Rookie Progress
It’s just plain wrong to talk about this team without devoting some time to the rookies. As I said before, Jerome Robinson just didn’t play enough minutes to make his statistics meaningful. So let’s chat about Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Landry Shamet for a bit.
A fun one to look at is the month-to-month progression of our boys. It’s fairly well known that rookies hit a wall sometime around the new year or the all-star break. That was very noticeable with Shai especially. You’ll note in the next images that around December to February, he was in a slump.
What’s very important to me, though, is the usage rate. Despite his slump, he didn’t really change the way he played; he was still finishing roughly the same number of possessions as always. That level of trust from the team and confidence in himself paid off. Check out Shai shattering that wall.
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That’s what I’m talking about. Another interesting thing to note is the inverse relationship between usage rate and true shooting percentage. That’s something you’ll see a lot, especially with young guys. As they carry more and more of the offensive burden, it’s hard to keep the same efficiency.
With Landry, we’re really interested in his scoring efficiency, more than things like assist numbers. Keep in mind that three point percentage has wild variance. Even guys like Steph Curry or Klay Thompson have fluctuating percentages. So, to me, the more important thing is to look at what values the percentage oscillates around. Check this out.
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See that crazy fluctuation? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact number and say “that’s the exact level three point shooter he’s gonna be” in any given month. But if you look at the value it seems to fluctuate around, it’s in the low to mid 40s. That’s a fantastic number, and one you can expect him to stay somewhere around. It’s also nice to see a general trend upwards in his shooting.
So that’s the story of this year in numbers. Again, it doesn’t tell everything. The stats don’t give us the wild comebacks, nail-biting finishes and heartbreaking losses. But they do tell us how this team got here, and they encourage us for the future of the Clippers. We have young talent that are clearly progressing, we have areas of strength that will help draw in some big name free agents, and we have clear areas to improve upon. Luckily, we also have absurd amounts of cap space to do so.