We need to talk about this rookie class, as No. 1 overall draft pick Zachary Lizacher will face No. 2 overall pick Alex Sarr on Wednesday night. Summary: It wasn’t good. If you think this is the worst class in recent NBA history, there’s a group of experts who seem to agree with you.
NBA coach.
At this rate, we may be witnessing the worst NBA entry class in league history. Rookies are glued to the bench in a way we’ve never seen before. And even if Rooks plays, the team trusts them with little actual responsibility.
You’ve probably heard of the “Freshman 15,” where college freshmen inevitably gain 15 pounds from parties and pizza.
Let me introduce you to another Freshman 15. No rookie has scored 15 points in a game this season. Nada.
Fifteen points is not a high bar, especially in today’s scorer-friendly environment, where no one blinks when their team scores 140 points. But not a single freshman professional player, not even Lizacher, Sarr, or other draft picks, has cleared that 15-point standard. According to Stathead.com, never before has a season gone this “deep” with a rookie scoring just 15 points in an NBA game.
Last year, two rookies scored 15 or more points in their first games: San Antonio’s Victor Wembaneyama (15 points) and Dallas center Derek Lively II (16 points). Two more names were added to the list in the second game of the season, Charlotte’s Brandon Miller (17 points) and Chet Holmgren (16 points). In his third game of the season, aka Grady Dick, scored 16 points for the Toronto Raptors. Last year, rookies exceeded the 15-point mark a total of eight times in each team’s first three games (Holmgren, Miller and Wembaneyama did it multiple times).
But this season, that same number is zero.
Since 1970, such performances have typically been seen about nine times, sometimes as many as 17 times, at this point in the season. The 2014-15 season featured only one game in which he scored more than 15 points in the opening week, the lowest mark ever, achieved by Orlando’s notable non-scorer Elfrid Payton. . This season? We’re still looking for our own Elfrid Peyton.
Coaches around the NBA don’t really trust Luke to do anything.
Reed Shepard, who was named the preseason Rookie of the Year, is riding Pine with Im Udoka’s Houston Rockets. The Kentucky product played 15 minutes in the opener, but his minutes have declined in each game since then, coming down to just three minutes against the Spurs on Monday. The sharpshooter has made just 4 of 12 shots in 38 minutes so far.
Another favorite for Rookie of the Year (yours included), Zach Eady has started every game for the Memphis Grizzlies. That’s good news. The bad news lies elsewhere. The 7-foot-4 center has committed more fouls (15) than field goals (14). He has registered one more block than his 5-foot-8 teammate Yuki Kawamura, who has zero. Due to foul trouble and general ineffectiveness, Eadie is averaging just 16 minutes per game, the worst in the league for a full-time starter.
Lisacher, Atlanta’s No. 1 overall pick, has shown promising signs, but the 19-year-old has come off the bench for the team’s first two games, an unusual feat for a No. 1 overall pick. , with an abysmal score of 38.3 percent. In his first attempt at professional American hoops, he recorded a true shooting percentage.
Charlotte’s No. 6 overall pick, Tijan Saraoun, also did not start the first two games. He didn’t even actually play. With Coach DNP’s decisions for the team’s first two games, the French teenager clearly hasn’t earned the trust of first-year head coach Charles Lee. And it’s not like the Charlotte Hornets roster reminds you of the 1996 Chicago Bulls.
By the way, has anyone heard from Rob Dillingham? The No. 8 overall pick in Minnesota hasn’t even played in a game yet. In retrospect, John Calipari appears to be doing himself a favor after benching Dillingham at Kentucky last season. Chris Finch has never called his number, and neither has Terrence Shannon Jr., the team’s other first-round pick.
The tank-tastic Wizards are the boldest team in the rookie division. Coach Brian Keefe started the team’s two standout players, Sarr and Bab Carrington, in the season opener against Boston. But even Keefe couldn’t stand that situation for long. After two heavy losses, Carrington was replaced by Jonas Valanciunas in the starting lineup, giving Sarr more power up front. Through three games, Carrington had three points, 10 rebounds, and 13 points.
And here’s the crazy thing: Carrington is your rookie scoring leader! The Pittsburgh native is averaging 8.7 points per game so far this season, making him the leading scorer in the rookie class. Yes, single digit. To answer a question posed by the NBA’s voice of God, Beau Estes, my research shows that there hasn’t been a rookie class that didn’t have at least one player who averaged double-digit points.
It’s not just points per game. Sarr and Carrington are first and second in minutes per game among rookies, but they have yet to play 30 minutes per game this season. In case you’re wondering, there are also pseudo-NBA records in this category. According to Stathead.com’s tracking, we have never seen a season in which a rookie did not log at least 30 minutes in at least one game through each team’s opening three games. By comparison, there were 19 such cases in 2021-2022 (Cade Cunningham class).
On Tuesday night, Utah rookie Cody Williams became the first rookie to reach the 30-minute mark when he clocked 29 minutes, 58 seconds in the team’s fourth game. Some teams have yet to play their fourth game, but it would be unheard of for a rookie class to play just one 30-minute game at this point. In fact, there have been fewer than five such games in a rookie class since 1964-1965, according to Stathead.com.
So what is the cause of the 2024 rookie depression? Many NBA drafters asked for patience with this draft group, which lacks home run talent like Wenby, Zion, and LeBron. They are also young. 18-year-old players drafted in the lottery (Saroun, Carrington, and Nicola Topic) than 18-year-old players who can legally buy Bud Light in the U.S. (Eadie and Devin Carter) There were many.
Speaking of Carter and Topic, it certainly doesn’t help that two lottery picks are out with injuries. Three other first-rounders, Toronto’s Jacoby Walter (No. 19), Denver’s Darron Holmes (No. 22) and Utah’s Isaiah Collier (No. 29), are also returning from physical illnesses. But injuries happen every season, and the rookie class is not immune to such setbacks.
The most obvious explanation is that this group just isn’t that good. It happens. Perhaps the closest would be the 2000-01 class after Kenyon Martin was selected No. 1 overall by the New Jersey Nets. The Cincinnati phenom was the rookie class’ leading scorer with a paltry 12.0 points per game, which can be partially explained by his recovery from a broken foot sustained in his final season as a Bearcat. Probably. (Mark Jackson, not Mark, actually averaged 13.2 points in 48 games for the Golden State Warriors, but his rookie status comes with an important caveat: He was 26 years old. is.)
After digging into historical draft data, I found that the 2000 draft class ranks as one of the worst draft classes in NBA history, with only three of the group ultimately being selected as All-Stars. , it has been suggested that no player made more than one All-Star appearance. Five of the top seven draft picks had left the league by the end of the decade. This class also had a slow start, which turned out to be more than just an anomaly.
There is a silver lining for this 2024 crew. Remember Elfrid Payton and the struggling rookie class of 2014-2015? Two 2014 draft prospects who didn’t play an entire season, forget about the first few games, and later became MVPs? Little did I know at the time that it would happen. Those players? Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic. Embiid missed two seasons due to injury issues, and Jokic was stashed overseas for a season before Denver’s second-round pick made his U.S. national team debut in October 2015. For that matter, you can count Julius Randle among the group of redshirt stars in 2014. class. The No. 7 overall pick suffered a broken foot in his first game in the NBA, prematurely ending his rookie season, but as we now know, he later made three All-Star teams. It will carve its name.
The class of 2024 will likely be similar to the class of 2014. A closer look at the data shows that a newcomer’s first week of work has little to no correlation with career performance. It may or may not be a sign of incompetence. After all, 18-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo also received some DNP-CDs at the beginning of his Hall of Fame career. It’s rare for a teenager to become a great NBA player right out of school, a fact that helps alleviate some of the nauseating moments for Lizacher and Sarr, who won’t turn 20 until April.
Perhaps Lizacher, Searle, Shepard and the rest of the rookie class will hit the ground running quickly and this rocky start will feel like a distant memory. But in order to average double-digit points, coaches have to at least feed their kids. So far, that hasn’t happened much. At the very least, let’s hope the rookie steps up and hits the Freshman 15 for all of us in the next few days. Perhaps Lizacher and Searle will do that on Wednesday.
