The NBA rookie class is off to the worst start in league history

With No. 1 overall draft pick Zaccharie Risacher facing No. 2 overall pick Alex Sarr on Wednesday night, we have to talk about this rookie class. Summary: it hasn’t been good. If you thought this was the worst class in recent NBA history, there’s a group of experts who seem to agree with you:

NBA coaches.

The way it’s going, we might be witnessing the worst class to enter the NBA in league history. Rookies have been glued to the bench in ways we haven’t seen. And even when the turrets play, the team barely relies on them for any real responsibility.

You know about the Freshman 15, where college freshmen inevitably put on 15 pounds from partying and pizza.

Let me introduce you to the other Freshman 15. Not one rookie has scored 15 points in a game this season. Nada.

Fifteen points isn’t a high bar, especially in today’s scoring-friendly environment where no one blinks at a team that scores 140 points. And yet no first-year pro player has reached that 15-point threshold — not Risacher, Sarr or anyone else drafted in the lottery. According to Stathead.com, we’ve never gone this “deep” into the season with a rookie who hasn’t scored a paltry 15 points in an NBA game.

Last year, two rookies scored 15 plus in their very first games, San Antonio’s Victor Wembanyama (15 points) and Dallas center Dereck Lively II (16 points). In the second game of the season, two more names were added to the list, Charlotte’s Brandon Miller (17 points) and Chet Holmgren (16 points). Third game of the season, another name: Gradey Dick, who had 16 points for the Toronto Raptors. In each team’s first three games, rookies had crossed the 15-point plateau a total of eight times last year (Holmgren, Miller and Wembanyama did it multiple times).

But this season, the same number is zero.

Since 1970, we’ve typically seen around nine such performances at this point in the season, sometimes as many as 17. The 2014-15 season represents the previous low, which only recorded one 15+ scoring game in the opening week, and that was done by not noted -scorer in Orlando’s Elfrid Payton. this season? We’re still looking for our very own Elfrid Payton.

Coaches throughout the NBA just don’t trust the towers to do much of anything.

The consensus for the season’s Rookie of the Year selectionReed Sheppard, has been running pine for Ime Udoka’s Houston Rockets. The Kentucky product played 15 minutes on opening night but has seen his playing time drop in every game since, down to just three minutes in Monday’s win over the Spurs. The sharpshooter has so far shot just 4-of-12 in 38 minutes.

Zach Edey, another popular choice for Rookie of the Year (including yours truly), has started every game for the Memphis Grizzlies. That is the good news. The bad news can be found everywhere else. The 7-foot-4 center has logged more fouls (15) than field goals (14). He has registered one more block than his 5-foot-8 teammate Yuki Kawamura, and Kawamura has zero. With all the foul trouble and general ineffectiveness, Edey has only averaged 16 minutes per game. game, which is the league lowest of any full-time starter.

Atlanta’s top overall pick, Risacher, has shown flashes of promise, but the 19-year-old came off the bench in the team’s first two games — a rarity in the annals of No. 1 overall picks — and has registered an abysmal 38.3 percent. true shooting percentage in his first foray into pro-American hoops.

In Charlotte, the sixth overall pick, Tidjane Salaun, also did not start in his first two games; he actually didn’t even play. A DNP coach’s decision 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 anyone of the 1996 Chicago Bulls.

By the way, has anyone heard from Rob Dillingham? The eighth overall pick in Minnesota hasn’t even entered a game yet. In retrospect, John Calipari looks charitable after bringing Dillingham off the bench at Kentucky last season. Chris Finch hasn’t had his number called once, and neither has the team’s second first-round pick, Terrence Shannon Jr.

The Tanktastic Wizards have been the boldest team in the rookie division. Coach Brian Keefe started the team’s two heralded lottery picks Sarr and Bub Carrington in the season opener against Boston. But even Keefe couldn’t stand that situation for long. After two blowout losses, Jonas Valančiūnas replaced Carrington in the starting lineup to give Sarr some muscle up front. After three games, Carrington has scored three, 10 and 13 points.

And here’s the crazy thing: Carrington is your first time leader! The Pittsburgh product has averaged 8.7 points per game so far this season, making him the top scorer in the rookie class. Yes, single digits. To answer the question raised by the NBA voice of the gods Beau Estesmy research shows that there has never been a rookie class without at least one player who averaged double figures in scoring.

It’s not just about points per match. Sarr and Carrington represent No. 1 and No. 2 in the highest minutes per game among rookies, and they haven’t even played 30 minutes in a game this season. In case you were wondering, there is a pseudo NBA record in that category as well. Through the teams’ opening three games, we’ve never seen a season where a rookie didn’t log 30-plus minutes in at least one game, according to Stathead.com tracking. By comparison, there were 19 such cases as recently as the 2021-22 – Cade Cunningham class.

On Tuesday night, Utah rookie Cody Williams logged 29 minutes, 58 seconds in the team’s fourth game, making him the first tower to touch the 30-minute plateau. While a handful of teams haven’t played their fourth games yet, having a lone 30-minute appearance from the rookie class at this point would also be unprecedented. In fact, we haven’t had fewer than five such games from the rookie class since 1964-65, according to Stathead.com.

So What’s Driving the Great Rookie Recession in 2024? Plenty of NBA draftniks urged patience with this draft group that lacked a home run talent like Wemby, Zion or LeBron. They are also young. There were more 18-year-olds drawn in the lottery (three – Salaun, Carrington and Nikola Topić) than those who could legally buy a Bud Light in the US (two – Edey and Devin Carter).

Speaking of Carter and Topić, it certainly doesn’t help that the two lottery picks have been sidelined with injury. Three other first-rounders, Toronto’s Ja’Kobe Walter (No. 19), Denver’s DaRon Holmes (No. 22) and Utah’s Isaiah Collier (No. 29) are also working their way back from physical ailments. But injuries happen every season, and rookie classes aren’t immune to setbacks like that.

The most obvious explanation is that this group just isn’t that good. It happens. Perhaps the closest comp is the 2000-01 class after Kenyon Martin was selected No. 1 overall by the New Jersey Nets. The Cincinnati phenom led his rookie class in scoring with a paltry 12.0 points per game. game, but that can be partially explained by him recovering from a broken leg in his final season as a Bearcat. (Marc Jackson—not Mark—actually averaged 13.2 points in 48 games for the Golden State Warriors, if you want to count it, but there’s an important caveat to his rookie status: He was 26 years old.)

My digging into draft history data suggests so 2000 draft class ranks as one of the worst draft classes in NBA history, counting only three eventual All-Stars in the group and none making more than one All-Star appearance. Five of the top seven picks were washed out of the league by the end of the decade. There were also slow starts in that class and it turned out to be more than just an aberration.

There is a glimmer of hope for this 2024 squad. Remember Elfrid Payton and the 2014-15 rookie class that struggled out of the gate? Little did we know at the time that two 2014 draftees who didn’t play the entire season – forget the first few games – would later become MVPs. Those players? Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic. Embiid sat out two seasons with injury issues, and Jokić was stashed overseas for a season before Denver’s second-round pick made his stateside debut in October 2015. For that matter, you can count Julius Randle in the group of redshirt stars from 2014 class. The seventh overall pick suffered a broken leg in his very first game in the NBA, ending his rookie season prematurely, and as we now know, he would later etch his name on three All-Star teams.

Maybe the 2024 class will be like the 2014 class. Looking deeper into the data, the first week of rookie production has little to no correlation to career performance. Sometimes it portends ineptitude, sometimes it doesn’t. After all, an 18-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo also received some DNP CDs early in his Hall of Fame career. Teenagers almost never come out of the gate as good NBA players, a fact that provides a tonic for some nauseating moments from Risacher and Sarr, who both don’t turn 20 until April.

Maybe Risacher, Sarr, Sheppard and the rest of the rookie class will hit the ground running soon and this bumpy start will feel like a distant memory. But to average double-digit scoring, the coaches have to at least let the kids eat. So far, not much is happening. At least let’s hope a rookie will party in the coming days and put on a Freshman 15 for all of us. Maybe Risacher and Sarr will do it on Wednesday.