Jerry from Salt Lake City writes in to ask:
Does more playing time for rookies translate into bigger boosts in training camp the next season?
It's an excellent question, and common sense would tell me that rookies who get on the court more stand to learn more and play better in the next season. But is that what the data says? Well, before we see what the data says, let's get to know what the data is.
The Data
For my data set, I had a snapshot of all of the rated attributes of the players before the 2014 season and all of the current rated attributes of the players this season. The caveats with this data: I believe I took a snapshot of all of the 2014 attributes before training camp, and all of the current season's attributes are most definitely AFTER training camp. This isn't perfect, but I wouldn't be the lazy statistician if I was willing to put in the extra work to get slightly cleaner data from the past. Plus, I don't think this should cloud the results too much especially if there's no clear answer...which, in the world of lazy statistics, there usually isn't!
Anyway, I didn't limit this to rookies. To get more data in there, I took a look at every player currently 24 or under who played last year. The total pool is 70 players, and you can see spreadsheet I'll reference here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
The Short Answer
- Screen Shot 2017-07-07 at 5.11.11 PM.png (32.88 KiB) Viewed 748 times
The Long Answer
It'd be so nice if we could just look at a chart, clap our hands, and be done. Technically, you can. You don't have to keep reading!
...but you're still reading, huh? Well, shit. I was hoping I'd get off easy here, so I could stop writing this articles and pop on some PS3 (I'll get off my ass and upgrade eventually).
Alright, so let's look at the spreadsheet itself. As far as I know, it's sorted from least points gained to most points gained. The average gain was about 24 points with a standard deviation of about 24 points as well, so there aren't any values that are over 3 standard deviations away from the mean. There are only a couple that are over 2 standard deviations away from the mean, so we don't have to really throw away any data as outliers. Also, this is America, so we don't have to do anything we don't want to do, except writing a bunch of PBSL articles to counterbalance high lux tax bills.
Another eyeball test confirms that the players who gained the most place seem to have a high concentration of heavy minutes players while the players who lost points tend to skew towards having played fewer minutes than the biggest gainers. Sure, there are exceptions, but there's nothing we can do about that, so we can just ignore them.
However, if we take a look at the biggest gainers, we have guys there like AD, Giannis, Embiid, Saric, Gobert, Oladipo, Porter Jr., etc. For the most part, these players are young guys who have all star potential and lots of room to grow. The players who lost are players like Terrence Jones, Terrence Ross, Tyler Johnson, Dion Waiters...more or less players who came into the league close to their potentials with ceilings that were already looming.
The Verdict
So I see some correlation here, but I'd be very hesitant to call it causation. I would not recommend giving your rookie extra minutes if he's not the best player to be on the court for those minutes unless you're building for the future, don't care about wins in the current season, and are just shooting to hit that 30 mpg average needed to give your rookie a tiny amount of extra training next year.
But don't play your rookie more because you hope that will mean a better chance at gaining potentials in the next year's training camp. That's still more of an art than a science and more of a stroke of luck than a stroke of genius.
