Who Will Emerge as 2014-15 NBA Rookie of the Year in Wide-Open Field?
The best rookie in the 2014-15 class won’t play a professional basketball game again until he’s lost that designation.
Jabari Parker is lost for the season. This is terrible—for him, and the people who enjoyed watching him—and it also delivers a crushing blow to a rookie class that’s been positively underwhelming since it entered the league with great fanfare this summer. (And, in the imaginations of fans of losing teams, long before that.)
Before he went down with a torn ACL on Dec. 15, the Duke product was just a hair shy of stellar. He averaged 12.3 points on 49.0 percent shooting, 5.5 rebounds and 1.7 assists in 29.5 minutes across 25 games and, according to Boxscoregeeks.com, led all rookies with 2.2 wins produced.
“[Parker was] not merely the leader for the award, he was the clear leader,” wrote NBA.com’s Scott Howard-Cooper in a eulogy for his season.
Per ESPN.com, Parker also paced all freshmen in Value Added and Estimated Wins Added and helped drag a Milwaukee Bucks team that won 15 games a season ago into the thick of the Eastern Conference playoff race. Coming in to the league, he was pegged as the most polished prospect, the player who could deliver the most immediately, and he didn't disappoint before the season-ending injury.
The same can’t be said for the rest of his classmates.
This was supposed to be a game-changing rookie cohort, the finest group of prospects to enter the NBA since the 2003 draft gave us LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosh and others. And while it’s still a young season, the early returns are majorly underwhelming.
No. 1 overall pick Andrew Wiggins, by measure of both Basketball-Reference’s win shares and Boxscoregeeks.com’s wins produced, is literally the worst player in basketball. Many figured the raw guard would struggle initially when he entered the league, but few pundits—present company included—dreamed he would be this ineffective.
And Wiggins isn’t the exception. No. 2 pick Parker is, obviously, gone for the season. Joel Embiid likely won’t make his debut until 2015-16. Aaron Gordon has been effective when he’s played, but that’s only been for 165 minutes.
Dante Exum has showed flashes of the athleticism that catapulted him up draft boards, but he hasn’t translated it into production. Marcus Smart will get more opportunities now that Rajon Rondo is a Dallas Maverick, but in his (very) young career, he hasn’t shown much indication that he’ll take advantage of them.
Meanwhile, Julius Randle is out for the rest of the season with a broken leg, Nik Stauskas has been almost cartoonishly ineffective (the sharpshooter is shooting 24.6 percent from three-point range), Noah Vonleh can’t get on the floor for the Charlotte Hornets and Elfrid Payton is boasting a true shooting percentage of .408, per Basketball-Reference.
And those, ladies and gentlemen, are your top 10 selections of what was, again, supposed to be a historically good, and deep, draft class. There’s not a single member of the group that’s submitting a season that, whether by injury or inefficacy, can be classified as anything north of “disappointing.”
Even the Philadelphia 76ers' Nerlens Noel—technically in his rookie season after missing all of 2013-14 with an ACL tear—has struggled to find his footing in the Association. Outside of an unusually high steal rate and some sound, and improving, defense, the center looks like he doesn’t have a single NBA-ready skill.
None of this is to say, however, that there aren’t any rookies out there who will be deserving of the ROY hardware at the end of the season. We just have to look really hard to find them.
There isn’t a LeBron James in this class. With the calendar set to turn over to 2015 shortly, there isn’t even a Michael Carter-Williams.
At present, the ROY race looks like it’s going to come down to two unlikely candidates: the Sixers’ KJ McDaniels and the Chicago Bulls' Nikola Mirotic.
The case for McDaniels is an easy one. He’s a dynamic athlete who’s been the best player on the floor for his team all season on both ends of the floor.
The 6’6” shooting guard out of Clemson is averaging 9.3 points, 3.8 rebounds, 1.2 assists and 1.6 blocks a night for Philly. The latter figure leads all guards by a huge margin and, according to Basketball-Reference, is tied with Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol for 14th in the NBA.
McDaniels has a block percentage of 5.2, per Basketball-Reference. To put this figure in context, Dwyane Wade is the best shot-blocking guard of all time, and he never posted a block rate better than 3.1.
No surprise, the Sixers' rookie told Sports Illustrated's Rob Mahoney that he learned to ply his craft by watching shot-swatting guards like Wade and Michael Jordan:
"I used to watch a lot of [Dwyane] Wade and LeBron [James] when they came into the league. I used to watch Michael Jordan a lot, too – the way they were versatile in how they defend multiple positions and use their athleticism to block shots. I just figured since I’m athletic and I can jump and have good instincts, I can go up there and get shots as well.
"
What McDaniels is doing is remarkable, but Mirotic’s case might be even stronger.
The 6’10” Spanish-Montenegrin power forward is averaging 8.3 points and 5.2 rebounds a night for a very good Chicago Bulls team. He’s a well-above-average rebounder and shot-blocker, a solid passer and shoots above 40 percent from three-point land.
The advanced metrics love him. Mirotic leads all rookies in wins produced and wins produced per 48 minutes, per Boxscoregeeks.com, and also paces the class in player efficiency rating, value added and true shooting percentage, according to ESPN.com.
The only thing holding the forward back from greater contributions is the strength of the Chicago roster. Ahead of him in the rotation are Pau Gasol and Taj Gibson, a pair of talented, productive and experienced veterans. As excellent as Mirotic has been on a per-minute basis, it's difficult to see those minutes increasing.
In many years, this would be enough to knock Mirotic from the running, or at least leave the door open for another strong rookie to creep through. But this year, with this class, that's difficult to imagine.
If their numbers are comparable, and there's reason to believe they will be, would voters reward McDaniels, who suits up for one of the worst teams ever constructed, over Mirotic, who's made major contributions in the context of a playoff race?
Mirotic isn’t a sexy name—well, the name itself is fairly sexy if the player isn’t—but, as of this point, he’s the clear king of the class. It’s not something anyone would have predicted three months ago, but that’s why they play the games.
.jpg?w=600 "Colts Release Kenny Moore")
