NBA Players Entering Make-or-Break Seasons
Forget "What have you done for me lately?" Thanks to our ruined attention spans and the constant news churn, NBA opinions are now formed on the basis of what players have done in the last five seconds.
Zooming out to consider a full season is anachronistically quaint. Real throwback stuff.
The guys we'll consider here can't just be breakout candidates. Most are actually established names. The common thread: Each of them has had chances to thrive, but relative to expectations, all have fallen short. The 2020-21 season represents a final chance to achieve stardom, meet expectations or realize potential, as the case may be.
The upcoming year will determine whether these players remain on the underwhelming paths they've trod to this point or blaze a new and better trail.
For each of them, it's now or never.
Andrew Wiggins, Golden State Warriors
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Keep floating or start flying?
That's the question facing Andrew Wiggins ahead of the 2014 No. 1 overall pick's seventh season and first (full one) with the Golden State Warriors.
Employed by a top-flight organization for the first time in his career and surrounded by veterans with championship experience, Wiggins has never been better positioned to succeed. The Warriors don't need him to be a leading scorer, but they're hoping for lockdown defense on the wing, reliable spot-up shooting and, more than anything else, consistent focus and effort.
Wiggins' tools have never been in doubt. He's a rangy 6'8" with the quickness to smother guards and just enough heft to handle today's downsized forwards. But for as long as everyone has agreed Wiggins' innate gifts are special, there's also been a consensus that his commitment to using them is lacking.
At 25, it's not too late for Wiggins to change. Draymond Green will be in his ear on defense. Head coach Steve Kerr will have the clout to demand accountability. Stephen Curry will create more easy scoring opportunities than Wiggins has ever seen.
Wiggins and Curry played a grand total of 27 minutes together last season, but that was all it took for the former to understand the latter's impact.
"He makes everyone great," Wiggins told ESPN's Nick Friedell in March. "He makes everyone play better. He finds open men. He's like the most unselfish superstar. That's a good way to put it. He attracts so much attention that he's going to find the open man, and he makes the right play, so it was fun."
Wiggins' work in a lost 2019-20 season was relatively encouraging. His 54.2 true shooting percentage in a dozen games with the Dubs was a fraction off his career high. On defense, his block and steal rates spiked to levels that would have blown away any previous full-season career mark. Though still plagued by bouts of aimlessness and sometimes displaying a glaring lack of feel, Wiggins showed enough last season to kindle hope that his best is yet to come.
If he can't reach his considerable potential with the Warriors, Wiggins will never ditch the "disappointment" label.
Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, Philadelphia 76ers
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We're fudging the rules a bit here by focusing on a duo, but there's a good reason. No preseason make-or-break analysis would be complete without a look at Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, who are running out of time to prove that, together, they form a championship foundation.
Simmons, 24, and Embiid, 26, aren't in danger of aging out of their primes any time soon, but the clock is ticking for a different reason. New president of basketball ops Daryl Morey rightly wants to see what those two can do with a new coach and more shooting around them, and he'll use the first few months of the season to feel out the fit. Should the results disappoint, Morey, ever the wheeler and dealer, will likely shake things up with a trade.
Simmons is Philly's best trade chip, and holding onto him in order to perform this critical chemistry experiment with Embiid might well cost the Sixers their chance at James Harden. Simmons will still have plenty of value whenever the next discontented All-NBA talent seeks a new destination, but Morey's patience may already be exacting an opportunity cost.
The decision to focus on building a better supporting cast makes sense. Even with suboptimal pieces around them, Simmons and Embiid played to a plus-1.8 net rating when sharing the floor last year. In 2018-19, when Philly had a bit more shooting, that number was plus-9.5. Expect Danny Green and Seth Curry to help the Sixers' stars produce at least as well as they did two years ago.
There's ample evidence this can work. But if things go wrong early in the year, it could mean the end of the Simmons-Embiid pairing.
Markelle Fultz, Orlando Magic
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Markelle Fultz started 60 games for a playoff team last year. That's pretty good for an age-21 season. If you could conveniently wipe the two years before that from your memory and pretend 2019-20 was Fultz's rookie campaign, you could envision a growth trajectory that tops out at an All-Star level.
Maybe that's still not quite what you'd want from a top pick, but it's something.
Fultz's disastrous first two seasons really did happen, though, and they remain part of his permanent record. They're the reason he's lost the benefit of the doubt, specifically with respect to his perimeter shot. Fultz's form, still mechanical, and his release point, out in front of his face, don't inspire confidence. He shot 26.7 percent from beyond the arc last year—untenably low for a primary ball-handler.
In encouraging news for the Orlando Magic, head coach Steve Clifford has observed a change in training camp.
"You're going to see it when you see him play," Clifford told The Athletic's Josh Robbins. "For instance, his spot-up threes, his release point is getting to be back where it used to be. Again, people forget: I think he shot 40 percent from three (note: it was 41.3 percent) at Washington when he was in college, and he shot his threes the same way he shoots his twos here. And if you watch him now, he’s shooting the ball much, much better from three, and his release point is getting back to the way it used to be."
Fultz sees the floor at an advanced level, and he has the size at 6'4" to defend both backcourt spots. Other than his stroke, he has most of what you'd want in a franchise point guard. But that's like saying a car has most of what you'd want, except for the wheels.
If Fultz can fix his form and fire often enough to command respect from defenders, he'll unlock the rest of his offensive game and regain a star ceiling. We'll need to see results quickly, though. That may seem impatient, but we're talking about a fourth-year player in 2020-21.
We've hit the point where potential must turn into production.
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Jamal Murray, Denver Nuggets
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Jamal Murray is already compensated like a superstar, and during the last two postseasons, he's played like one.
This needs to be the year when Murray's playoff eruptions no longer register as surprises. When they don't inspire rhetorical "Where was this all season?!" questions. When they represent his actual level of play, rather than some aspirational plateau he might someday reach in the future.
Trim all that down, and it's really just a plea for consistency. Murray has shown us his best, but he hasn't shown it often enough. Nobody is asking him to go for 50 multiple times in a week like he did in that epic bubble series with the Utah Jazz, but 18.5 points per game and a true shooting percentage (55.9 percent) that sits below the league average?
Nope. That won't cut it anymore.
Murray is going to have a long career, and a reputation for game-raising in the playoffs is hardly a knock. It's just that his ability to consistently play like a superstar would vault the Denver Nuggets from the league's second tier to its first. Murray can make the Nuggets a legitimate contender—one that doesn't need heroics and a series of favorable breaks to advance in the playoffs.
Denver might get a second bite at the apple with Michael Porter Jr., as he could plausibly become the franchise's second superstar after Nikola Jokic. But Murray is 23 and a four-year vet now. He's closer to his ceiling, whatever it might be, than MPJ is.
The time for Murray to permanently join the league's elite level of guards, validated by an All-NBA nod, is now.
Marvin Bagley III, Sacramento Kings
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Marvin Bagley III's first make-or-break task is to avoid breaking down.
The No. 2 pick in 2018 has played 75 games over two seasons. Before we even get to the issue of whether he can be a positive contributor on the court, he has to prove he can stay on it. And then, once Bagley shakes the injury bug, he'll have to prove he can do more than offer empty-calorie scoring.
Bagley's numbers impress—cosmetically anyway. For his career, the 6'11" lefty sits at 21.0 points and 10.8 rebounds per 36 minutes. Given the small sample and low-stakes environment with the Sacramento Kings, it's difficult to maintain the illusion that those stats mean much in the face of other, deeper metrics that say they're window dressing.
The Kings have been markedly worse with Bagley on the floor in each of his two seasons, logging minus-5.4 and minus-13.5 net ratings, respectively, in 2018-19 and 2019-20. Rookies almost always struggle, and Bagley's second campaign was so short at only 13 games that we can basically treat it as an extension of his first. Nonetheless, red flags are red flags.
Bagley has yet to demonstrate a reliable jumper, and his work on the defensive perimeter suggests his future is almost certainly at the 5. Exceptionally quick off the floor, Bagley could be a useful rim-protector. Yet despite his penchant for hunting blocks at the expense of operating within a scheme (a common trait among inexperienced frontcourt players), he's been no more than a middling shot-blocker so far.
So, to date, Bagley has been an oft-injured, non-spacing, non-switching, inefficient big. Forget justifying taking him ahead of Luka Doncic. That's a profile that might not even belong in the lottery.
To be fair, Bagley's physical tools are undeniable. He's instinctive around the rim, coordinated in space and has an innate nose for the ball. His lack of production could be due almost entirely to a combination of bad luck on the health front and the suboptimal growth environment in Sacramento, where losing is the norm.
Anyone writing Bagley off after two rough years is making a mistake, but anyone claiming he has star potential on the basis of those misleading point and rebound averages can't be taken seriously, either.
This is the season Bagley proves either his believers or his detractors correct.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Basketball Insiders.
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