressed on average from rookie season to their sophomore year.  Brook Lopez has seen his conversion rate dip from 66.4 percent to 62.8 percent this season while Jason Thompson has slid down to 58.9 percent from his 62.4 percent rookie campaign.  Not every center experienced a sophomore slump, however;  Roy Hibbert has boosted his success rate 8.2 percent since last season and now ranks among the league average in the category.

As you can see, rookie point guards have it rough.  The going rate for point guards at the rim is 56.1 percent but rookies fare even worse at 51.8 percent.  And this sample does not include Brandon Jennings who misses 6 out of every 10 layups. Speaking of Brandon, his forecast isn’t bright for his stature.  Undersized point guards like Aaron Brooks and D.J. Augustin each saw their at rim percentages plummet in their second year by 7.6 and 9.8 percent respectively.  Normally, one would say that Jennings has no where to go but up from here but Augustin, at 35.2 percent this season, reminds us that it’s not guaranteed that improvement waits on the rookie’s horizon.  Thanks to Suns point guard Goran Dragic (+13.4%), Jerryd Bayless (5.5%), and Mario Chalmers (+6.6%), the point guards in this sample actually showed improvement as a whole.   For Evans, the closest comp points to Pistons point guard Rodney Stuckey who stands at 6-5 and attacks the rim with similar aggressiveness, if less ability.  While he doesn’t exhibit quite the same length, bulk, and finishing skills as Tyreke, the Eastern Washington product improved his shooting at the basket ever so slightly in year two.  It’s not out of the question to suggest Tyreke Evans is just beginning to tap into his potential.  And he’s already one of the most relentless attackers in the game.

We’ll need more data to draw up some stronger conclusions but this is another step forward in projecting the development of rookies in the NBA.  Before I go, I thought I’d offer up the leaders and trailers from year-1 to year-2: