After a promising ‘21-22 season for G League Ignite and an impressive preseason performance vs Victor Wembanyama, Scoot Henderson seemed like a lock for a top 2 pick. But since then he has had an underwhelming G League season where he has been in and out of the lineup with injuries. It’s been good enough given that he recently turned 19, as he is averaging 29.5 mins 18.1 pts 4.9 rebs 6.4 asts 3.4 tovs 1.3 steals 56.6% TS. But he has not quite looked like a can’t miss star.
Hey good writeup here, lots of interesting thoughts.
Directionally agree with "[w]hen in doubt they should focus on adding role players to have an ideal cast in place when the right go to scoring option comes available" particularly as a zag given an NBA environment where the opposite is conventional wisdom. Here are just some thoughts, more as devil's advocate than actively disagreeing.
It's fairly clear 2-way star that can play off ball is more valuable than a 1-way ball dominant star. So limiting discussion here to decision of drafting high probability of 1-way ball dominant star vs. high probability of good role player with small probability of becoming 2-way star.
A reasonable counter-argument is that you're more likely to get that "right go to scoring option" via trade or FA if you have a glamorous scoring option already. Sure Wade is very ball dominant and might not be the *perfect* fit with Lebron, but there's a 0% chance you're getting Lebron if you have role players instead of Wade. Same with Booker for CP3 and KD. Even Garland and Mitchell. As you point out there are cases where this hasn't worked out such as Murray and Young, but the point is having one (even if they're overrated) puts you in the conversation for another star. Maybe you're right that a basket of good role players would be a better fit for a blue chip ball dominant star but that's empirically not how they see things when deciding their next destination.
Also, in an NBA landscape where virtually no stars are hitting NBA free agency anymore, the "right go to scoring option comes *available*" scenarios are essentially limited to trade, short of tanking. In that scenario you're probably giving up all your best role players to get / salary match that scoring option anyways, so the environmental context variable is less relevant. The role players then are easier to get via free agency.
Ideally you draft a role player with lower (conventional) star probability that hits that outcome (e.g. your Kawhi example), but there may be certain markets and ownership constraints that would make getting a high probability B tier 'star' creator and be in the market for a blue chip a more probable path to a title.
I understand where you are coming from, but this mostly applies to free agency, which is a fairly rare means of stars changing teams. And when it does happen, you’re right that LeBron wants to play with Wade or AD and KD wants to play with Steph or Kyrie.
But I would 100% advocate taking guys with Steph/Wade/Kyrie upside— and all of those guys showed far more predraft upside than Scoot.
Typically stars aren’t thirsty to align themselves with the Stephon Marbury, DeMar DeRozan, or Zach LaVine types of fringe all-star creators. These are the type of outcomes that are dangerous to chase in the draft.
In terms of trade, it’s not difficult to get a star to stick around when he gets to be the man on a perennial contender surrounded by role players i.e. Harden in Houston. Or even if he doesn’t stick around like Kawhi in Toronto, having that cast in place was enough to win a title.
CP3 was near the end of his career and didn’t make sense to acquire without him potentially putting a team over the top. And he is more of a low friction #2 guy at this stage than #1, which is why playing with Booker made sense.
Re: Young and Murray, do you think either would complain if they went on the block and got traded to Utah or Brooklyn where they got to be the go to guy for a perennial 50 win team? Still a big upgrade over sharing the blame for Hawks being average. And it may not cost too much given how few suitors need a guy like that on open market.
Re: lower tier guys like Marbury, Derozan, Lavine -- that's actually another trade angle, that Derozan and Lavine were able to be centerpieces of trades for Kawhi and Butler. In a vacuum even if a bundle of role players might be more valuable than those guys in the context of the trade landscape you're playing a greater fool theory game where how teams perceive them is more important than their true on-court value. Not to mention other concerns like salary matching making it easier to 1 for 1 those trades.
Else you're trading away all that depth that you argue would make the cast in place good enough to win a title. Suppose there wasn't a B-tier max level player in Derozan and instead a role player (or a few) in their place. Then you'd probably be trading multiple of your Siakams, OG, FVV instead and Kawhi's context wouldn't be as good once he arrived
Also the fact that stars don't often hit free agency and role players do is a reason that it's easier to acquire the role player skillsets in FA and draft your stars / creators
Also Marbury was traded for Kidd in one of the all time heists.
So yeah, it works when you can find a sucker on the trade market, which is worth something. And lots of times teams trading stars don’t want to go to complete rebuild so they are willing to buy in on the fringey fake all star to remain semi competitive.
But there are cases it works the other way, i.e. when the Wolves paid a draft pick that became Kuminga (should have been Franz) to dump Wiggins for D’Angelo Russell. Or when the Lakers gave up on D’Angelo Russell after 2 years when they drafted Lonzo and traded him for #27 to draft Kuzma and dumped 2 years of Mozgov for 1 year of Brook Lopez.
So it’s a double edged sword, sometimes teams find a sucker but other times they get caught holding the bag or making a bad deal.
Wouldn’t say you see many quality role players hit FA. Look at most contenders— their core is mostly built through trade and draft. Tough to think of the last quality role player who was a big FA signing. Unless you want to count GP2 and OPJ randomly hitting bigly off scrap heal for GSW last year.
And in trade, there is more competition trading for an OG Anunoby where half the league will inquire than Trae or Dejounte where there will only be a handful of realistic suitors.
Sure agree there's upside and some downside. Variance is good when you're not a top tier contender yet though, especially when the top end outcomes (acquire a legit top 10 player) are better than the low end outcomes (do a suss asset dump deal).
And yes FA is just generally harder to find in value in than draft and trade, argument is just more possible for role player than star. There's plenty of decent examples depending on your threshold of quality, at the GP2/OPJ level of contending level teams off the top of my head there's B. Lopez/Connaughton/D. Green/KCP/Tucker/Bullock/E. Gordon, and a bunch of those players or similar ones have gotten acquired via trade for relatively little quite recently like Melton/A. Gordon/O'Neale. But agree it seems like the price for the most premium of those players like Mikal and OG is going up as we speak.
I think that in the NBA more bidders is correlated with but not determinate of return for that player. Might be basically a 1 team market for a player like AD or PG demanding only LA, unclear how many teams were bidding aggressively for Gobert, but the ask is still going to be close to all the future looking assets a team has. If Trae is ever available he's probably going to go for essentially the max number of picks possible, even Dejounte went for 3 1's and a swap. Often for role players even if a ton of teams want them it's like a thick buy wall that's capped at ~2 late FRPs (possibly not true depending on reporting this year for players like Mikal/OG)
Lots of those guys are terrible though. Gordon + Tucker washed, Bullock is a huge liability for Dallas, Connaughton may be hitting the age cliff soon and never hit open market.
As for trades, Melton demanded a trade, O'Neale isn't good enough to merit more than a late 1st, and Gordon was a fumble by Orlando. Imagine if they had Franz/Gordon/Paolo? Would be tight.
Fair point that # of bidders doesn't always correlate with return.
Only thing I'd disagree with is variance is good. That's only if you don't believe you have edge and want to play roulette to polarize your outcomes. In reality the market is full of inefficiencies, and there is a good amount of stable value to be farmed. If you just make a bunch of steady moves and patiently wait for the efficient swings on stars when they present themselves, you are inevitably going to end up with a quality team.
Hey good writeup here, lots of interesting thoughts.
Directionally agree with "[w]hen in doubt they should focus on adding role players to have an ideal cast in place when the right go to scoring option comes available" particularly as a zag given an NBA environment where the opposite is conventional wisdom. Here are just some thoughts, more as devil's advocate than actively disagreeing.
It's fairly clear 2-way star that can play off ball is more valuable than a 1-way ball dominant star. So limiting discussion here to decision of drafting high probability of 1-way ball dominant star vs. high probability of good role player with small probability of becoming 2-way star.
A reasonable counter-argument is that you're more likely to get that "right go to scoring option" via trade or FA if you have a glamorous scoring option already. Sure Wade is very ball dominant and might not be the *perfect* fit with Lebron, but there's a 0% chance you're getting Lebron if you have role players instead of Wade. Same with Booker for CP3 and KD. Even Garland and Mitchell. As you point out there are cases where this hasn't worked out such as Murray and Young, but the point is having one (even if they're overrated) puts you in the conversation for another star. Maybe you're right that a basket of good role players would be a better fit for a blue chip ball dominant star but that's empirically not how they see things when deciding their next destination.
Also, in an NBA landscape where virtually no stars are hitting NBA free agency anymore, the "right go to scoring option comes *available*" scenarios are essentially limited to trade, short of tanking. In that scenario you're probably giving up all your best role players to get / salary match that scoring option anyways, so the environmental context variable is less relevant. The role players then are easier to get via free agency.
Ideally you draft a role player with lower (conventional) star probability that hits that outcome (e.g. your Kawhi example), but there may be certain markets and ownership constraints that would make getting a high probability B tier 'star' creator and be in the market for a blue chip a more probable path to a title.
I understand where you are coming from, but this mostly applies to free agency, which is a fairly rare means of stars changing teams. And when it does happen, you’re right that LeBron wants to play with Wade or AD and KD wants to play with Steph or Kyrie.
But I would 100% advocate taking guys with Steph/Wade/Kyrie upside— and all of those guys showed far more predraft upside than Scoot.
Typically stars aren’t thirsty to align themselves with the Stephon Marbury, DeMar DeRozan, or Zach LaVine types of fringe all-star creators. These are the type of outcomes that are dangerous to chase in the draft.
In terms of trade, it’s not difficult to get a star to stick around when he gets to be the man on a perennial contender surrounded by role players i.e. Harden in Houston. Or even if he doesn’t stick around like Kawhi in Toronto, having that cast in place was enough to win a title.
CP3 was near the end of his career and didn’t make sense to acquire without him potentially putting a team over the top. And he is more of a low friction #2 guy at this stage than #1, which is why playing with Booker made sense.
Re: Young and Murray, do you think either would complain if they went on the block and got traded to Utah or Brooklyn where they got to be the go to guy for a perennial 50 win team? Still a big upgrade over sharing the blame for Hawks being average. And it may not cost too much given how few suitors need a guy like that on open market.
Re: lower tier guys like Marbury, Derozan, Lavine -- that's actually another trade angle, that Derozan and Lavine were able to be centerpieces of trades for Kawhi and Butler. In a vacuum even if a bundle of role players might be more valuable than those guys in the context of the trade landscape you're playing a greater fool theory game where how teams perceive them is more important than their true on-court value. Not to mention other concerns like salary matching making it easier to 1 for 1 those trades.
Else you're trading away all that depth that you argue would make the cast in place good enough to win a title. Suppose there wasn't a B-tier max level player in Derozan and instead a role player (or a few) in their place. Then you'd probably be trading multiple of your Siakams, OG, FVV instead and Kawhi's context wouldn't be as good once he arrived
Also the fact that stars don't often hit free agency and role players do is a reason that it's easier to acquire the role player skillsets in FA and draft your stars / creators
Agreed with rest
Also Marbury was traded for Kidd in one of the all time heists.
So yeah, it works when you can find a sucker on the trade market, which is worth something. And lots of times teams trading stars don’t want to go to complete rebuild so they are willing to buy in on the fringey fake all star to remain semi competitive.
But there are cases it works the other way, i.e. when the Wolves paid a draft pick that became Kuminga (should have been Franz) to dump Wiggins for D’Angelo Russell. Or when the Lakers gave up on D’Angelo Russell after 2 years when they drafted Lonzo and traded him for #27 to draft Kuzma and dumped 2 years of Mozgov for 1 year of Brook Lopez.
So it’s a double edged sword, sometimes teams find a sucker but other times they get caught holding the bag or making a bad deal.
Wouldn’t say you see many quality role players hit FA. Look at most contenders— their core is mostly built through trade and draft. Tough to think of the last quality role player who was a big FA signing. Unless you want to count GP2 and OPJ randomly hitting bigly off scrap heal for GSW last year.
And in trade, there is more competition trading for an OG Anunoby where half the league will inquire than Trae or Dejounte where there will only be a handful of realistic suitors.
Sure agree there's upside and some downside. Variance is good when you're not a top tier contender yet though, especially when the top end outcomes (acquire a legit top 10 player) are better than the low end outcomes (do a suss asset dump deal).
And yes FA is just generally harder to find in value in than draft and trade, argument is just more possible for role player than star. There's plenty of decent examples depending on your threshold of quality, at the GP2/OPJ level of contending level teams off the top of my head there's B. Lopez/Connaughton/D. Green/KCP/Tucker/Bullock/E. Gordon, and a bunch of those players or similar ones have gotten acquired via trade for relatively little quite recently like Melton/A. Gordon/O'Neale. But agree it seems like the price for the most premium of those players like Mikal and OG is going up as we speak.
I think that in the NBA more bidders is correlated with but not determinate of return for that player. Might be basically a 1 team market for a player like AD or PG demanding only LA, unclear how many teams were bidding aggressively for Gobert, but the ask is still going to be close to all the future looking assets a team has. If Trae is ever available he's probably going to go for essentially the max number of picks possible, even Dejounte went for 3 1's and a swap. Often for role players even if a ton of teams want them it's like a thick buy wall that's capped at ~2 late FRPs (possibly not true depending on reporting this year for players like Mikal/OG)
Lots of those guys are terrible though. Gordon + Tucker washed, Bullock is a huge liability for Dallas, Connaughton may be hitting the age cliff soon and never hit open market.
As for trades, Melton demanded a trade, O'Neale isn't good enough to merit more than a late 1st, and Gordon was a fumble by Orlando. Imagine if they had Franz/Gordon/Paolo? Would be tight.
Fair point that # of bidders doesn't always correlate with return.
Only thing I'd disagree with is variance is good. That's only if you don't believe you have edge and want to play roulette to polarize your outcomes. In reality the market is full of inefficiencies, and there is a good amount of stable value to be farmed. If you just make a bunch of steady moves and patiently wait for the efficient swings on stars when they present themselves, you are inevitably going to end up with a quality team.