re: Naji and Trey sent to Squadron

Yeah, Ingram, Hart and Herb soak up 90% of the minutes at the forward spots, and there's just not enough left over for a rookie to come in and get in any kind of groove. That's probably why a vet like Clark was able to come in and get those minutes pretty quickly, he doesn't need as many reps/consistency, where Trey as a rookie needs that to find his groove.

And to drive that home, Herb is third of all rookies in value over replacement, behind only Mobley and Scottie Barnes.

Most rookies are negatives. Even in a strong draft class year like this

Yep, slightly above him too. Franz is next.

Of course you can slice those advanced statistics in different ways.

BPM Franz is better, on the other hand, Herb is the best wing defender in the league according to BBIndex's D-Lebron metric that uses a ton of tracking data to rank players based on matchup difficulty and defensive opponent efficiency.

I just pretend that Herb was the first round pick and TM3 was the second round pick ... makes it way better.

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How many top 20 picks get sent to the G-league their first year? Nice pick.

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I made the argument several times about why Kira wouldn't play in the G-League. I had gone back and looked at the last few years of guys picked in the top 13 and they seem to rarely ever play in the G-League. Guys picked after that are much more common to play multiple games in the G-League their first year.



Being a top 10 pick and playing games in the G-League, not b/c of injury rehab, is usually not a good thing.

Being the 20th pick and playing in the G-League can be part of the development process sometimes. It may be more of a "we need you to be this type of role player and we want you to specifically work on this part of your game", so do this for a few games in the G-League b/c we can't give you the minutes for you to work this out properly right now.

there will always be exceptions, but if you can't earn minutes as a rookie, then you're probably going to have a hard time earning minutes the next 3 years. Talent doesn't wait a year or two. You're either good enough to play as a rookie, despite the fact that you're young and going to make mistakes, or you're probably not going to be anything more than a bench role player if you can make it in the NBA. Again, there's always exceptions, but most solid long term nba players find their way onto the court their rookie year and play significant minutes, especially by the end of the year.
Two guys can play 50 or so games in a season but have two drastically different seasons. One may have played the first 35 games, got benched, and played sparingly the rest of the season. The other may have played sparingly the first 30 games of the season, then came around and started being a solid contributor to close the season out.

If you do what I was suggesting, that wouldn’t be the G-League experience for NAW at all. I remember a story of the Heat putting Duncan Robinson in the G-League and told him to focus on 2 things: 1) shoot as many 3’s as possible and 2) guard the other teams best player every night.

You would do a similar thing with NAW. Tell him to limit himself to just a few “good” 3’s a night and focus on getting as many assists as possible. Make it very structured