Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (25 page)

In short, Harden had the best offensive season of his career paired with his best defensive season, which at the level he plays on offense makes him an all-world talent. He came up short to Curry both in the
MVP voting and in the Western Conference Finals, which Golden State won 4–1, but in many other seasons, Harden would have won multiple trophies with his level of play. Harden wouldn’t have developed the same way in Oklahoma City with two other ball-dominant stars playing heavy minutes, but he still resonates as the one who got away from a Thunder franchise that, in part due to injuries that Harden may well have helped mask, hasn’t reached the heights of that 2012 season ever since.

Nikola Vucevic: Growth of a College Stats Monster

Nikola Vucevic did not take the traditional blue-chipper path to NBA success. A native of Montenegro, Vucevic came to the United States to play his senior year of high school basketball under the tutelage of a friend of his father’s, and landed at University of Southern California, far from a basketball power even with its Los Angeles location and membership in the big-money Pac-12 Conference.

Vucevic was forced to miss the first eight games of his freshman season while the NCAA worked through some eligibility issues, then made twenty-three appearances for a Trojans team that slipped into the NCAAs as a 10-seed, all but three off the bench. He didn’t even average 3.0 points per game that first season, but did convert an eye-catching twenty-six of forty-two shots from the field when he did look for his own offense, and he rebounded on the defensive glass very well for a limited-minutes freshman.

The following year, Vucevic moved into a starting role and increased his gross outputs dramatically. He nearly tripled his minutes per game to thirty-two a night and pushed his usage rates up from around 13 percent as a freshman to 20 percent as a sophomore, and that resulted in a quadrupling of his per-game scoring average and his gross rebounds per game going up by three and a half times. More notably, he converted on 55 percent of his field goal attempts and his per-minute rates either held or increased significantly pretty much
across the board. Vucevic made the successful conversion from role player to significant contributor as a starter without much impact on his effectiveness.

Then, as a junior, he upped his minutes even further and vastly increased his usage rates again, as he became the primary offensive option for an NCAA tournament team in 2010–11. Carrying a heavy possession load of above 25 percent, Vucevic still converted 54 percent of his 2-point attempts, became a legitimate 3-point threat (making 35 percent of his eighty-three tries that season), and continued to inhale rebounds, especially to close out opponent possessions. He finished twenty-first in Division I that season, with a defensive rebounding rate of 26 percent. Over his three seasons, his shotblocking rates increased slightly year-over-year, as well.

Vucevic declared for the draft after that season and was picked sixteenth overall by the Philadelphia 76ers, playing one season for them before being included in the disastrous Andrew Bynum trade, with Vucevic’s rights going to the Orlando Magic. Vucevic made 208 starts for Orlando over his first three seasons there, and was developing into a very productive NBA big man, with the same types of strengths—efficient, high-usage scoring, and defensive rebounding—that he displayed in college. In his first three campaigns with the Magic, Vucevic never shot worse than 50.7 percent from the field, and he averaged between 8.1 and 9.1 defensive rebounds per thirty-six minutes.

In 2014–15, taking advantage of more touches in better spots thanks to some of the spread pick-and-roll sets Orlando figured out made best use of its personnel, Vucevic posted his highest-ever offensive efficiency rating (a 109), offensive box plus-minus (the first time he’d ever been in positive territory in that category), and a PER that equates to a very good NBA first option. The Magic’s offense fell off by nearly three points per one hundred possessions when he was on the bench, a figure just below that of Elfrid Payton and Victor Oladipo, the team’s starting guards. Vucevic’s frontcourt teammates weren’t surprised.

“First, he just needs to stay healthy. Other than that, he can do whatever he wants. He’s a [expletive] monster. Good gracious, almighty,” teammate Channing Frye said. “I think for us, we just have to give him the room to operate and make sure we’re running sets for him, but I told him ‘You’re going to get tired getting that ball.’ I’m OK with me shooting one shot and he shoots ninety. For us to win, we have to continue to feed him and go to him. We need to work through him.”

The defensive end has been more of a struggle. With expanded minutes and offensive responsibility on the offensive end, Vucevic posted a career-worst 106 defensive rating in 2014–15, per
Basketball-Reference.com
, and he was middle of the road in overall on/off splits because of the relative defensive weakness. According to
Nylon Calculus’
s Seth Partnow, who calculated estimated “points saved” for big man rim protectors for the 2014–15 season, Vucevic was toward the bottom of the league with a 53.7 percent field goal percentage allowed around the rim, and a -1.25 points saved rate that put him below so-so defenders like Greg Monroe and uncomfortably in the proximity of porous Oklahoma City Thunder
big man Enes Kanter. Part of this is Orlando never really figured out the right big man to pair with Vucevic—Frye helped space the court, but the defense was poor; Kyle O’Quinn (who moved to the Knicks in the summer of 2015) was better defensively but more limited on the other end; and small ball with Tobias Harris wasn’t sustainable over huge minutes, either.

So, yes, Vucevic still has some flaws, especially at the defensive end, but should it be a surprise that what he showed offensively in college is panning out in the pros? If you believe independent research, it shouldn’t be.

In 2009, Jon Nichols, now part of the analytics team for the Cleveland Cavaliers but at the time a writer for
Basketball-Statistics.com
, posted a piece where he ran some simple correlations on different stats categories for successful college players who went
on to make
the NBA. He discovered that shotblocking rates were the stat that translated from college to pro the best, with a full 92 percent of a player’s NBA shotblocking explained by his performance in that category at the college level. Similarly, rebounding had a correlation of 0.8927. Other than assists per minute, no other stat category was all that close to shotblocking and rebounding as a projectable statistic. A 2015 column from Neil Paine and Zach Bradshaw at
FiveThirtyEight
suggested that among the most telling individual stats that translate are 2-point shot attempts per minute, offensive
rebounding rate, and usage rate. Whichever ones tend to suggest future success, Vucevic was delivering in them at the college level.

That said, even Vucevic knows he’s not yet the finished product in the NBA.

“I think I’m still early in the process. I have a lot of room to improve. A lot of room to get better,” he said after a game in Brooklyn against the Nets. “I have improved every year I’ve been in the NBA. I’ve added a lot of stuff to my game to help me. I think that playing more years, getting more experience, all the stuff that I do will become easier for me. I’m still early into my career, so I have a lot of room to grow.

“You see playing all of these games against different guys, you see what you did well, you see the takeaways of what you can add onto that,” he added about how he’s gone about improving his game. “A countermove or something. A lot of it is just you watch other players against whom you play, and if you like something they do, you try and see how you like it. A lot of it is just trying and getting a feel for something and seeing how you like it, if it fits your game and if it helps your team.”

In a league where a growing premium is put on bigs who can face up and shoot, it was a bit curious that former Magic head coach Jacque Vaughn never fully explored pushing Vucevic occasionally out past the 3-point arc, given his junior season numbers at USC and a relatively strong positive correlation between college 3-point
percentage and the pros. In his first four NBA seasons, Vucevic has been used mostly as a post scorer, a seemingly lost artifact now in a league with occasional 6-foot-7 “centers” and more-than-occasional slash-and-kick offensive styles that often tend to bypass traditional big men on the block.

Vucevic, at least during the 2014–15 season, didn’t seem that interested in evolving that part of his game, though.

“I’m not going to make it a big part of my game, because it would take away from the other stuff that I do,” he said about 3-pointers in a January
2015 interview with
Grantland.
“But I’m capable. I shoot them pretty well in practice. Maybe I could make it a bigger part of what I do without taking away from other things. Who knows? But playing inside is always going to be my focus. Maybe we can run a play for me to shoot a 3 sometimes, just as a surprise.”

Vucevic is an interesting test case. It’s not often in the modern era that NBA teams get three seasons (including two as a major contributor) to evaluate a big man with raw talent like his, but his path to college excellence is one worth considering. It also will make the future development of someone like Charlotte Hornets lottery pick Frank Kaminsky, the 2015 college Player of the Year whose college numbers and development trajectory were even more impressive than Vucevic’s, worth watching. The Hornets were widely discussed after the 2015 draft when reports surfaced that they may have declined a package of four current and future first-round picks from the Boston Celtics for the No. 9 spot where they selected Kaminsky.

Thanks to varying levels of competition and systems to often go with small sample sizes at the college level, translation of production there to the pro game is still a work in progress. Vucevic’s best college performance comparables, according to Ken Pomeroy’s site, were a bunch of mostly nondescript, non-NBA players, while Kaminsky’s are a solid bunch of future NBA pros. One thing seems pretty certain, though: the new 76ers management team likely is angry at its predecessors. Tony DiLeo and his staff saw the potential in Vucevic,
but didn’t have the organizational patience or foresight to see it out after his rookie season.

Channing Frye: Survival Through Evolution

It’s extremely difficult to make the NBA. It’s even harder to stick around for any length of time. Of the 450 or so players in the league in any given season, maybe 10 percent of them—if even that many—can be considered “stars.” The rest of the league revolves around those players, with each franchise trying to find the proper mix of second bananas and role players to form a cohesive and successful team. As a player, if you’re not going to be a star, you need to very quickly figure out what your primary role is going to be. Those who do can carve out lengthy, lucrative careers.

Channing Frye is an excellent example. Frye was originally a lottery pick, take No. 8 overall by the New York Knicks in 2005. He had a very credible rookie season, providing 12.3 points and 5.8 rebounds a game in only twenty-four minutes an outing. Frye struggled defensively like many young big men do when they get to the NBA level, but he shot nearly 48 percent from the field and over 82 percent from the free throw line, showing off a nice face-up touch and athleticism on the offensive end, especially considering he had played a more traditional post game in college at Arizona.

Things went downhill in his second season in New York, as Frye, far from a dominant rebounder or shotblocker at 6-foot-10, was proving to be a poor fit next to groundbound center Eddy Curry. His averages and per-thirty-six rates dropped across the board, with the
New York Times
writing that Frye “hardly developed in two seasons as a Knick and has been little more than a
midrange jump-shooter.” On draft night in 2007, Frye was part of an exchange of problem players with Portland, with disgruntled point guard Steve Francis heading to the Trail Blazers in exchange for rugged power forward Zach Randolph.

Frye didn’t realize a rebirth in the Rose City, though. In his two seasons in Portland, his minutes and per-game averages continued to wobble, and in his second year there, his shooting percentages dropped below even those of his disappointing sophomore campaign in New York. Now four years into his career, Frye quickly was reaching a crisis point. As a free agent, he signed a two-year, $3.8 million contract with the Phoenix Suns, with the second season a player option. Not that Frye was struggling to make ends meet, but in the first year of his second NBA contract, he was making the lowest salary of his career. That’s not the way things are supposed to work, and Frye knew things had to change. He was willing to adapt to save his NBA viability.

In Phoenix, Frye morphed into an early prototype of the “stretch” bigs who are now so profoundly important to offensive spacing in today’s NBA. In his first season with the Suns, Frye made an astounding 172 3-pointers (after making just 11 the previous season in Portland) while shooting 43.9 percent from the arc, which was the sixth-best success rate in the league that season.

“When I was in college, I was a post-up guy,” Frye said. “Came to the league and figured out that just wasn’t going to ride, so I started to develop other parts of my game. So it’s a combination of what team you’re on, and what the coaches want you to develop, and what you can do on a nightly basis.”

Where once his specific skill set was considered a weakness, he worked with the staff in Phoenix to extend what he was good at, with profound results.

“I think you kind of see it,” Frye said about what parts of his game were going to continue to work, and what he needed to develop in order to stay effective. “Certain things for me, it was like ‘face up and shoot a jumper,’ and then over the course of the year, they put smaller guys on me, and then they put bigger guys on me. And then it was like, ‘OK, how can I continue to be effective, drawing the guy away from the hoop and going farther and farther back?’ And finally in
Phoenix, they were like ‘We want you to shoot this. This is the shot. Practice this. This is what you’re looking for.’ So I just developed into what I am now.