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Age?
« on: March 23, 2017, 11:58:31 AM »

Offline droopdog7

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How much attention do you pay to the age of a prospect.  One of the things that separates Fultz even more is that he is the youngest high-level prospect in the draft.  Josh Jackson on the other hand is already 20, and well over a year older.

Obviously talent is talent but age certainly would give me pause when comparing Jackson, to say, Tatum.  I wonder is this is something the fans think about?  I'm guessing GM's certainly do.

Re: Age?
« Reply #1 on: March 23, 2017, 12:31:16 PM »

Offline saltlover

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I think a lot of fans don't realize the difference in age between some freshmen.  Players at this age are still physically growing, not to mention mental growth and skill growth.  That Jackson is a year or more older than many of his fellow top freshmen should matter to draft fans, and certainly matters to GMs.  He's closer in age to Jaylen Brown than he is to virtually anyone in the Draft Express top 12 (Lauri Markkanen is 5 days closer to Jackson than is Brown, but everyone else is months younger). And when you go back to high school scouting, it's also true.  Jackson was always a year older than his competition.

Anyway, Jackson is a great prospect, but he's likely to have less growth than the other top draftees.  It's why Fultz and Ball should both be ahead of him, as they've performed at the same level (or better, but that's not the point of the debate) despite being the age of typical college freshmen.  And it's why Tatum, a full year younger, might also be the better prospect.

Re: Age?
« Reply #2 on: March 23, 2017, 12:32:51 PM »

Offline nickagneta

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How much attention do you pay to the age of a prospect.  One of the things that separates Fultz even more is that he is the youngest high-level prospect in the draft.  Josh Jackson on the other hand is already 20, and well over a year older.

Obviously talent is talent but age certainly would give me pause when comparing Jackson, to say, Tatum.  I wonder is this is something the fans think about?  I'm guessing GM's certainly do.
I think fans, draftniks, draft sites think about it and put more emphasis on it than NBA front offices do. If a player is someone an NBA team feels has star potential I don't think they care if he is 18, 19, 20, or 21. If they feel he is going to be a star they look at it as they have him under control for 9 years, or basically through his early development and well into his prime. If he is going to be a star his game is defined by his talent, not his age.

Now when you get into projects, age matters some to teams because there is usyally more growth potential for young players(18,19) than there is for older prospects(21,22). So in that way, I feel teams may differentiate some prospects using age. But for the most part, I think teams judge prospects more on talent level, measurables, mental makeup, and potential growth with lack of potential growth due to age being the absolute last factor.

Re: Age?
« Reply #3 on: March 23, 2017, 01:12:26 PM »

Online mobilija

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People don't grow, physically or mentally, at the same rate. So one 19 yr old may have mostly developed while another may have a lot of growth left to do. You've got to look at a persons growth history/pattern to make the judgement, not just their age.

Re: Age?
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2017, 02:09:04 PM »

Offline Csfan1984

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I feel it matters. If not Heild should have gone #1 last year. We base projections/upside on the skill set of player at his age. If we just draft based on skill without factoring upside/age it would be senior heavy first round every year. Age matters a great deal even if it's a one year difference. Example is I ranked Murray over Heild and Dunn last year due to age/upside.

Re: Age?
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2017, 03:14:22 PM »

Offline footey

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Age is a factor, but I think you can tell a lot about what kind of player you have at any age.

For example, take Tatum and Jackson. Tatum is 13 months younger than Jackson.  Does that mean Tatum has more time to grow, physically and maturity wise, than Jackson? Yes, certainly. But guys don't suddenly transform into a different style of player from the age of 19 to 20. They improve upon the game they have developed, but, for example, a great scorer doesn't just become a great point guard.  The skill set, basketball IQ, athleticism, smoothness of Jackson are qualities I don't really see in Tatum now, nor do I believe he will ever acquire.  You have it or you don't.

Another thing to bear in mind, if we keep the pick (and I hope we do): wouldn't you rather take the player more likely to contribute right away, rather than have to groom for a year or two before getting any serious minutes?  If you were the Lakers or Sixers, you wouldn't care, because you're not going to be competing any time soon. But if you're the Celtics, it is a decent bonus to have a guy who can contribute right away. I believe Jackson is far more ready than any of the other 3 to contribute serious minutes right away.

Re: Age?
« Reply #6 on: March 23, 2017, 03:29:40 PM »

Offline Moranis

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Daryl Morey (Houston's GM) uses a formula based on thousands upon thousands of data points.  When he was first starting out, he had some strange results, but when he better accounted for age, he said the formula became much better and was a much better gauge of where a player might end up.  Morey's conclusion, age matters a great deal. 

That said, a lot of his strange results were looking at a 19 year old freshman vs. a 23 year old senior.  I suspect there is a lot of difference between a 19 year old freshman and a 20 year old freshman.

EDIT:  here is the article.  very long but a very interesting read.  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/how_daryl_morey_used_behavioral_economics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html

Here is the part of the article about what I was referencing above


That year the Rockets had the 25th pick in the draft and used it to pick a big guy from the University of Memphis named Joey Dorsey. In his job interview, Dorsey had been funny and lik­able and charming—he’d said when he was done playing basketball he intended to explore a second career as a **** star. After he was drafted, Dorsey was sent to Santa Cruz to play in an exhibition game against other newly drafted players. Morey went to go see him. “The first game I watch he looks terrible,” said Morey. “And I’m like, ‘Edited.  Profanity and masked profanity are against forum rules and may result in discipline.!!!!’” Joey Dorsey was so bad that Daryl Morey could not believe he was watching the guy he’d drafted. Perhaps, Morey thought, he wasn’t taking the exhibition seriously. “I meet with him. We have a two-hour lunch.” Morey gave Dorsey a long talk about the impor­tance of playing with intensity, and making a good impression, and so on. “I think he’s going to come out the next game with his hair on fire. And he comes out and sucks the next game, too.” Fairly quickly, Morey saw he had a bigger problem than Joey Dorsey. The problem was his model. “Joey Dorsey was a model superstar. The model said that he was like a can’t-miss. His signal was super, super high.”

That same year, the model had dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration a freshman center at Texas A&M named DeAndre Jordan. Never mind that every other team in the NBA, using more conventional scouting tools, passed him over at least once, or that Jordan wasn’t taken until 35th pick of the draft, by the Los Angeles Clippers. As quickly as Joey Dorsey established himself as a bust, DeAndre Jordan established himself as a domi­nant NBA center and the second-best player in the entire draft class after Russell Westbrook.

This sort of thing happened every year to some NBA team, and usually to all of them. Every year there were great players the scouts missed, and every year highly regarded players went bust. Morey didn’t think his model was perfect, but he also couldn’t believe that it could be so drastically wrong. Knowledge was prediction: If you couldn’t predict such a glaringly obvious thing as the failure of Joey Dorsey or the success of DeAndre Jordan, how much did you know? His entire life had been shaped by this single, tantalizing idea: He could use numbers to make better predictions. The plausibility of that idea was now in question. “I’d missed something,” said Morey. “What I missed were the limitations of the model.”

His first mistake, he decided, was to have paid insufficient attention to Joey Dorsey’s age. “He was insanely old,” says Morey. “He was twenty-four years old when we drafted him.” Dorsey’s col­lege career was impressive because he was so much older than the people he played against. He’d been, in effect, beating up on little kids. Raising the weight the model placed on a player’s age flagged Dorsey as a weak NBA prospect; more tellingly, it improved the model’s judgments about nearly all of the players in the database. For that matter, Morey realized, there existed an entire class of college basketball player who played far better against weak opponents than against strong ones. Basketball bullies. The model could account for that, too, by assigning greater weight to games played against strong opponents than against weak ones. That also improved the model.

Morey could see—or thought he could see—how the model had been fooled by Joey Dorsey. Its blindness to the value of DeAndre Jordan was far more troubling. The kid had played a single year of college basketball, not very effectively. It turned out that he had been a sensational high school player, had hated his college coach, and didn’t even want to be in school. How could any model predict the future of a player who had intentionally failed? It was impossible to see Jordan’s future in his college stats, and, at the time, there were no useful high school basketball statistics. So long as it relied almost exclusively on performance statistics, the model would always miss DeAndre Jordan. The only way to see him, it seemed, was with the eyes of an old-fashioned basketball expert. As it happens, Jordan had grown up in Houston under the eyes of Rockets scouts, and one of those scouts had wanted to draft him on the strength of what appeared to him undeniable physical talent. One of his scouts had seen what his model had missed!
« Last Edit: March 23, 2017, 03:41:16 PM by Moranis »
2023 Historical Draft - Brooklyn Nets - 9th pick

Bigs - Pau, Amar'e, Issel, McGinnis, Roundfield
Wings - Dantley, Bowen, J. Jackson
Guards - Cheeks, Petrovic, Buse, Rip

Re: Age?
« Reply #7 on: March 23, 2017, 04:17:51 PM »

Offline footey

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That said, a lot of his strange results were looking at a 19 year old freshman vs. a 23 year old senior.  I suspect there is a lot of difference between a 19 year old freshman and a 20 year old freshman.

Why?


Re: Age?
« Reply #8 on: March 23, 2017, 04:19:09 PM »

Offline droopdog7

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Age is a factor, but I think you can tell a lot about what kind of player you have at any age.

For example, take Tatum and Jackson. Tatum is 13 months younger than Jackson.  Does that mean Tatum has more time to grow, physically and maturity wise, than Jackson? Yes, certainly. But guys don't suddenly transform into a different style of player from the age of 19 to 20. They improve upon the game they have developed, but, for example, a great scorer doesn't just become a great point guard.  The skill set, basketball IQ, athleticism, smoothness of Jackson are qualities I don't really see in Tatum now, nor do I believe he will ever acquire.  You have it or you don't.

Another thing to bear in mind, if we keep the pick (and I hope we do): wouldn't you rather take the player more likely to contribute right away, rather than have to groom for a year or two before getting any serious minutes?  If you were the Lakers or Sixers, you wouldn't care, because you're not going to be competing any time soon. But if you're the Celtics, it is a decent bonus to have a guy who can contribute right away. I believe Jackson is far more ready than any of the other 3 to contribute serious minutes right away.
At least two the the things you mentioned are more style that substance.  You can better really athletic and smooth but not a good basketball player (not that Jackson will be).  Jackson and Tatum are different kinds of players, both effective in their own way.  But the age difference could certainly be a tipping point if we needed to choose between the two players.  Of course, it depends on the talent evaluation as you say.  Older certainly does not mean worser automatically.

Re: Age?
« Reply #9 on: March 23, 2017, 04:37:37 PM »

Offline More Banners

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That said, a lot of his strange results were looking at a 19 year old freshman vs. a 23 year old senior.  I suspect there is a lot of difference between a 19 year old freshman and a 20 year old freshman.

Why?

I'd say two things, 1 physical development and 2 did the freshman play a postgrad year to build a resume to get to div I in he first place. Both give the 20 year old an advantage that would disappear after one year in the pros, if that long.

Re: Age?
« Reply #10 on: March 23, 2017, 04:39:19 PM »

Offline Moranis

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That said, a lot of his strange results were looking at a 19 year old freshman vs. a 23 year old senior.  I suspect there is a lot of difference between a 19 year old freshman and a 20 year old freshman.

Why?
I actually meant isn't.  typo. 
2023 Historical Draft - Brooklyn Nets - 9th pick

Bigs - Pau, Amar'e, Issel, McGinnis, Roundfield
Wings - Dantley, Bowen, J. Jackson
Guards - Cheeks, Petrovic, Buse, Rip

Re: Age?
« Reply #11 on: March 23, 2017, 04:44:25 PM »

Offline droopdog7

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That said, a lot of his strange results were looking at a 19 year old freshman vs. a 23 year old senior.  I suspect there is a lot of difference between a 19 year old freshman and a 20 year old freshman.

Why?
I'd say two things, 1 physical development and 2 did the freshman play a postgrad year to build a resume to get to div I in he first place. Both give the 20 year old an advantage that would disappear after one year in the pros, if that long.
Yeah, anecdotally differences are pretty obvious between kids of different ages.  My son is a competitive player and sometimes we play "up" in tournaments, sometimes we play teams that are playing "up".  In every instance, the difference in age is glaring across the board (at least in terms of how the kids look).  Shoot, even your differences within a year are important.  My son's birth date is August 31, which puts him on the young side for school, but it also puts him at the absolute youngest for AAU (which uses September 1 as a cutoff).  So he looks different than a lot of the kids he plays against.

Of course, age has less of a difference as one gets older but it is still significant up the early 20's I would say.

Re: Age?
« Reply #12 on: March 23, 2017, 05:14:30 PM »

Offline Evantime34

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Tp to Droopdog for the interesting idea and tp to Moranis for that Morey article.

I view ceiling as having 3 main components, athleticism, age and length.

I go back and fourth between Tatum and Jackson. Tatum has the age and the length but Jackson is clearly the superior athlete. All things being equal I'd take the younger player but Jackson's vertically explosive athleticism makes me pause when thinking of taking Tatum ahead of Jackson.

With the players so close in my opinion, I can be easily swayed by recent events. Jackson looked like a superstar in his last tournament game against Michigan State, so right now I am leaning towards him, but could easily be swayed in the other direction.

I'm a huge fan of the top 4 in this draft and would be excited to get any of those guys. I'm getting nervous that the Nets will end their season 6-6 while the Lakers will go 0-11 and a coin flip, plus a disastrous lottery will leave us with the fifth pick.
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Re: Age?
« Reply #13 on: March 23, 2017, 05:55:11 PM »

Offline droopdog7

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Tp to Droopdog for the interesting idea and tp to Moranis for that Morey article.

I view ceiling as having 3 main components, athleticism, age and length.

I go back and fourth between Tatum and Jackson. Tatum has the age and the length but Jackson is clearly the superior athlete. All things being equal I'd take the younger player but Jackson's vertically explosive athleticism makes me pause when thinking of taking Tatum ahead of Jackson.

With the players so close in my opinion, I can be easily swayed by recent events. Jackson looked like a superstar in his last tournament game against Michigan State, so right now I am leaning towards him, but could easily be swayed in the other direction.

I'm a huge fan of the top 4 in this draft and would be excited to get any of those guys. I'm getting nervous that the Nets will end their season 6-6 while the Lakers will go 0-11 and a coin flip, plus a disastrous lottery will leave us with the fifth pick.
Man, I was just about to give you a high five because I too would be pretty happy with any of the top 4.  But the possibility of the lakers losing every single game from here on out is not out of the realm of possibility.  If we somehow did end up at #5, I'd be p---ed.